Mini-briefs

Sea cucumbers, scavengers of the seafloor that resemble the cylindrical vegetable, have been consumed as a delicacy in Asia for centuries. But in recent decades, they’ve been severely overharvested to a point that they are now quite rare. New research I helped conduct suggests their repopulation could play an important role in protecting and revitalizing another type of endangered marine organism: corals. Coral reefs are in decline around the world partly due to diseases, some of which are associated with sediment on the seafloor. In several field experiments involving corals in Moorea, French Polynesia, and around Palmyra Atoll, research scientist Cody Clements and I, along with two other colleagues working on marine microbes, found that sea cucumbers grazed and consumed bacteria in the sediment, and that sea cucumber presence prevented pathogens from sickening co-occurring corals. We learned this by either removing sea cucumbers from certain sand patches, while leaving...

Sea level rise has already put coastal cities on notice thanks to increasing storm surges and even sunny day flooding at high tide. These challenges will continue to grow because global projections point to a mean sea level rise of at least one foot above year-2000 levels by the end of this century. However, many cities are facing another factor making them even more vulnerable to rising waters: land subsidence. The three of us – Pei-Chin Wu, Meng (Matt) Wei and Steven D'Hondt – are scientists at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography working with the U.S. Geological Survey to research challenges facing waterfront cities. Our findings indicate that land is sinking faster than sea levels are rising in many coastal cities throughout the world. By using radar images of the Earth’s surface collected from orbiting satellites, we measured subsidence rates in 99 coastal cities worldwide. These rates are highly variable within cities and from...