Science and the Sea podcast artwork

Science and the Sea podcast

192 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 14 ratings

The goal of Science and the Sea is to convey an understanding of the sea and its myriad life forms to everyone, so that they, too, can fully appreciate this amazing resource.

Natural Sciences Science marine science oceanography marine biology
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Episodes

Ancient Giants

March 24, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

In 1983, roadworkers cut a notch in a hillside in Lorraine, a region in northeastern France. Paleontology students examined the exposed layers of rock. They found fossils of an ancient sea creature. Scientists just recently studied the fossils in detail. They found that the fossils were the remains of a type of giant marine reptile that hadn’t been seen before. It was about 16 feet long, with jaws four feet long. It plied the Tethys Sea, which covered parts of present-day Europe. Because i...

Weaker Stream

March 17, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

The Gulf Stream plays a big role in the weather and climate on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A recent study concluded that the Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could have an impact on everything from hurricanes to heatwaves. The Gulf Stream is a strong current of warm water. It starts in the Gulf of Mexico, then flows up the East Coast of the United States. It then veers eastward into the North Atlantic, and finally around western Europe, where it warms part of the continent. The Gulf...

Attractive Turbines

March 10, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

Many people like to have some “white noise” in the background while they work or sleep. And some fish seem to like it as well. A recent study found that young Atlantic cod were attracted to a background “hum” like that produced by offshore wind turbines. Researchers in Norway studied the impact of a low-frequency hum on 89 larval cod. They put the fish in mesh containers, then placed them in a fjord in Norway. They played the humming sound to half of the fish, but not the other half. And t...

Voyage to the Northeast

March 03, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

One of the great quests of the 16th century was to find a northwest passage—a shortcut from Europe to Asia. Such a route would go through or above the lands of the New World. No one ever found it because there isn’t one. But the search gave European mapmakers and scientists a lot of information about the North American coastline. One example was a search that reached the coast 500 years ago. Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano convinced the king of France to sponsor a search for the n...

On the Decline

February 25, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

For the eastern North Pacific gray whale, it’s been an up-and-down few decades. The population had been decimated by whaling. Conservation efforts allowed the whales to rebound. But over the past few years, the numbers have dropped again. There are two populations of North Pacific gray whales. One is on the Asian side of the Pacific Ocean. The other is along the coast of the United States and Canada. Every year, the whales migrate 10,000 miles or more. They go from their summer feeding gr...

Whiter Clouds

February 18, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

People are always looking for ways to make things brighter and whiter—from teeth to laundry. They seldom think of brighter, whiter clouds. Yet whiter clouds are just as important as whiter bicuspids or T-shirts. They reflect more sunlight back into space, making our planet cooler. In recent years, scientists have discovered a great cloud whitener: tiny organisms known as phytoplankton. They’re especially abundant in the Southern Ocean—the waters around Antarctica. Satellites reveal that cl...

‘Fishy’ Teeth

February 11, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

When you bite into a chewy bagel, crunch a crispy taco, or grind up a piece of tough meat, you’re using structures that evolved hundreds of millions of years ago: teeth. There’s no consensus on how teeth first formed. One idea says they formed from structures inside fish or perhaps other animals. The other says they formed from the scales of fish that resembled modern-day sharks—400 million years ago. The scales of sharks and rays are made of a material similar to that found in teeth—thei...

Storm Relocations

February 04, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

Hurricane Ian slammed into southwestern Florida in September 2022. It produced a storm surge up to 15 feet high, and dumped a foot or more of rain across the region. That killed dozens, damaged or destroyed thousands of buildings, and caused tens of billions of dollars in losses. Floridians are still evaluating another form of damage—the spread of plants and animals beyond their usual habitats. Flooding and the storm surge brought water in from the Gulf of Mexico, and caused lakes and rive...

Ram Tough

January 28, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

The final battle of a war between Rome and Carthage sent many warships to their doom. Scientists have pulled up artifacts from some of those vessels. And at least one of the artifacts became a busy home for life. Biologists found evidence of more than a hundred species—clams, worms, snails, and others—a record of how life colonized the artifact over the centuries. The battle took place in 241 BC. It was in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Sicily, a large island near the toe of Italy...

Batfish

January 21, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

There are lots of ways for a fish to attract its prey. The batfish uses two ways. It dangles a lure over its head, which pulls the prey in close. It then squirts a fluid into the water that completes the job—it pulls the prey close enough for the batfish to grab it. Batfish—also known as seabats—are odd little creatures. They have wide, flat bodies. Seen from above, they can resemble garden spades or pancakes. They’re fairly small, and they live on the bottom of warm oceans and seas around...

