Latest Marine science Podcast Episodes
Sharkcano
Science and the Sea podcast - April 28, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsNow playing in the southwestern Pacific Ocean: Sharkcano—an underwater volcano filled with sharks. Officially, the volcano is Kavachi. It’s named for a fire god of a nearby culture. Its base is about three-quarters of a mile deep. Kavachi is one of the most active volcanoes on the planet—ther...
Power Naps
Science and the Sea podcast - April 21, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsChinstrap penguins may be contenders for the title of “world’s greatest power nappers.” A recent study found that penguins that are watching over their eggs or chicks nod off more than 10,000 times a day—for an average of just four seconds per nap. Chinstrap penguins live in Antarctica and nea...
Deep Snow
Science and the Sea podcast - April 14, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsIt snows in the oceans. Bacteria, the skin cells of fish, fish poop, and bits of sand and dirt all clump together. These “snowflakes” can be up to an inch or two across. Many of them are eaten as they sink toward the ocean floor. But others float all the way to the bottom—a trip that can take w...
Ship Killers
Science and the Sea podcast - April 07, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsKiller whales near the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal have been living up to their name. From May 2020 through the end of 2023, they “killed” four boats and attacked hundreds of others. Marine biologists are still trying to explain why. They’re not the first reported whale attacks in tha...
Deadly Combo
Science and the Sea podcast - March 31, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsAccording to an old saying, a rising tide floats all boats. And in the decades ahead, rising waters will threaten all coastal cities. As our planet gets warmer as the result of human activities, sea level is rising. So cities along the coast will see more flooding—more often, with higher water...
Ancient Giants
Science and the Sea podcast - March 24, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsIn 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 re...
Weaker Stream
Science and the Sea podcast - March 17, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsThe 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 ...
Attractive Turbines
Science and the Sea podcast - March 10, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsMany 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 impac...
Voyage to the Northeast
Science and the Sea podcast - March 03, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsOne 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...
On the Decline
Science and the Sea podcast - February 25, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsFor 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....
Whiter Clouds
Science and the Sea podcast - February 18, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsPeople 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 ye...
‘Fishy’ Teeth
Science and the Sea podcast - February 11, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsWhen 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 anima...
Storm Relocations
Science and the Sea podcast - February 04, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsHurricane 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 ar...
Ram Tough
Science and the Sea podcast - January 28, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsThe 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...
Batfish
Science and the Sea podcast - January 21, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsThere 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 seaba...
Stormquakes
Science and the Sea podcast - January 14, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsAs 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 studyi...
Risky Business
Science and the Sea podcast - January 07, 2024 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsWhale 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 s...
Nap Time
Science and the Sea podcast - December 31, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsWhen 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 c...
Scale-Free
Science and the Sea podcast - December 24, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsThe 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, alignmen...
Brighter Winters
Science and the Sea podcast - December 17, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsLife 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 dec...
Warm-Blooded Fish
Science and the Sea podcast - December 10, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsThe 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 ...
Warm Seaweed
Science and the Sea podcast - December 03, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsSeaweed 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...
Redfish Rebound
Science and the Sea podcast - November 26, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsLife 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, ...
Williwaws
Science and the Sea podcast - November 19, 2023 06:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsIn 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 h...
Losing Ice
Science and the Sea podcast - September 17, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsThe 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 disappearin...
Shark Nursery
Science and the Sea podcast - September 10, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsYoung 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 abo...
Asphalt Volcanoes
Science and the Sea podcast - September 03, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsOil 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 ...
Otters and Wolves
Science and the Sea podcast - August 27, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsGood 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...
Coastal Threats
Science and the Sea podcast - August 20, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsMillions 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 ...
Arms vs. Tentacles
Science and the Sea podcast - August 13, 2023 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsHere’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 ...
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