When Whale Food Moves: Climate Change, Crab Traps, and Pop-Up Gear
In 2014, a patch of unusually warm water nicknamed "the blob" settled off the west coast of North America. The cold, food-rich water that no...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsScience & Medicine
Speak Up For The Ocean Blue
Speak Up For The Ocean Blue raises awareness of the variety of ocean science and conservation projects conducted all around the world. It educates you, the listener, on the different Ocean C...
Episodes
20 of 2,019 episodesThe Whale Heart That Beats Twice a Minute
Fill your hands with cold water, hold your breath, and press your face in. Your heart slows within seconds. That reflex lives in every whale...
The Biggest Mouthful: How Blue Whales Eat and Why Krill Matters
A blue whale can swallow a volume of water bigger than its own body in a single gulp. That move, called lunge feeding, is one of the most ex...
Whales Are Sprinters: What a Blue Whale's Heart Does When It Lunge Feeds
What happens to the heart of the largest animal on Earth when it charges into a swarm of krill? Dr. Ashley Blawas, a postdoctoral scholar in...
The Pollution That Breeds: How the Great Lakes Stopped Invaders
In 1988, someone found a striped mussel the size of a fingernail in Lake St. Clair. Within a few years, zebra mussels coated pipes, boats, a...
How Beach Cleanup Data Helped Canada Ban Plastic
You rinse the yogurt tub, check the number on the bottom, and drop it in the blue bin. In Canada, only about 9% of plastic waste actually ge...
What Happens to Fish When Our Pills Reach the Water?
In 2001, government scientists started adding a tiny amount of the synthetic estrogen found in birth control pills to a remote lake in north...
How Did Humpback Whales End Up in New York Harbour?
This summer, people are boarding whale watching boats and seeing humpbacks feeding in sight of the Manhattan skyline. Fifty years ago, that...
Plastic Is Still the Ocean's #1 Villain, with Dr. Judith Weis
Plastic keeps getting made, it never goes away, and almost none of it gets recycled. Dr. Judith Weis, Professor Emerita at Rutgers Universit...
You Left a Public Comment. Now What?
All week, Andrew has asked listeners to comment on and show up for California's marine protected area review. Today he answers the question...
Does Your Public Comment Count? Two Ocean Wins Show How
Earlier this year, about 65,000 people submitted comments on a federal deep-sea mining proposal near the Northern Mariana Islands, most of t...
The Blob Hit California's Kelp. Protected Kelp Came Back Faster.
In 2014, just two years after California finished its statewide network of marine protected areas, a marine heatwave known as The Blob settl...
300 People, 50 Tribes, One Meeting: How California Built Its Marine Protected Areas
In 1999, California passed a law ordering the state to fix its patchwork of ocean parks. For two years, almost nothing happened, and two att...
California Votes on 15 MPA Changes in October. Who Got a Say?
California has a network of 124 marine protected areas, and in October the state's Fish and Game Commission takes up 15 proposals that could...
Millimeters That Matter: The Sea Level Rise Threshold Coastal Wetlands Can't Survive
Sea level rise. It's a phrase everyone's supposed to be afraid of, and almost nobody can picture. A couple of millimeters a year sounds too...
What the Coast Is Worth: How a Dollar Number Is Already Funding Its Protection
A boat's wake looks harmless right up until you watch it happen over and over. Every wake a boat throws off chips away at a shoreline that t...
Red Tide, Decoded: Why It Isn't Random, and How to Track It
No smell. No warning. Just a beach full of people who start coughing at the same time, grab their towels, and leave. That's red tide, and it...
Nature's Kidneys: How Coastal Wetlands Stop Ocean Pollution
Green water. A smell that won't go away. Sometimes, dead fish washing up on shore. That's what too much nitrogen does to a coastline, and it...
Blue Nitrogen: The Nutrient Story Coastal Wetlands Have Been Hiding
Every time this podcast talks about coastal wetlands, the conversation goes straight to carbon. Marshes, mangroves, and seagrasses pull carb...
Who Pays for Plastic? Inside the Law Quietly Shifting the Bill to Producers
For decades, the honest answer to "who pays to deal with plastic packaging once it leaves the shelf" was taxpayers, quietly, through municip...