all about oysters

I didn't know much about oysters until three weeks ago, but a member of the editorial team at Current Biology suggested to do a feature on the restoration of oyster reefs, so I educated myself and found out a lot of interesting things about the ecosystems we lost, but could in some cases restore quite easily, for instance by dumping discarded oyster shells in the sea.

The resulting feature is out now:

Returning shells to the sea

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 9, 4 May 2026, Pages R363--R365

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF.)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

Oyster reefs declined severely in the 19th and 20th centuries but are now being restored in many places. (Photo: The Tampa Bay Estuary Program/Unsplash.)

stopping the shark trade

A rare bit of good news for marine biodiversity arrived last December from the unlikely location of landlocked Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The 20th conference of the signatories to CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) significantly enhanced the protection of sharks and rays. Time for another feature about cartilaginous fish, or as I now like to call them: chondrichthyans:

Chondrichthyans at the crossroads

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 1, 5 January 2026, Pages R1-R3

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

An oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus, Critically Endangered) observed at Elphinstone Reef, Egypt. The species has now been added to the Appendix I of CITES, meaning that all trade is banned. (Photo: Polygonia c-album/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

nature in recovery

I needed cheering up after covering 30 years of climate failure in the penultimate feature of the year, so I followed a suggestion from the editorial team and chose species recovery as the topic for the last one. From the global moratorium on whaling to the European ban on neonics, if we just stop destroying nature, it actually helps the planet to heal, so we should really do more of that.

The feature is out now, completing my set of 24 features in this calendar year:

Roads to recovery

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 24, 15 December 2025, Pages R1165-R1167

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

Global populations of humpback whales have made a remarkable recovery since the whaling moratorium, offering opportunities for scientific studies as well as for recreational whale watching.
(Photo: NPS Photo/Kaitlin Thoresen.)

oceans acidified

I've covered ocean acidification many years ago, when it was beginning to emerge as a threat to corals and other calcifying sea organisms, and I've written about the planetary boundary concept (most recently, when chemical pollution was found to have exceeded the boundary).

Thus the new research suggesting that ocean adicification is also outside the planetary boundary (as the seventh of the nine parameters in the original planetary boundary paper) presented a good opportunity to visit both issues in one go.

My feature is out now:

Oceans acidified beyond boundary

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 15, 4 August 2025, Pages R739-R741

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

The cover image is not really related to my article, but to me it also symbolises the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere, because: "Bluebottles or man-o'-war, cnidarians in the genus Physalia, use a gas-filled float and sail to catch the wind and sail the ocean surface."

Cover of Current Biology, vol. 35, issue 15, 2025.

coastal squeeze

Sometimes reading a new word or phrase opens a whole new perspective on problems that we may already have known about in a less focused way. The words alone can suggest new connections, analytical methods, ways of describing things, a whole new world. This happened to me recently when I spotted the expression "coastal squeeze" in the headline of a press release. So I had to do a feature about how the coasts get squeezed, and why, and what to do about it.

My feature is out now:

Squeezed between land and sea

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 14, 21 July 2025, Pages R687-R689

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

Coastal ecosystems are at risk of being squeezed out between rising sea levels and encroaching infrastructure. (Photo: x70tjw/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

deep down

As an armchair explorer of life under extreme conditions, I always enjoy reading the accounts of people who dare to go to these dangerous places themselves. One of them is Susan Casey, whose book on deep sea dives is informed by her own participation in some of the exploration as well as by immersing herself in the weird and wonderful world of those people who are prepared to go to the bottom of the oceans. While I had covered the 20th century explorations in my books, it was enlightening to read about the recent multi-record breaking exploits of Victor Vescovo who visited the deepest points of all five oceans in solo dives (the Five Deeps project completed in 2019).

The book is called

The underworld: Journeys to the depths of the oceans
Susan Casey
Penguin 2024

and my review is out now:

Oceanic exploration

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 6, June 2025, Page 30

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

brown algae and blue carbon

There is another COP climate summit coming up this week, and to fend off the evil spirits of fossil fuel dependency I've written another climate related feature to appear just ahead of the event. So delegates have something to read when they get bored. This time it's about kelp both as a casualty and as a potential saviour in the climate catastrophe. I'm afraid the choice between these two paths rests very much with us (ie humanity). So judging on current performance in global affairs, not much hope there.

Anyhow, the feature is out now:

Brown algae and blue carbon

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 21, 4 November 2024, Pages R1059-R1061

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Kelps can capture and sequester carbon on a scale that is significant for climate mitigation. (Photo: freddy an/Pixabay.)

a whale of a tale

The rise of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) to become the dominating megafauna of the oceans happened remarkably quickly, within only 50 million years since some sort of hippopotamus-like species took the plunge to go fully aquatic. Their demise, which very nearly might have led to the extinction of a number of species, happened even more rapidly, within less than a century.

