Academy scientist John McCosker describes a healthy, tropical shallow coral reef as an intricate network of shape, motion, and color. “The variety, amount, and numbers of coral, fish and invertebrates is impossible to describe,” he says. “It’s visually overwhelming.” In contrast, a reef damaged by dynamite, poison, or other methods of excessive resource extraction, appears as an ash-gray scar of calcium carbonate rubble along the ocean floor.

McCosker knows the difference first-hand. He made his first dive in the tropical Indo-Pacific with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1972 in the vicinity of Raja Ampat. Recently, he accompanied Terry Gosliner, the Academy’s Dean of Science and Research Collections on a scouting expedition to Northwestern Papua in Indonesia. “There is no comparison between a healthy coral reef and one that’s been dynamited,” says McCosker. “That said, Raja Ampat remains one of the least inhabited and most pristine areas of the Coral Triangle.”

Many are working to keep it that way. The trip, explains Gosliner, is an initial step in what will be a five-year collaboration with the government of Indonesia, LIPI (the Indonesian Institute of Sciences), Conservation International, Papuan Indonesian scientists, educators and local fisherman. The Academy will work with Papuan residents to provide baseline documentation and training that will strengthen their effort to monitor and protect their newly formed marine sanctuaries.

Gosliner is working to complete a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government of Indonesia that will identify marine sites off of Birds Head peninsula where Academy scientists and their partners will document the biodiversity of those coral reefs.

Academy scientists will use the same methodology employed during the 2011 Hearst Philippines Biodiversity Expedition. Gosliner hopes the five-year effort will also settle an ongoing question among scientists—exactly where is the richest part of the ocean? “Some say it’s the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines,” Gosliner says, “others say it’s Raja Ampat. We hope to gather enough data to compare the two areas.

“Coral reefs are actually far more resilient than people realize,” says Gosliner. “We’ve seen transformation of once-decimated reefs into productive, recovering ecosystems. The key is to work with the local population to adopt sustainable practices. We will survey the biodiversity. But it’s just as important to build relationships with Indonesian scientists.”

The Academy, Gosliner explains, is not a newcomer to the issue of sustainability. “It’s been part and parcel of what we’ve done throughout our entire history. But we’re stepping up our efforts because the issue is so urgent and the challenges we face today are so great.”

Barbara Tannenbaum is a science writer working with the Academy’s Digital Engagement Studio. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine and many other publications.

Image: Terry Gosliner

That’s marine biologist Rochelle Constantine of the University of Auckland. And while much of the unknown marine life may be small organisms such as sponges and small fish, Constantine is talking about a very rare whale.

The spade-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii), was never seen before. The species was only known by three partial skulls collected from New Zealand and Chile over a 140-year period.

Then, two years ago, a stranded mother and her male calf died on a New Zealand beach. The New Zealand Department of Conservation photographed the animals and collected measurements and tissue samples.

The whales were initially identified as much more common Gray’s beaked whales. But then the scientists conducted routine DNA analysis. “When these specimens came to our lab, we extracted the DNA as we usually do for samples like these, and we were very surprised to find that they were spade-toothed beaked whales,” Constantine says. “We ran the samples a few times to make sure before we told everyone.”

Their findings were published earlier this month in Current Biology.

The discovery serves as a reminder of just how little we still know about life in the ocean, the authors say. They are still unsure why the whales are so elusive. “It may be that they are simply an offshore species that lives and dies in the deep ocean waters and only rarely wash ashore,” Constantine says.

Image: New Zealand Government

It all has to do with an experiment in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Scientists dumped seven tonnes of iron into an eddy in the Southern Ocean. As expected, an algal bloom followed. Scientific American describes this well:

A hunger for iron rules the microscopic sea life of the Southern Ocean surrounding ice-covered Antarctica. Cut off from most continental dirt and dust, the plankton, diatoms and other life that make up the broad bottom of the food chain there can’t get enough iron to grow.

The bloom was dominated by diatoms like the one pictured above. This group of algae are known to form large, slimy aggregates (marine snot) with high sinking rates at the end of their blooms. Indeed, after about a month, over 50% of the bloom sank deeply into the ocean, taking carbon dioxide with it as it went.

