Science

BOSTON, MA (February 23, 2009) – Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution are getting a lot of attention this month, the 200th anniversary of his birth. Much has happened over those two centuries.

Evolution still brings to mind the kind of change that happens over millions of years, such as humans evolving from forerunners of apes. But there is increasing evidence that species can evolve quite quickly, within our lifetimes, and that human intervention in the natural world is speeding up that process.

Take, for example, the cod fish, a New England icon.

Cod, once plentiful in the region’s waters, are increasingly rare because of overfishing. But perhaps more important is the fact that large cod are especially rare. The reason: Decades of intense fishing for the largest cod have meant the species has evolved along the lines of the survivors, which is to say, smaller cod.

Read The Boston Globe story in full

 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (February 3, 2009) – Google finally put the world’s oceans on the map.

During a splashy presentation Monday at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Internet giant unveiled a feature in its Google Earth program that will allow users to swim through undersea canyons as deep as the Mariana Trench and encounter creatures like a critically endangered, prehistoric fish called the coelacanth.

Google also unveiled an interactive, 3-D map of Mars that enables visitors to whisk, as if by rocket ship, over Martian mountains that dwarf Everest and scan Martian rocks through the eyes of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

Read the Los Angeles Times story in full

NEW BEDFORD, MA (January 01, 2009) – Teacher, fisherman, furnituremaker, marine scientist — there isn’t much that University ofMassachusetts Dartmouth professor Brian Rothschild can’t do and do well.

Luckily for the city of New Bedford, sometime in the 1990s he set his mind on seeking ways to save the local scallop fishery. A little over a decade later, scallops have made the city the biggest fishing port, in terms of dollars worth of seafood caught, in the United States. Around the same time that Dr. Rothschild, now 74, started studying scallops, he also started building up the faculty and facilities at the UMD Center for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), making it into one of the nation’s quality schools of ocean science. He was dean of the marine school from 1995 through 2006, the school’s formative decade, when it first began attracting a world-class faculty. Read the SouthCoastToday.com story in full

 

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Science Overview Intro Text.

NEW BEDFORD (September 29, 2008) — When the winch motors stopped grinding and the fishing net swung over the transom of the 90-foot-long trawler Darana R four miles out of the port on Sunday morning, a mishmash catch of dozens and dozens of fish was disgorged on the deck to "oohs" and "ahs."

Rain fell from the sky over Buzzards Bay on the second day of the Working Waterfront Festival, and the smell of fish filled the humid, salty air as the deck crew of the commercial fishing trawler moved aside. Another group, almost all head-to-toe in bright orange foul weather gear, moved into action. They separated fish by type, and, in some instances, size, on a large sorting table. As fish flopped and twisted, gasping for air in the unfamiliar and unnatural environment, the trawler crew and the orange-covered crew methodically went about their business.

Read the SouthCoastToday.com story in full