News
23 April 2015
For the most part, evolution seems a lot like a lottery of mutations. The winners get to survive, reproduce, and eventually evolve. The losers disappear from all but the fossil record. Now new research has revealed that a small group of microbes and viruses are apparently cheating the system,...
20 April 2015
Five years ago today, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, scientists have continued to study the effects of the largest environmental disaster in the history of the petroleum industry.
UC Santa Barbara research oceanographer Uta Passow has been...
15 April 2015
The common hippopotamus can spend up to 16 hours a day immersed in rivers and lakes. Lumbering out of the water at night, these herbivores graze on tropical grasses and consume 80 to 100 pounds in one meal.
By daybreak, having eaten their fill, they return to their daytime resting area to rest,...
6 April 2015
With one of the highest-quality climate and environmental archives in the world’s oceans, the Santa Barbara Basin presents the ideal natural laboratory for researchers studying the global climate record on a variety of time scales, from last year to a million years ago. That’s according to UC Santa...
23 March 2015
Many strange creatures live in the deep sea, but few are odder than archaea, primitive single-celled bacteria-like microorganisms. Archaea go to great lengths — eating methane or breathing sulfur or metal instead of oxygen — to thrive in the most extreme environments on the planet.
Recently, while...
10 March 2015
The relationship between human disease and environmental management has been the subject of extensive research, especially given the recent outbreaks of Ebola, SARS and other zoonotic infectious diseases that transmit from animals to humans.
The fieldwork of UC Santa Barbara community ecologist...
26 February 2015
UC Santa Barbara’s Douglas McCauley has been selected to receive a 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship. Awarded annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships honor early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next...
25 February 2015
As ocean acidification and warming continue to increase due to climate change, how will California fisheries respond? UC Santa Barbara’s Gretchen Hofmann is looking to answer that question. She is one of seven recipients of a California Sea Grant Core Award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric...
2 February 2015
The warm ocean temperatures that brought a green sea turtle to San Francisco in September and other southern species north of their usual ranges on the Pacific Coast have triggered a population explosion of a bright pink, inch-long sea slug in tide pools along the central and northern California...
29 January 2015
Craig Carlson Receives 2015 Hutchinson Award
Craig Carlson, chair of UC Santa Barbara's Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology (EEMB), has received the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). This is the second major...