The Ocean Blog

Welcome to the Ocean Portal Blog!

Mon, 12/07/2009 - 2:08pm
By: Smithsonian Institution
The Ocean is important to all life, including yours. Join us. Welcome to the Ocean Portal – a unique, interactive online experience that inspires awareness, understanding, and...

Christine, the Ocean Portal Community Manager wants to hear from you. Please leave a comment, send us an email, or use the feedback module to let her know what you think of the site.

CREDIT: 

Laetitia Plaisance

If you've found your way here, you've probably already seen the homepage of the Smithsonian Institution's brand new Ocean Portal (or OP, for short). We encourage you to spend some time exploring the OP and let us know what you think.

This is an experiment and an invitation. It's our first attempt to really work closely with visitors to build an interactive web experience - not just a web site. And we invite you to participate in shaping the Portal as it grows. Sure, we have cool ocean things we want to show you, but we also want to know what you are curious about and what kinds of features would be interesting or helpful to you.

This blog is one way we'll keep in touch. You can give us feedback by leaving comments, and we'll pose questions and post news about what we're hearing from visitors and how we're responding. As you explore the OP, you'll also notice that most pages have a place to give feedback. Please use these liberally! Let us know which are your favorite (and least favorite) stories, images, videos, and features. What are you dying to know more about? What's helpful, interesting, or confusing? What's missing? You can double your two cents by filling out the more detailed visitor survey.

Please, let us know what you think. We're listening.

Christine
Community Manager, Ocean Portal

Categories: Get Involved, News, Visitor Feedback

Recent Posts

More

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Outstanding start to an outstanding and visionary site. I hope to learn and contribute much here. Congratulations to all involved.

R. Lawrence, educator

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Very Nice Site!!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

cool!!!!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

This is an awesome page! This site is helping me learn a lot and definitely helping me with my reports i have to send in! Thanks for all the education!

Submitted by Andy (not verified) on

Hello,

My name is Andy and I'm from Brunei a small country just beside Singapore. Anyway, recently in a pet shop, i saw a black Jelly fish, and it look something like the cannonball jellyfish. Number 13 on this link.
Anyway, i want to know more about it. If anyone around here is interested to help me and discover it would be awesome.

Thanks,
Andy Yong

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Thank you for your article, "Searching for the ocean acidification signal", http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-news/searching-ocean-acidification-signal

But just a few years ago a paper was published, also in Nature Geoscience, documenting that planktonic foraminifera were making thinner and less calcified shells in the modern Southern Ocean. This was also attributed to ocean acidification. A number of media outlets at the time (Scientific American, etc.) at the time described that study as the first evidence from nature that acidification had already begun to affect shell-making organisms:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/03/10/no-more-speculation...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=more-acid-ocean-corrode...

So who got there first? The foraminifera study from 2009 or the sea butterfly paper you describe now?

Thanks for your comment! We will transfer both of these to the original article once we get our commenting situation worked out; thank you.

As to your question -- the difference between these papers is that the 2009 paper compared the size of modern shells to the size of older shells from the past centuries. The shells now are smaller, it concluded, and so the animals must be struggling to build them as large as they once did.

However, it is not entirely conclusive: there could be any number of reasons that an animal would build a smaller shell, unrelated to climate change or acidification.

In the new paper, the authors show microscope photos of the shells physically breaking down--the "patches of weakness" we described above. (You can see photos here.)

Until now, researchers weren't sure they'd see such clear signs of the shells dissolving in the water, and thought maybe smaller shells were the best evidence they could find. The new study showed that this evidence can be observed in the wild without the animals being killed from the weakening shells.

Does that make sense?

Thanks again for your comment and for reading!