Fabulous new killer whale paper, showing that mammal-eaters are seen much more often around Seattle's seas, while fish-eating resident killer whales are now more rarely seen journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

In the 90 minutes after @theguardian.com article went live, BHL received more than US$2,500 in donations. Thank you to everyone helping keep biodiversity knowledge free and open. Please read, share, and help us build momentum.

NSF's grantmaking is miserly when compared to recent years, but when compared it to the historical record, we see it's a radical break from the long-term consensus of investing in scientific innovation. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF 🧪

Amazing photo and story: swim with the dwarf minke whales on the Great Barrier reef www.bbc.com/future/artic...

This is the 1st time I've seen a Flota swimming with the little stick legs fanned out. Usually they're moving fast and have them pulled in like little spikes @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 929 #Doldrums #MarineLife

Mary Jane Rathbun (June 11, 1860 – April 4, 1943) was an American #zoologist who specialized in crustaceans. She worked at the Smithsonian from 1884 until her death.[1] She described more than a thousand new species and subspecies and many higher taxa. #womeninstem en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_J....

Brilliant work by Rose Hilmo shows individual blue whale tracks in *winter* on feeding grounds in the NE Pacific, demonstrating some that are transiting and others hanging out doi.org/10.3389/fmar...

Annual catch summaries of whales caught during "modern" industrial whaling (1864-present), now available online from the International Whaling Commission zenodo.org/records/1920...

Massive fight in Alaska between commercial fishers and subsistence salmon harvesters heats up as Attorney General steps into the fray, invalidating the Board of Fish decision www.adn.com/alaska-news/...

Bacteria inside toadfish make sand from seawater scitechdaily.com/a-surprising...

There are almost no crustaceans in the deep ocean. Not because they would get crushed, but because they would DISSOLVE. The cold & high pressure cause changes to water that make it very corrosive to calcium carbonate shells. But there's one crustacean who solves this problem with ALUMINUM ARMOR.

Another xkcd classic out today

OK, sure, but did the toddler get coauthorship? www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts...

Artist Wyland sues FIFA for $25 million for painting over enormous mural of whales in Dallas www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/u...

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

Life hack from a marine biologist: When your blue sea dragons need a little snack, remember that they never evolved to swim, so you have to drive the Portuguese man-o-war around and pick them up like a little bus 🎥 by me during field work :)

You can't convince me this isn't from some other solar system.

Check out this incredible museum The Whale, in Andenes in northern Norway. Opens June 4, 2027. The architecture is truly incredible. I've been helping with one of the displays. thewhale.com

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

Roadside solar, and solar canopies over roads are far more efficient and scalable than roads paved with solar bricks. Nice analysis and viewpoint here: www.autonocion.com/us/wattway-s...

Update: Univ Washington IT folks think it is perfectly reasonable to block emails with Word documents that include doi links. i.e., documents which cite scientific papers. i.e. what scientists need to send to each other to collaborate on papers. At a research university. So totally ludicrous.

President of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...

Complete madness. NSF once again stops giving out grants to the best universities in the US. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The latest in idiotic work spam filters: blocking emails between scientists because the Word attachment has too many "URLs" by which they mean DOI links in your reference list in a draft scientific paper. Literally blocking scientists from collaborating on scientific papers.

A livestream of a volcano in the Philippines captured a meteor crashing to Earth today. What are the odds? Mayon Volcano, Location: Albay, Luzon, Philippines

The Pope says FACT CHECK YOUR SOURCES

Hundreds of thousands of Americans would have to say goodbye to their foreign-born spouses for weeks, months or maybe forever under this policy. (Disclosure: I got my green card this way.) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...

Context: $9 billion is more than the entire annual NSF budget allocated for all science research in the US. If the NSF budget had actually been disbursed this year (it has not). www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...

FIFA painted over a beloved Wyland mural of whales, one of just 100 in the world, to advertise for the World Cup. Apparently without talking to anyone before doing so. www.espn.com/soccer/story...

Reminder: If generative AI platforms & data centres were erased from the Earth…we’d be fine. They prop up nothing of essential value we can’t do ourselves.

Intrepid tails—fluke photos confirm humpback whales mount 14,000 km open ocean crossing to breeding grounds https://phys.org/news/2026-05-intrepid-tails-fluke-photos-humpback.html 🐋 #cetaceans #marinemammals #marinelife #marinebiology #whales #Science

In fisheries models, natural mortality (M) is often set to 0.2 per year. A detailed derivation of this result was provided by John Pope in 1975, see below:

designed to take down the smaller yachts

Why does PLOS ONE ask for reviews to be returned within 10 days? That's a ridiculously short timeline for a journal with a mid-to-low impact factor. @plosone.org

In fisheries models, natural mortality (M) is often set to 0.2 per year. A detailed derivation of this result was provided by John Pope in 1975, see below:

Why we know vaccines work royalsociety.org/blog/2021/01...

The most incredible eyes in the world: independent swiveling on stalks, 16 color detectors (humans have 3), can see UV, infrared, polarised light, etc. But for now, just marvel at the swiveling eyes.

I feel I should alert Bluesky to the baby foxes in our yard

Just published! Our new study reveals that anthropogenic #noise dominates the shallow-water #soundscape of the eastern Ionian Sea, from speedboats to offshore #seismic surveys. Growing challenge for marine #biodiversity #conservation & #management. 🌊🔊🌐🌍🧪 ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/hc...

Elsevier: we will join the lawsuit against Meta for copyright infringement for AI training. Elsevier: Yes, this AI representation of an ear is an accurate representation for this mathematical model. Fig. 1. Schematic figure representing (...) the cochlea. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

If you want to know everything about hybrids blue and fin whales across the world, from the late 1800 to the current knowledge using genetic markers, just read our review paper published in Ecology and Evolution: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/IP58QZ... @mfri.bsky.social

Today we start with the Bayesian portion of modeling in my class... xkcd.com/2545/

Smithsonian Fish Curator position announcement! Note the application dates of May 12 – June 2, 2026. Should be posted here tomorrow: trustcareers.si.edu#js-careers-j...

Estimates suggest that ocean-focused philanthropy accounts for well under 1% of global charitable giving, despite the #ocean’s role in climate regulation, food production, and trade. news.mongabay.com/2026/05/ocea...

When its moon hits your eye, Like a big manta nigh, That's remora! www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/s...

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

So remoras sometimes hitchhike inside a manta ray's bum. ' “It does not look like the manta ray likes it,” said Catherine Macdonald' www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/s...

Social media promotion improves job prospects, results of a Twitter experiment www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....