Stormquakes

January 14, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

As if hurricanes aren’t scary enough, they can generate something that sounds just as scary: stormquakes. As a hurricane rumbles across the ocean surface, it can cause the ocean floor to rumble as well. Fortunately, the quakes don’t cause any damage. Scientists discovered stormquakes by studying seismic activity recorded during many hurricanes. The records revealed that sometimes, the ocean floor “jiggled” as a hurricane passed overhead. The jiggles could be as strong as a magnitude 3.5 ea...

Risky Business

January 07, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes - 4.62 MB

Whale sharks are a bit like pop stars: They attract a crowd. Smaller fish swarm around them. That’s probably a better deal for some fish than others. Sometimes, predators can wolf down entire schools of the groupies in a matter of seconds. Whale sharks are the largest fish on Earth. They can span 25 feet or more. They’re filter feeders—they filter tiny fish and other small organisms from the water as they swim along with their mouths wide open. The sharks often are accompanied by other fi...

Nap Time

December 31, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes - 5.16 MB

When we talk about “falling asleep,” we don’t usually mean it literally. For Northern elephant seals, though, it is literal—they sleep while falling through the ocean. You can’t help but wonder if they dream about falling, too. Northern elephant seals live along the coast of California. They can be up to 13 feet long, and weigh a couple of tons. The seals spend seven or eight months a year at sea, foraging for food. They spend the remaining months on shore, where they breed and rest up for...

Scale-Free

December 24, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes - 5.16 MB

The bodies of most fish are scaly. The scales protect them from predators and rough surfaces, improve streamlining, and ward off diseases and parasites. But a few species have different forms of protection: tough skin, bony plates, or thick layers of slime. Scales vary in size, shape, alignment, and structure. The bodies of most sharks, for example, are covered by rows of tiny, pointed scales that aim toward the tail. The scales of tarpon, on the other hand, are round and can be more than ...

Brighter Winters

December 17, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes - 5.16 MB

Life in arctic waters is like a giant see-saw. Some species rise to the surface during the day and sink into the depths at night, while others do just the opposite. And the see-saw keeps tottering even during the winter, when there’s no sunlight at all. But research over the past couple of decades suggests that things could be changing. As the climate warms up, the arctic ice gets thinner. That allows more ships to ply the winter waters. It’s also making it easier to develop the coastline....

Warm-Blooded Fish

December 10, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes - 5.16 MB

The basking shark looks intimidating. It’s the second largest of all fish—it’s 25 feet or longer and can weigh 10,000 pounds. And it can open its jaw a yard wide—wide enough to swallow a person. Yet the shark is a gentle giant. It cruises through the ocean at a leisurely two or three miles per hour, filtering tiny organisms from the water—nothing for swimmers to fear. Yet researchers recently found that the basking shark shares one trait with some of its more fearsome cousins, such as the ...

Warm Seaweed

December 03, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes - 5.16 MB

Seaweed is useful stuff. Among other things, it provides habitat for fish, turtles, and other creatures. It’s also used in a lot of products in the human realm: food, fertilizers, animal feed, medicines, thickeners for everything from toothpaste to ice cream, and many more. And there’s one new possible use: providing heat. There are many varieties of seaweed. They can be up to hundreds of feet long. All of them are types of algae. They don’t grow in the ground. Instead, they anchor themse...

Redfish Rebound

November 26, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes - 5.16 MB

Life in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence has been on a seesaw. Some species all but disappeared, allowing others to thrive. Then the seesaw flipped the other way. Some all-but-vanished species tipped up, while the thriving ones tipped down. Perhaps the most dramatic example is deepwater redfish, a type of rockfish that’s quite different from the redfish in the Gulf of Mexico. From the 1950s until the 1980s, fishers caught about 60,000 tons of the deepwater redfish and another rockfish species...

Williwaws

November 19, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes - 5.16 MB

In early 1945, as World War II neared its climax, 19-year-old Gore Vidal was the first officer of an Army supply ship in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. The weather was often stormy. Another ship in the fleet was hit by an especially nasty type of wind storm. Vidal wrote his first novel about his time in the Aleutians, and incorporated that storm into the plot. In fact, he named the novel after the wind: Williwaw. In scientific parlance, a williwaw is a type of katabatic wind. Such winds p...

