Tag: ocean

Rusty Hudson grew up on the salt-laden docks of Daytona Beach, Florida. As a third-generation fisherman, he naturally took to the industry. When he was just 9 years old, Hudson started his first job as a bait boy aboard the Mako, a charter boat owned by his grandfather, Captain Jake Stone. By the late 1960s, […]

Since 2000, I’ve been an avid scuba diver in Southern California. When the Yukon, a 366 ft. long Canadian warship, sunk off the coast of San Diego in July of 2000, it became an artificial reef for divers to explore, piquing my interest in and igniting a lifelong passion for diving. In late 2006, my […]

Kristin Butler dedicates her Scuba Series in remembrance of her beloved mother, Marilyn Butler, who passed along to Kristin a deep love for science and nature along with a pair of pink scuba diving fins. Each year, the Long Beach Scuba Show brings together divers from around the world for seminars and exhibits on all […]

We tend to think of famine in human terms. But animal populations also experience wide-spread hunger, and the hundreds of emaciated young seals and sea lions stranded on California beaches in the past year were a poignant example. Fortunately, a large team of citizen scientists at The Marine Mammal Center—an animal hospital and research institute […]

  This is a guest post by Michael Bear Citizen Science Project Director at Ocean Sanctuaries.  In this post, he describes a citizen science led effort to catalog marine life living in and around the HMCS Yukon. In 2000, the Yukon was transformed into an artificial reef as part of San Diego’s  marine conservation effort.   In 2000, […]

This Saturday June 21st, collect samples from bodies of water to catalog the ocean’s microbial biodiversity. Want more marine-themed citizen science projects? We’ve got you covered!   This Saturday June 21st, citizen scientists will be able to take part in MyOSD (official site) the citizen science component to this year’s Ocean Sampling Day (OSD). The event is […]

Calling all water monitoring groups! It is time for the annual Secchi Dip-In. From now until July 22, volunteer and professional water monitoring groups are being asked to take transparency measurements in a local body of water. A secchi disk is a common tool for measuring water turbidity, or water cloudiness. Turbidity is caused by […]

On June 1, 2011 at 11:51 PM, a group of people assembled on the beach in Northpoint, New York. There was no moon shining that night, not even a sliver. The people carried flashlights or wore headlamps. They held clipboards and paper.

Their mission: to report where horseshoe crabs were spotted along the beach.

This was just one of several places along New York’s shoreline where people collect data about horseshoe crabs. Volunteers also amassed on dark beaches in Stony Brook, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Westhampton. In all, volunteers monitored the comings and goings of horseshoe crabs at ten New York beaches that night.

They are a part of the New York Horseshoe Crab Monitoring Network, a group of citizen scientists who are documenting where horseshoe crabs emerge from the water to lay eggs along beaches in New York State. On specific dates through the spring and early summer, participants collect data about the number of horseshoe crabs and identify their size and sex. They attach tags to the horseshoe crabs bulky exoskeleton and look for tags from prior years.

Da-dum … da-dum … Don’t look now, but there are  researchers hoping you’ll hop in shark-infested waters in the name of science! Members of ECOCEAN want your help photographing whale sharks on your next ocean outing. Your pictures will be uploaded to the ECOCEAN Whale Shark Photo-identification Library, a photographic database of whale shark (Rhincodon […]

Jellyfish, in addition to being one of many ocean creatures that terrify me, are an important part of the underwater ecosystem. However, several reports have indicated an unusually high increase in Jellyfish populations, and scientists are in need of help to understand why. Enter JellyWatch, a new citizen science project that aims to create a database of jellyfish […]