environment

All of the saltwater bodies on Earth make up one big ocean. But within it, there is infinite variety – just ask any scuba diver. Some spots have more coral, more sea turtles, more fish, more life. “I’ve been diving in many places around the world, and there are few locations like the Fuvahmulah Atoll in the Maldives,” Amanda Batlle-Morera, a research assistant with the Important Shark and Ray Areas project, told me. “You can observe tiger sharks, thresher sharks, scalloped hammerheads, oceanic manta rays and more, without throwing out bait to attract them.” Identifying areas like Fuvahmulah that are especially important to certain species is a long-standing strategy for protecting threatened land animals, birds and marine mammals, such as whales and dolphins. Now our team of marine conservation scientists at the Important Shark and Ray Areas project is using it to help protect sharks and their relatives. I am a marine conservation biologis...

It’s an observation as old as humans gathering around campfires: Light at night can draw an erratically circling crowd of insects. In art, music and literature, this spectacle is an enduring metaphor for dangerous but irresistible attractions. And watching their frenetic movements really gives the sense that something is wrong – that instead of finding food and evading predators, these nocturnal pilots are trapped by a light. Sadly, centuries of witnessing what happens have produced little certainty about why it happens. How does a simple light change fast, precise navigators into helpless, flittering captives? We are researchers examining flight, vision and evolution, and we have used high-speed tracking techniques in newly published research to provide an answer. The reason insects fly around light will surprise you. Moths to a flame? Many old explanations for this hypnotic behavior have not fully panned out. An early notion w...

When people hear about underwater reefs, they usually picture colorful gardens created from coral. But some reefs are anchored to much more unusual foundations. For more than a century, people have placed a wide assortment of objects on the seafloor off the U.S. coast to provide habitat for marine life and recreational opportunities for fishing and diving. Artificial reefs have been created from decommissioned ships, chicken transport cages, concrete pipes, rail cars and more. We study how ocean-dwelling fish use artificial reefs in the U.S. and beyond. Through our research, we have learned that artificial reefs can be hot spots for large predatory fish such as groupers and jacks. They also can serve as stepping stones for reef fish expanding their range northward with warming water temperatures and as rest stops for sharks. Artificial reefs can be strategically designed and placed to optimize fish habitat. But although they provide valuable ecological services, no one has in...

Extremely cold Arctic air and severe winter weather swept southward into much of the U.S. in mid-January 2024, breaking daily low temperature records from Montana to Texas. Tens of millions of people were affected by dangerously cold temperatures, and heavy lake-effect snow and snow squalls have had severe effects across the Great Lakes and Northeast regions. These severe cold events occur when the polar jet stream – the familiar jet stream of winter that runs along the boundary between Arctic and more temperate air – dips deeply southward, bringing the cold Arctic air to regions that don’t often experience it. Surface temperatures at 7 a.m. EST on Jan. 16, 2024. Temperatures below freezing are in blue; those above freezing are in red. The jet stream is indicated by the light blue line with arrows. Mathew Barlow/UMass Lowell, CC BY An interesting aspect of these events is that they...

Millions of Californians were under flood alerts as a powerful atmospheric river brought heavy rain to the West Coast in early February 2024. Los Angeles saw one of its wettest days on record with over 4 inches of rain on Feb. 4. Other communities were hit by more than 12 inches of rain and reported widespread flooding. Debris and mudslides shut down sections of highways and roads into Malibu. It was the latest in a series of atmospheric rivers to bring extreme rainfall to the West Coast. While these storms are dreaded for the damage they can cause, they are also essential to the region’s water supply, particularly in California, as Qian Cao, a hydrologist at the University of California, San Diego, explains. What are atmospheric rivers? An atmospheric river is a narrow corridor or filament of concentrated water vapor transported in the atmosphere. It’s like a river in the sky that can be 1,000 miles long. On average, atmospheric rivers have about twice the regul...