Science News quotes Victor Smetacek, lead author in the study, as saying:

“Every one atom of iron removed 13,000 atoms of carbon” from the air.

While scientists suspected this, they were never able to prove it. This is likely what happened during past ice ages. The air was cooler and drier then and carried more iron-containing dust from the continents to the ocean—lavishly supplying marine phytoplankton and removing carbon, cooling the atmosphere.

Now scientists are wondering if we can cool our warming climate by simply adding iron to the ocean. National Geographic has more on this geoengineering fix and other extreme geoengineering ideas to fight global warming. If only we spent this much energy on stopping global warming…

Image: Marina Montresor, SZN, Alfred Wegener Institute

Despite being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, we were able to catch incredible glimpses of the solar eclipse this week through photos throughout the web.

DNA sequencing started the year off right. Popular Science reported that “For the First Time, DNA Sequencing Technology Saves A Child’s Life.” Doctors, desperate to find the cause of a boy’s severe illness, sequenced his genes, discovered a mutation and were able to prescribe a treatment that appears to be working. A new machine could make this practice more common. An article in the New York Times this week described a more affordable sequencing machine. At $50,000, the Personal Genome Machine is significantly less than standard machines and “could expand the use of DNA sequencing from specialized centers to smaller university and industrial labs, and into hospitals and doctors’ offices.”

What is causing birds to fall out of the sky and fish to die from Arkansas to Maryland and Brazil to Sweden? Cold weather? Hail storms? Fireworks? The end of the world? There’s been much hype and speculation, but scientists don’t appear to be worried. The Academy’s own Jack Dumbacher is getting samples from the southern occurrences—he’s planning on testing the corpses for viruses. You can track these deaths yourself through Google maps or the US Geological Survey.

Finally, after topping the science news headlines last year, oil in the Gulf reappeared this week, at least on news sites. Have bacteria consumed nearly all of the methane from the spill? A study published in Science this week suggests that’s the case. Ed Yong finds a lot of support for the paper in his blog on Discover; Samantha Joye tells Science News, “Just because you can’t find methane in the spot where you lowered your [instruments] doesn’t mean there’s no methane out there somewhere.”

Also, the president’s oil spill commission released the first chapter of its report this week. (The entire report will be available next week.) An excerpt from the chapter in Science Insider reports that the blame for the disaster can be shared among the companies responsible for the well.

Most of the mistakes and oversights at Macondo can be traced back to a single overarching failure—a failure of management.

And sadly, this may not be an unusual event, according to the New York Times:

The commission warned that without major changes, another such accident was likely.

If you want a front seat on a Gulf of Mexico recovery expedition, follow Sylvia Earle and others on National Geographic News Watch this month.

What science news did you dive into this week? Share with us!

Image by Brydzo/Wikimedia

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

Salps are a type of tunicate or sea squirt, small gelatinous creatures that live in the oceans and are chordates, which makes them more closely related to us than they are to the jellyfish they resemble. They can exist either singly or in chains that may contain a hundred or more of the five-inch animals (National Geographic has a great video on YouTube of a long salp chain).

Salps are known to be efficient eaters and in fact, as this older article in Discover points out,

Moving and eating are the same thing for them. As water flows into one open end of the barrel, the barrel contracts, shooting the water out the back and pushing the salp forward. On its way, though, the water passes through an internal net of mucus, sort of like a sleeve lining, that strains out particles as small as bacteria.

(These creatures are so efficient, the article continues, numerous parasites love salps.)

Recent research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), illuminates how impressive and important these little ocean vacuums are.

According to LiveScience,

…The new results show these animals can consume particles that span a huge size range, or about four orders of magnitude, from a fraction of a micrometer to a few millimeters. If sized up that range would be like eating everything from a mouse to a horse, [co-author Larry] Madin said.

And in fact, they prefer the smaller particles. Again from LiveScience:

In the laboratory at WHOI, [lead author Kelly] Sutherland and her colleagues offered salps food particles of three sizes: smaller, around the same size as, and larger than the mesh openings.

“We found that more small particles were captured than expected,” said Sutherland, now a post-doctoral researcher at Caltech. “When exposed to ocean-like particle concentrations, 80 percent of the particles that were captured were the smallest particles offered in the experiment.”

According to Madin, “Their ability to filter the smallest particles may allow them to survive where other grazers can’t.”

