In mid-September, while Monterey Bay basked in late summer beach weather, MBARI geologist Charlie Paull stood shivering at the base of a low hill, several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle and about a dozen miles from anywhere.
In the spirit of California Rideshare Week, MBARI employees celebrated six years of vanpooling and hundreds of gallons of gas saved by bicycling to work.
Exploring a deep-sea ridge off Northern California, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have discovered a unique undersea nursery, where groups of fish and octopus brood their eggs, like chickens on their nests. This is the first time that marine biologists have directly observed any deep-sea fish brooding its eggs.
Oceanographers from more than a dozen prestigious research institutions have converged on Monterey Bay this month to examine the bay as never before, collaborating in a unique research experiment. They have come together as part of the Autonomous Ocean Sampling Network (AOSN) program, funded by the Office of Naval Research.
In photographs, it looks like a big red spaceship cruising the ocean depths. But it’s actually a new species of jelly that was discovered and described by scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. MBARI scientists published their research on this unusual animal in a recent online version of the journal Marine Biology.
In the late 1930s, California’s sardines supported the biggest fishery in the western hemisphere, with more than half a million tons of fish caught each year. By the mid-1950s, the sardines had virtually disappeared. Although fishing pressure may have played a part in this process, new research published in the current issue of Science indicates that the sardines’ demise was part of a 50-year cycle that affects not just California, but the entire Pacific Ocean.
Research programs at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) encompass the entire ocean, from the surface waters to the deep seafloor, and from the coastal zone to the open sea. The need to understand the ocean in all its complexity and variability drives MBARI's research and development efforts.