Did You Know?

Purple has always been a ‘royal’ color that originally came from snail slime. You heard right: snail slime!Archeologists have dated “royal” purple garments dyed with snails to as old as 1,000 B.C and only three species produce this dye.

In 2017 a nine-year old in New Mexico tripped and fell. What Jude Spark tripped on, he found out later, was the skull of a rare stegomastodon (an elephant-like creature) from 1.2 million years ago.

The idea of “natural” or “wild” lands is a myth. Scientists released a study showing that about three quarters of terrestrial nature has been shaped over 12,000 years by the land use of Indigenous and traditional peoples. Those land use practices included burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication and cultivation.

Just like us, coral reefs have microbiomes that keep them healthy. Researchers, like our Featured Scientist, Colin Howe, study the microbiomes of coral reefs. They aim to identify microbes on specific reefs where they can discover how corals’ microbes help them become more resilient in the face of human-caused climate change and pollution.

Sea Star Wasting Disease (SSWD) has decimated sea star populations around the world. Since the epidemic of dead, dissolving sea stars was discovered around 2013, scientists have been trying to figure out the cause of the disease.

There is a squid so HUGE it has made sucker scars on sperm whales found washed ashore.

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has lost  half of its coral in the last 25 years. Along its entire length (1,429 miles over an area of approximately 133,000 square miles) coral bleaching has destroyed the reef.

You’ve got to see My Octopus Teacher! We never imagined someone could spend a year following a wild female octopus through that kelp forest almost every day.

“Darwin's Paradox” asks how productive and diverse ecosystems like coral reefs thrive in the ocean equivalent of a desert with few nutrients.The answer is sponges.

“If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”E.O. WilsonOf the 2200 species in five insect orders tracked by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, nearly half are declining.