Sharks’ bodies are covered with tiny, tooth-like scales called denticles. Shed denticles settle to the ocean floor, where they remain in sediments for years and can be used to understand which sharks lived on a reef in the past.
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Bocas del Toro
Picture this: What to do at a party when you try to carry on a conversation, but the music is too loud? A Panamanian doctoral student is trying to figure out how dolphins communicate underwater during heavy boat traffic in the Bocas del Toro Archipelago.
At the Smithsonian’s Bocas del Toro Research Station, in Panama, marine biologist Rachel Collin runs an educational program that recruits international experts to teach and create videos about how to collect, preserve and observe marine invertebrates, passing down their very specific knowledge to aspiring taxonomists.
The next time you eat seafood, think about the long-term effects. Will consistently eating the biggest fish or the biggest conch, mean that only the smaller individuals will have a chance to reproduce?
Post-doc Jarrod Scott is an active contributor to anvi’o, a set of computational tools to visualize microbial communities.
As oceans warm and become more acidic and oxygen-poor, Smithsonian researchers asked how marine life on a Caribbean coral reef copes with changing conditions.