Losing Ice

September 17, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

The two largest ice sheets on Earth sit atop Antarctica and Greenland. But they’re both getting smaller in a hurry. They’re contributing to the rise in global sea level—about an inch over the past few decades. The rate at which the sheets vanish isn’t the same, though—Greenland’s is disappearing much faster. The ice sheets can be hundreds of feet thick. But as the climate has warmed up, they’ve been shrinking. According to one study, from 1992 to 2020 they lost a combined eight trillion to...

Shark Nursery

September 10, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Young sharks of several threatened species are living together in a “nursery” off the western tip of Africa. It’s one of the busiest nurseries in the Atlantic Ocean. From 2016 to 2019, researchers counted the sharks found in fishing nets around Cabo Verde, a group of small volcanic islands about 350 miles west of Africa. They also interviewed most of the fishermen in the region to see where young sharks were most common. And one spot was by far the most popular: Sal Rei Bay, on the coast o...

Asphalt Volcanoes

September 03, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Oil and gas bubble up through the ocean floor all the time. They form oil slicks, create tar balls that wash up on shore, and make pillows of methane ice. And in some rare instances, they form asphalt volcanoes—tall, black mounds with smooth sides. The first were discovered in 2003, about two miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Others have been found in the Gulf since then, along with a few off the coasts of California and western Africa. Some of those in the Gulf of Mexico have split apart,...

Otters and Wolves

August 27, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Good news for one species isn’t necessarily good news for all. Consider the wildlife on Pleasant Island, off the coast of southeastern Alaska. Sea otters returned to the island a couple of decades ago. Gray wolves came along a decade later. The wolves ate most of the island’s deer, then started hunting the otters. That’s good for the wolves, but bad news for everyone else. Fur hunters nearly wiped out otters in the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. But thanks to legal protections and ...

Coastal Threats

August 20, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Millions of residents chased out of their homes. Trillions of dollars in extra damages. A tenth of coastal crops destroyed. That’s what some developing countries could face from coastal flooding by the year 2100, according to a recent study. Several regions could be especially hard hit, facing costs of more than five percent of their total economies. Researchers looked at possible coastal flooding at 9,000 locations around the world. They forecast what could happen by the years 2050 and 21...

Arms vs. Tentacles

August 13, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Here’s a pop quiz for you: How many tentacles does an octopus have? If you said “eight,” sorry, but you fail. An octopus does have eight limbs. But technically, they’re known as arms, not tentacles. An octopus is a cephalopod—a group that includes squid, cuttlefish, and nautilus. Each of them has a whole bunch of limbs—from eight for the octopus, to more than 90 for the nautilus. The animals use those limbs to look for and catch prey, to move along the sea floor, and even to build houses. ...

Anglerfish

August 06, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

When scientists began pulling anglerfish from the deep ocean, they noticed something odd—all of the specimens were female, and many of them had small parasites attached to their bodies. And when they studied the fish in detail, the story got even odder—the “parasites” were actually the missing males. Deep-sea anglerfish are some of the strangest creatures in the oceans. To attract prey, the females wave around a small “lure”—a pod filled with glowing bacteria. They have a wide mouth filled...

Moving Out

July 30, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

When neighborhoods start to go downhill, people move away. And today, that’s happening in marine neighborhoods. As the oceans get warmer—a result of our changing climate—fish and other critters are moving out of their neighborhoods and into cooler waters. That includes the tiniest organisms, known as plankton. And a recent study says the trend could accelerate in the decades ahead. Researchers at the University of Texas and elsewhere pored through a database of half a million microscopic p...

Shark Grass

July 23, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Tiger sharks can boldly go where no diver has gone before—or is likely to go anytime soon. That makes them great research assistants for marine scientists. In fact, they helped confirm the discovery of the largest known seagrass meadow in the world. The seagrass is in the Bahamas. Scientists used satellite observations to get a rough estimate of the size of the beds. Divers took more than 2500 plunges into the clear, shallow Caribbean waters to confirm the satellite maps. Even so, coverag...

Atmospheric Rivers

July 16, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Many Americans have learned a new term in the past few years: atmospheric river. Massive ribbons of water vapor have brought floods and epic snowfalls to the West Coast. And our warming climate could produce more intense examples in the years ahead. An atmospheric river begins as warm ocean water evaporates and climbs into the sky. It forms a stream of water vapor that surfs along with the weather. It can be a few hundred miles wide and a thousand miles long, and carry several times more w...

Lyrical Spider

July 09, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

A few years ago, some scientists in Australia got a tip from a city council member in a town in the state of Queensland, on the country’s northeastern coast: Some unusual spiders were appearing on the beaches of a nearby town during especially low tides. The scientists checked it out. And their analysis revealed that the spider belonged to a species that hadn’t been cataloged before. So they recorded its details—an adult male is about a quarter of an inch long, a female about 50 percent la...

