15 articles
A coastal atlas guide to Browns Bank, the Scotian Shelf plateau where kelp grows far offshore, urchins regrew and crashed, and science has watched for fifty years.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Estuaries layer fresh water over salt in shifting gradients. How estuarine circulation works, where kelp's brackish limit lies, and why the river–sea edge matters.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Falklands kelp grows so dense it damps waves, stalls boats and builds calm harbours. Inside the physics and ecology of the world's thickest kelp belt.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Fjords are drowned glacial valleys with a rock sill at the door. How that sill shapes circulation, deep-water renewal, anoxia risk — and why fjords shelter rich kelp.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Most of the ocean's carbon never gets bitten by anything. Meet the microbial loop — the invisible recycling circuit that turns leaks and corpses back into food.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Where wind-driven upwelling stalls behind headlands, pockets of warm, retentive water form. These 'upwelling shadows' shape larvae, kelp and climate refuges.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Norris's top snail spends its whole life on giant kelp — a large red-brown top snail found in no habitat but the southern California kelp forest.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Lacuna vincta, the chink-shell kelp snail, lives its whole life on kelp blades — sometimes a helpful gardener, sometimes a grazer that can riddle a farm.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
A single kelp blade hosts algae, bryozoans, hydroids and a whole mobile fauna. Meet the epiphytes — the living deck that perches on the forest's leaves.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Wave energy is the architect of rocky reefs. How drag, shear and exposure gradients sort species, sculpt kelp and decide where a forest can stand.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Discurria insessa, the kelp limpet, lives its whole life on a single stipe of feather boa kelp — one of the coast's strictest partnerships.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Wave exposure decides which kelp species can live where, and what shape they take. How ocean energy filters the forest — and why it matters for restoration.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Calliostoma ligatum, the blue-top snail, is a small pearly topsnail that grazes living kelp blades along the Pacific coast, from blade to canopy.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Black tegula (Tegula funebralis) rules the high tide line of the Pacific coast — a decades-lived black turban snail whose grazing shapes kelp recruitment.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Kelp forests photosynthesise hard — but how much oxygen do they actually produce, where does it go, and is the 'lungs of the ocean' slogan honest science?
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·