A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life – driven by a ring of neural stem cells reminiscent of vertebrate eyes. What's more, these stem cells respond to environmental light. The research, published in Nature Communications, offers new insight into the fundamental principles of eye evolution and the role of light in shaping the adult nervous system – even in organisms often considered rather simple.

01 December 2025 / Kiel. A study by an international team involving the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel shows that the expansion of Antarctic Bottom Water during a major warming phase around 12,000 years ago displaced a carbon-rich mass of deep-water in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. This process released carbon dioxide that had been stored in the deep ocean, thereby contributing to the end of the last Ice Age. The study provides important insights into how the ocean may respond as Antarctica continues to warm today. The findings are published today in Nature Geoscience.

Humpback whales are less picky eaters than other baleen whales. If cod runs out in an area, they may switch to krill. This flexibility might be a key reason for their evolutionary success, according to whale scientists in a recent study.

The study showed that surgeonfish use various combinations of feeding movements and that each species uses a particular pattern more often — the pattern matching one of the three types of bites. By extracting teeth from these species for examination, the researchers were able to reconstruct the evolutionary history of bite mode across surgeonfish.

Marine litter is a serious environmental problem worldwide. Reducing it would require implementing a global monitoring system, agreeing on the use of common methods and protocols for data collection, and categorizing all components of marine debris. This involves a tremendous scientific, political, and social effort at the international level — one that cannot be carried out with the same intensity by all countries — given the magnitude of what is still unknown about the pollution of seas and oceans, particularly the deep ocean, where the vast majority of marine litter accumulates.

The Galapagos and other oceanic islands and Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) may be "critical" refuges for sharks in the Tropical Eastern Pacific, as predatory fish appear depleted in more coastal MPAs through fishing pressure

An international team led by Covadonga Orejas, a researcher at the Gijón Oceanographic Centre of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC); Veerle Huvenne, a researcher at the UK National Oceanography Centre (NOC); and Jacob González-Solís, professor at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona, has published the first comprehensive study on the seamounts of the Cape Verde archipelago, their biodiversity, ecological functionality and socio-economic relevance in the journal Progress in Oceanography.

A new paper in Biology Methods and Protocols finds that we can now distinguish wild from farmed salmon using deep learning, potentially greatly improving strategies for environmental protection.