He started diving with his dad at four years old, decades before he'd ever set foot at Loggerhead Marinelife Center. Andy DeHart's father was a former Navy diver, and that early exposure to the water hooked him on marine biology for good. By 15 he was already working in aquariums,…
For decades, marine biologists called it the "lost years": the stretch of a baby sea turtle's life, from the moment it crawls into the surf after hatching to the moment it resurfaces years later as a juvenile near shore, that nobody could actually observe. The working theory was that hatchlings…
Trinidad and Tobago's deep-sea expedition is the headline story on this episode of Ocean Decoded Live, and host Andrew Lewin breaks down what a mostly Trinbagonian science team found during the first-ever locally led deep-sea survey in the country's history. Led by marine biologist Dr. Diva Amon, the team mapped…
Trinidad and Tobago's deep-sea expedition is the headline story on this episode of Ocean Decoded Live, and host Andrew Lewin breaks down what a mostly Trinbagonian science team found during the first-ever locally led deep-sea survey in the country's history. Led by marine biologist Dr. Diva Amon, the team mapped…
Record ocean heat just broke a seasonal record it shouldn't have broken. Between August 22 and 24, 2026, the world's oceans hit an average surface temperature of 21.10°C (69.98°F), beating the previous record set in March 2024. That timing is what makes it different: ocean temperatures normally peak in March…
Today's episode covers three very different corners of the ocean world: a heat record that just broke months ahead of schedule, a career profile of the man now running one of Florida's best-known sea turtle hospitals, and a decade-long tracking study that overturns a textbook assumption about where baby sea…
At five or six years old, at a book fair, one book stopped Carlee Jackson-Bohannon cold: a shark book, cover alone enough to hook her on how many different species of sharks exist, in how many shapes and colours. That single moment set the course for a career. She went…
Two hundred baby great white sharks are born every year in a stretch of water most people know only as a beach vacation backdrop. For 50 years, the Hamptons area gave the world the Jaws-fueled shark panic; the real story underneath is the opposite of a monster movie. Off Hampton…
Coral reefs are already in crisis, hit by climate change, pollution, and coastal development. While they fight to survive, a parallel threat is stripping them from the inside: the illegal trade in live coral for the aquarium hobbyist market has never been bigger. More than 1,300 documented smuggling cases have…
Issah Seidu spent years building a research career around dragonflies, damselflies, elephants, and crocodiles, with several published papers to his name in that field. In this Ocean People Profile from Ocean Decoded Live, host Andrew Lewin explains what pulled him away from that work and into sharks: a visit to…
Wounded corals heal faster when a tiny, easy-to-overlook fish is living inside them. That's the headline finding from a new study out of the University of Georgia: the yellowtail dascyllus damselfish (Dascyllus flavicaudus), a small reef fish that spends its entire life inside a single coral colony, appears to actively…
Today's episode covers three very different corners of the ocean world: a true-crime story hiding inside a conservation story, a profile of a scientist who built her own path into a field that didn't make room for her, and a hidden-in-plain-sight discovery just off one of America's most famous beach…
The Ocean Cleanup was supposed to be one of the great ocean conservation success stories: in 2013, an 18-year-old named Boyan Slat founded the project on a promise that a passive, current-powered barrier, no boats, no fuel, could remove 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within five years. He…
Dr. Andrew Thaler is one of the most prolific voices in ocean science communication working today, and in this Ocean People profile from Ocean Decoded Live, host Andrew Lewin breaks down why. Thaler is a deep sea ecologist and population geneticist who earned his PhD in marine science and conservation…
Fishing nets don't always end when a boat pulls them in. Some get lost, cut loose, or abandoned at sea, and they keep fishing anyway, drifting for years as "ghost nets" that trap and kill anything that swims into them. The Gulf of Carpentaria, off Australia's northern coast, is ground…
Today's episode covers three very different corners of ocean conservation: an accountability check on one of the most famous ocean cleanup projects in the world, a profile of the man building shark science in West Africa from scratch, and a genuinely good-news discovery about how coral reefs heal. First, we're…
Captive Whale Relocation Update: this episode covers two major stories unfolding for captive whales right now — the largest beluga transfer ever recorded, and the fate of two orcas, Wikie and her son Keijo. Thirty beluga whales and four dolphins from the now-closing Marineland Canada have been relocated this summer…
Craig McClain is a deep-sea biologist, a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and, as this Ocean People Profile from Ocean Decoded Live makes clear, one of the more colorful figures in ocean science communication. Host Andrew Lewin has known him since meeting at Oceans Online in the…
