The San Jose was carrying gold, silver, gems and jewellery collected in the South American colonies to be shipped to Spain's king to help finance his war of succession against the British when it was sunk in June 1708 during heavy fighting off the coast of Cartagena. In the fighting the vessel was reported to have exploded, with most of its crew killed.
Sharks home in on faint bioelectric fields generated by the bodies of their prey which they pick up using sensitive detectors on their snouts.
When researchers from Duke University showed captive cuttlefish held in tank videos depicting the menacing silhouettes of a shark or predatory grouper fish they reacted by lowering the electric field dramatically. Being shown the shadow of a harmless crab produced no reaction.
Sharks home in on faint bioelectric fields generated by the bodies of their prey which they pick up using sensitive detectors on their snouts.
When researchers from Duke University showed captive cuttlefish held in a tank videos depicting the menacing silhouettes of a shark or predatory grouper fish they reacted by lowering the electric field dramatically. Being shown the shadow of a harmless crab produced no reaction.
A team of researchers from the University of Michigan focused on leatherback sea turtles nesting on St. Kitts, an island in the West Indies southeast of Puerto Rico. The team wanted to know what factors influence where and when the leatherbacks lay their eggs.
It has been suggested that characteristics of the sand, the slope of the beach and proximity to vegetation contribute to the success or failure of nests, but which factors cause female leatherback sea turtles to dig a nest in a particular spot has never been investigated.
With up to 10m tides, the Kimberley region in north Western Australia has the largest tropical tides in the world, creating naturally extreme and highly dynamic coastal habitats that corals from more typical reefs could not survive.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute were thus surprised to find that corals from the region are just as sensitive to heat stress and bleaching as their counterparts from less extreme environments elsewhere.
Satellite telemetry suggests that seamounts represent an overlooked cryptic habitat for humpback whales
Seamounts probably serve multiple and important roles as breeding locations, resting areas, navigational landmarks or even supplemental feeding grounds for this species, which can be viewed as a transient component of the seamount communities.
Residents of Stewart Island, New Zealand have pleaded for politicians to halt shark cage diving in their waters. The residents and paua divers have expressed fears that the cage diving is attracting great white sharks to the area and putting them at risk, saying they live in fear of a fatal shark attack.
The researchers found that lookdown fish camouflage themselves through a complex manipulation of polarized light after it strikes the fish's skin. In laboratory studies, they showed that this kind of camouflage outperforms by up to 80 per cent the "mirror" strategy that was previously thought to be state-of-the-art in fish camouflage.
The open ocean represents a challenging environment for camouflage,There are no objects to hide behind in three-dimensional space, so organisms have to find a way to blend in to the water itself.
In 2006, a postgraduate program in maritime archaeology was established at the University of Southern Denmark. Based in Esbjerg, on the west coast of the Jutland Peninsula in southwestern Denmark, it is a one-of-a-kind university program in this centuries-old seafaring nation. The program is designed for students who want to pursue a professional career in maritime archaeology and heritage management.
Behavioural innovation is thought to play an important role in enabling animals to cope with environmental change. Research on animal innovation has focused on terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates, but few animals face environmental variation as extreme as those living in littoral zones, where physical and social conditions change dramatically from moment to moment.
Last July, David Trotter, a shipwreck hunter who had spent 30 years searching for a century-old ship, and a team of divers finally located the missing vessel: a 436-foot steamship named Hydrus, which sunk during the Great Lakes Storm of 1913.
The ship, carrying a load of iron ore, was headed for the shelter of the St. Clair River off of Lake Huron when a terrible blizzard struck the region. During the storm, which struck in early November, more than 19 ships were lost and 250 sailors died, reported Garret Ellison for The Grand Rapids Press.
Ocean acidification affects biological processes in a wide range of marine taxa.
A new study, published in Research and Reports in Biodiversity Studies, notes that in the tropics, coral reefs face a host of interconnected problems (bleaching, corrosion, disease, spreading seaweed, invasive species) that are all caused by rising CO2 levels.