Perhaps most significantly, the result enhances the importance of the salps’ role in carbon cycling. As they eat small and large particles, “they consume the entire ‘microbial loop’ and pack it into large, dense fecal pellets,” Madin says.

The larger and denser the carbon-containing pellets, the sooner they sink to the ocean bottom. “This removes carbon from the surface waters,” says Sutherland, “and brings it to a depth where you won’t see it again for years to centuries.”

But wait, there’s more. Co-author Roman Stocker of MIT says that the more carbon that sinks to the bottom, the more space there is for the upper ocean to accumulate carbon, hence limiting the amount that rises into the atmosphere as CO₂.

Thanks, salps!

Image Kelly Sutherland and Larry Madin, WHOI

The findings are astounding and the images amazing! (Check out New Scientist and National Geographic for images and video of some of the stranger creatures catalogued.)

According to Scientific American:

The latest findings profile the diversity and distribution of known species in 25 important marine areas, including temperate, tropical and polar oceanic waters such as the Caribbean, Baltic and Mediterranean Seas as well as the Gulf of Mexico. The data provide a baseline for marine diversity that will be useful when assessing the future impacts of humans and nature on pelagic life.

The results from the marine areas show over 230,000 species, although scientists believe that there are more than a million more to be discovered. Japanese and Australian waters appear to be the most diverse, with about 33,000 species each.

The breakdown of life may surprise you. Science News reports that:

Big stuff… such as species of whales or turtles or sea lions, barely amounts to a drop in the oceanic bucket. Census data indicate that crustaceans are the largest chunk of known marine creatures, including crabs, shrimp and the unsung but ecologically crucial krill.

The full breakdown follows:

• 19% Crustaceans (including crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles),
• 17% Mollusca (including squid, octopus, clams, snails and slugs)
• 12% Pisces (fish, including sharks)
• 10% Protozoa (unicellular micro-organisms)
• 10% algae and other plant-like organisms
• 7% Annelida (segmented worms)
• 5% Cnidaria (including sea anemones, corals and jellyfish)
• 3% Platyhelminthes (including flatworms)
• 3% Echinodermata (including starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins, sand dollars and sea cucumbers)
• 3% Porifera (including sponges)
• 2% Bryozoa (mat or ‘moss animals’)
• 1% Tunicata (including sea squirts)

The remaining categories are other invertebrates (5%) and other vertebrates (2%). The scarce 2% of species in the “other vertebrates” category includes whales, sea lions, seals, sea birds, turtles and walruses. Thus some of the best-known marine animals comprise a tiny part of marine biodiversity.

These results are incredibly important so scientists can protect the life that is out there from various threats. Again, from Scientific American:

The researchers emphasize overfishing as the top threat to marine life worldwide. It impacts diversity and alters food webs in the sea by depleting the targeted, exploited species as well as reducing other animals commonly found in by-catch. Other threats of chief concern highlighted in the report are habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species and warmer waters due to climate change.

Image by Tin-Yam Chan, CoMarge

This is the first oceanographic research voyage sponsored by NASA.  The ICESCAPE (Impacts of Climate on Ecosystems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment) mission plans to take an up-close look at how changing conditions in the Arctic are affecting the ocean’s chemistry and ecosystems that play a critical role in global climate change.

NASA is hoping that this mission enhances the satellite data that already is collected of the area. More than 40 scientists, including six from Stanford University, will spend five weeks at sea sampling the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the ocean and sea ice.

According to today’s Stanford Report:

They will gather data on the state of the ice, the ocean and the microscopic plants and animals that dwell therein. The tiny organisms regulate the flow of carbon into and out of the sea, and the scientists are seeking to assess how the melting ice is affecting the organisms and ecosystem.

“The ocean ecosystem in the Arctic has changed dramatically in recent years, and it’s changing much faster and much more than any other ocean in the world,” said ICESCAPE chief scientist Kevin Arrigo, PhD, of Stanford. “Declining sea ice in the Arctic is certainly one reason for the change, but that’s not the whole story. We need to find out, for example, where the nutrients are coming from that feed this growth if we are going to be able to predict what the future holds for this region.”

(The Stanford team will be blogging about their adventures and research. You can follow them here.)