Garbage Soup

July 02, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t what you think. It’s often depicted as a big “island” of junk—plastic bottles, fishing nets, sneakers, tires, and other debris. But that’s not the case. In fact, you could sail right through it and never even notice. That’s because, instead of an island, it’s more of a “soup”—tiny bits of plastic and other debris spread across an area twice the size of Texas, from the surface to depths of hundreds of feet. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually tw...

Raw Power

June 25, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

A hurricane is like a giant power plant. In a single day, a run-of-the mill hurricane can produce 200 times as much energy as all the power plants in the entire world. And a major hurricane can produce several times more. It might not sound right, but only about one percent of that comes from a hurricane’s winds. That’s still a lot of power—the equivalent of a 10-megaton H-bomb every 20 minutes. Most of its power comes from the process that makes clouds and rain. A hurricane is fed by war...

Ear Protection

June 18, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Nobody likes the booms and cracks of pile drivers and airguns. They’re not only aggravating, but they can cause hearing loss and other health problems. So there are laws and regulations to control how those tools can be used. There are similar regulations to protect the ears of marine mammals in offshore construction zones. The noise is an extra problem in the oceans because sound carries a lot farther underwater than in the air. A recent study says the regulations might need to be update...

Fewer Cyclones

September 25, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.59 MB

Earth’s warming climate is likely to have big impacts on tropical cyclones—the generic term for hurricanes and other big tropical storm systems. Studies have shown that the proportion of powerful storms may be increasing, and that storms appear to be dumping a lot more rain on land. On the other hand, a recent study suggests that the number of storms is going down. Scientists analyzed storm records beginning in 1850. That’s not an easy task. Records before satellites began tracking storms ...

Coral Sounds

September 18, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

A healthy coral reef is a noisy coral reef. Shrimp, fish, and other organisms create a cacophony of sound that attracts other critters. And for damaged reefs that’ve been restored, the noise can reappear in just a year or two. Researchers from England studied reefs around several islands in Indonesia. Many of the reefs have been damaged or destroyed by “blast fishing,” climate change, and other causes. But a big project has been trying to nurse some of the damaged reefs back to health. Me...

Eating Fossils

September 11, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

In 2016, scientists discovered large fields of sponges atop some volcanic mountains that rise from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. And that was a big surprise—no one had seen anything like it before. And there didn’t seem to be a way for the sponges to survive—there just wasn’t enough for them to eat. It turns out that the sponges have found a new way to keep themselves going: eating fossils. Researchers were studying the geology and life of Langseth Ridge, north of Norway and Greenland. T...

Coral Survival

September 04, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Corals are in trouble. Higher ocean temperatures and acidity are damaging or killing many reefs. And the problem gets worse by the year. But not all the news is in the “doom-and-gloom” category. Several recent studies have provided a slightly more hopeful outlook. Corals survive with the help of algae that live inside them. The algae are photosynthetic—they convert light and carbon dioxide to sugars, providing most of the coral’s nutrients. When conditions get bad, though, the algae are ki...

Tricky Niño

August 28, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Studies say our planet’s changing climate is likely to make hurricanes more intense, trigger more outbreaks of the polar vortex, and bring more big thunderstorms and flooding rains to the American heartland. But no one is sure just what will happen to the biggest weather maker of all, El Niño. In fact, a recent study says that natural changes in El Niño make it hard to forecast how it might be altered by human-caused climate change. El Niño is a warming of the surface waters of the Pacific...

Oyster Comebacks

August 21, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

If you like oysters, some researchers in Virginia have some good news for you: Restored oyster reefs can return to good health in just a few years. Oyster populations have plummeted by about 85 percent over the past 200 years—the result of over-harvesting, pollution, and other problems. Yet oyster reefs provide many important benefits. The reefs are close to shore, so they can reduce coastal erosion. And the oysters feed by filtering tiny organisms from the water. As they do so, they also ...

Lost Legos

August 14, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Thousands of scuba tanks have washed ashore on the beaches of Cornwall, England, in the last quarter-century. So have life jackets, flippers, octopuses, and other nautical items. And they may continue to show up for decades longer. As you might expect, though, there’s a catch: They’re all Lego blocks that were washed off the deck of a ship. The saga began in February 1997, when the cargo ship Tokio Express was hit by a rogue wave about 20 miles off Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of Engl...

