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…
How did scientists just find 31 new species in only two weeks? Off the coast of Brazil, in the ocean's twilight zone, roughly 600 to 3,300 feet down, a science expedition uncovered a wave of previously undocumented marine life in the mysterious mid-water layer that sits between sunlit surface waters…
Today on Ocean Decoded Live, we're doing a reality check on the captive whale relocations making headlines this year. Wikie and Keijo, two orcas whose sanctuary plan fell through, are now at Loro Parque in Tenerife, a commercial park with a documented welfare record. Meanwhile, all 30 of Marineland Canada's…
Trump renames Lake Ontario "Lake America," and he did it using a loophole. Renaming a US body of water is normally supposed to go through the US Board on Geographic Names: a free-to-file process involving historical review and public input that typically takes six months to a year. Trump's August…
Lake Ontario renamed Lake America: that's the story leading this episode of Ocean Decoded Live, and we dig into what it actually means, on paper and in practice, when a president tries to rename a body of water shared with another country. We trace the same playbook back to the…
Asha de Vos could have spent her career chasing her own next discovery. Instead, once she'd built up her own research, her fellowships, and her global speaking career, she made a deliberate pivot: training what she calls "an army of local ocean heroes," starting in Sri Lanka and reaching conservationists…
Seagrass loss in Maine sounds like a quiet, local story, until you hear the numbers. Maine had more than 30,000 acres of seagrass meadows in the 1990s, habitat that supports fish nurseries, stabilizes coastlines, filters water, and stores carbon. But the state didn't start mapping that seagrass statewide until 2023,…
Corals fighting for the future are living through the most extreme swings in nearly 40 years of Great Barrier Reef monitoring, bouncing between record lows and record highs faster and harder than at any point since scientists started tracking them in 1986. This isn't a reef in steady decline, it's…
Some deep-sea corals can live for thousands of years, making their protection especially important. Holly Koehler explains how fisheries management has evolved from focusing primarily on target fish to recognizing the need to protect habitats and other species associated with fisheries. It's a shift toward looking at the broader ecosystem,…
Angelo Villagomez protecting the deep sea is the throughline of this Ocean People Profile from Ocean Decoded Live, where host Andrew Lewin spotlights one of his closest friends in ocean conservation. Villagomez is a native of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, born in a village in the Western…