Spotlights

Here’s an image for you: A sea star eats by basically vomiting up its stomach, sticking it inside the shell of a tasty morsel, say a mussel, and hanging out all day like this until it’s fully digested the prey. That’s according to Marine and Environmental Sciences professor Brian Helmuth, whom I spoke with the [...]

A new study featured in Science suggests that coral may be able to recover from disaster. The paper, co-authored by Richard Aronson of the Florida Institute of Technology, combined the skills of several universities, including Prof. Steven Vollmer and PhD student David Combosch from Northeastern University. The study focused on the reefs off the Pacific [...]

There are more than 3,000 species of ter­mites in the world, all living in social colonies with dis­tinct hier­ar­chies. They can be dev­as­tating pests, with the ability to destroy entire build­ings. But they’re also an impor­tant com­po­nent of nat­ural ecosys­tems, with much to teach us about soil nutrient recy­cling. Still, nei­ther of these facts is [...]

Prof. Kimbro, currently stationed at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center in Nahant, collected synthesized research on marine diversity reports published from 1997-2012 to better understand the specific biological and environmental properties that allow invasive species to succeed or fail. “For the past 15 years, marine scientists have conducted a lot of experiments that have taught [...]

Craig Schneider teaches biology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Seaweed is Schneider’s thing. He’s made his living “as a person who studies seaweeds and knows pretty much what you’re going to find any time of the season.” Which made his trip to Rhode Island in the summer of 2009 so weird. Schneider was walking [...]