Saffir-Simpson Scale

August 07, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

As a hurricane roars toward the American coastline, residents pay close attention to a single number: the hurricane’s category. Category 1 is dangerous but usually survivable, while category 5 is monstrous—an Armageddon with effects that can last for months. The categories come from the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. It was conceived in 1969 by Herbert Saffir. He was an engineer who was evaluating the impacts of tropical storms for the United Nations. He showed it to Robert Homer Sim...

Oh, Poo

July 31, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

Parrotfish and surgeonfish are among the many colorful residents of Caribbean coral reefs. They mainly eat algae and a type of bacteria off the reef. But they also nibble on other things, including sponges and the living coral. And one item that may be an important part of their diet is decidedly unappetizing: the poo of other fish. Researchers studied these fish in the waters around an island near Venezuela, in 2019. They followed nine species of parrotfish and three species of surgeonfis...

Rising from the Dead

July 24, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

A type of ray has come back from the dead—or at least the mostly dead. The tentacled butterfly ray inhabited the waters along the northern Indian Ocean, from Arabia to India. But it hadn’t been seen since 1986, near Pakistan. So it was listed as critically endangered and possibly extinct. The tentacled butterfly ray is one of about a dozen species of butterfly rays. The rays can be up to about 12 feet wide. They have long, thin “wings” that make them look like butterflies. They live near t...

Slowing Down

July 17, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

A “conveyor belt” in the Atlantic Ocean appears to be slowing down. And that could have a big impact on the climate, although it’s not clear just what that impact might be. The conveyor belt is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation—AMOC for short. Water at the surface travels northward, parallel to the American coastline, then curls over to Europe. As it reaches higher latitudes, the water gets cooler and denser, so the current sinks. It swings around and moves southward, on the ...

Atlantic Aviary

July 10, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

The North Atlantic Ocean is home to a rich diversity of life beneath the waves. But it’s also home to a rich diversity above the waves: seabirds. There are so many birds that scientists managed to have a patch of the ocean declared a marine protected area. The birds inhabit a region that’s almost as big as Texas. It’s south of Greenland, from near the shore of Canada to the middle of the Atlantic. The first hints that it was a popular spot for birds popped up in 2016. A team of researcher...

Limpets

July 03, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

During the Irish potato famines of the 19th century, many people survived by eating limpets -- small animals that cling to rocks at the ocean’s edge. And when German troops occupied the island of Jersey during World War II, its people survived on a stew of limpets and curry powder. So limpets became known as “famine food” -- something to eat when there wasn’t much else. Yet a recent study notes that limpets have been an important food source for thousands of years. In fact, the earliest re...

Melting Fire

June 26, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.19 MB

What happens in the Arctic doesn’t always stay in the Arctic. Changes in conditions in the Arctic Ocean can have an impact on land as well. A loss of sea ice, for example, appears to increase the risk of wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. Wildfires have been a growing problem in Washington, Oregon, and northern California for a couple of decades. Around Labor Day of 2020, for example, fires in Washington burned more than half a million acres in just 36 hours. And the 2021 fire season in Ca...

Octopus Garden

June 19, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.18 MB

Davidson Seamount -- an extinct underwater volcano off the coast of California -- has been described as “an oasis of the deep.” It’s home to huge coral reefs -- some of them more than a century old. It hosts crabs, many species of deep-sea fish, and big fields of sponges. And scientists recently discovered something else: the largest congregation of octopuses seen anywhere in the world -- more than a thousand of them. They nicknamed the spot the Octopus Garden. The seamount is the largest ...

The Blob

June 12, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.18 MB

In the 1958 B-movie “The Blob,” Steve McQueen and the gang stop the blobby monster from absorbing people by freezing it. The Air Force then drops it on Arctic sea ice to keep it frozen. With the sea ice melting in a hurry, though, perhaps we should keep an eye out to make sure it doesn’t head back for land. On the other hand, the warming climate has already given us an ocean “blob”: a giant pool of warm water off the Pacific coast. It killed huge numbers of marine organisms. This blob was...

Heat Waves

June 05, 2022 05:00 - 2 minutes - 5.18 MB

Big heat waves are hotter, more common, and cause more suffering than ever -- and not just on land. Marine heat waves are a problem as well. Eight of the 10 largest ever seen have occurred since 2010 -- a result of Earth’s warming climate. And the hot spells are likely to become an even bigger challenge in the decades ahead. A marine heat wave is just what it sounds like: A large patch of water that’s much warmer than average. The heat wave can last anywhere from days to years. The biggest...