A couple of recent studies have enlightened us on the rise of whales, and ongoing news regarding whaling remind us of their entirely human-made fall, so I combined these two to the feature called:

The rise and fall of whales

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 19, 7 October 2024, Pages R877-R879

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Baleen whales like this humpback typically feed on krill. (Photo: Admitter/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).)

oceans on the brink

In the last 12,000 years, while humans were busy replacing the terrestrial ecosystems with agriculture and infrastructure, the oceans had a reprieve due to their inaccessibility. Only since the 19th century did the oceans begin to suffer the consequences of humanity's world domination, beginning with industrial scale whaling and not ending with climate change killing off coral reefs and the rush towards deep-sea mining endangering even the remoter parts of the sea floor.

This could make for a rather depressing story of a paradise lost, but with their book At every depths, Tessa Hill and Eric Simons manage to make it more interesting by emphasising the things we are only beginning to understand and also the traditional knowledge of coastal and seafaring populations that has been ignored by modern science and almost been forgotten. This angle, covering things like the clam gardens of Hawaii and the long-distance journeys of the polynesian voyagers who settled everything from New Zealand to Hawaii, makes for the most surprising and fascinating stories here.

More about all this in my essay review which is out now:

Exploration vs exploitation

Chemistry & Industry Volume 88, Issue 7-8, July/August 2024, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I'm happy to send a PDF on request.

menopausal mammals

I knew about orca females enjoying a post-reproductive lifespan (ie going through menopause), but in recent years the number of non-human mammalian species doing this has grown to five, and all of them are toothed whales, which is intriguing. So I took a new paper on the evolution of this trait in whales as an occasion to write about the menopause of whales an women. (I recently had Of elephants and men, so I'd better give poor old John Steinbeck a rest now.)

The feature is out now:

Of whales and women

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 7, 8 April 2024, Pages R261-R263

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) typically spend their lifetime in family groups led by a matriarch. (Photo: Courtesy of Dr Brandon Southall, NMFS/OPR (CC BY 2.0 Deed).)

cockles and mussels

... not only share the title of a folk song, they are also both bivalves, which is the topic of my latest feature. Considering that bivalves including mussels, clams, scallops, oysters and such like are omnipresent in cultural history, we still know surprisingly little about some important aspects of their biology. Accordingly, I have rounded up some things we are still learning from them, from underwater adhesion through to mirror optics.

The resulting feature is out now:

Learning from bivalves

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 24, 18. December 2023, Pages R1263-R1265

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

I wrote a few lines about Botticelli's very famous painting The birth of Venus but didn't include a picture of it in the article, so I'm showing it here instead. Image: Wikipedia

all about cephalopods

Today's issue of Current Biology is a special on cephalopods (octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and nautiluses) with lots of contributions on various aspects of these amazing species, with a focus on their neurobiology and behaviour. My contribution looks at the way we treat octopuses and other cephalopods and asks whether, given what we are now beginning to realise about their intelligence, it is still acceptable to farm them for slaughter, as a company in Spain is planning to do.

Octopus etiquette

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 20, 23. October 2023, Pages R987-R990

FREE access to full text and PDF download
(open archives).

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

Cover of the special issue. Image: broadclub cuttlefish (Sepia latimanus) (photo © Kimberly Tripp Randal; instagram @KimberlyLTripp).

our planet is in hot water

We have just experienced the warmest month since records began and reports of new weather extremes have become a regular feature of the news. Most of the extra heat we are inflicting on our planet doesn't end up in our cities and landscapes however. Most is absorbed by the oceans. There it will not only disrupt marine ecosystems, it also feeds more deadly storms and accelerates the loss of the ice caps and thus sea level rise. Even if we can still be grateful that the oceans save us from even worse heating, all of these changes will eventually come back to bite us.

Pegged to the ongoing marine heatwaves in the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, my feature looks at what we can learn from previous heatwaves and how the warmer oceans are going to affect life on Earth, both marine and terrestrial. The feature is out now:

Oceans feel the heat

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 16, 21. August 2023, Pages R829-R831

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

Kelp forests off the Californian coast and their residents, such as this kelp bass (Paralabrax clathratus), were affected by the extended marine heatwave nicknamed the North Pacific Blob in the years 2014 to 2016. (Photo: © Chris Honeyman.)

deep down

The February issue of C & I contains two deep-sea related items from me, namely my feature on the likely beginning of commercial seafloor mining:

Plumbing new depths

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 2, February 2023, Pages 18-21

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

... and my long essay review of the short and unusual memoir "My life in sea creatures" by Sabrina Imbler.

A diverse life

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 2, January 2023, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

Blackwells

save our sharks

Humans vs sharks is a topic I have covered a couple of times before, but it bears repeating that the murderous monster is actually us, and the innocent victim the sharks. Nearly half a century after Jaws, cartilagenous fish are one of the most endangered groups of vertebrates, so I've rounded up some recent conservation news on sharks and rays, complete with an almost apology from Steven Spielberg. The feature is out today:

Sharks face the jaws of extinction

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 3, 06. February 2023, Pages R85-R87

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

Bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas) in a Florida lagoon are exposed to toxins that are passed on through the food web. (Photo: amanderson2/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

PSA: I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

under the sea

Earlier this week it was reported that the International Seabed Authority (ISA) closed its meeting without reaching agreement on regulations on deep-sea mining. In the absence of such regulation, uncontrolled mining could start at the end of June next year. Ahead of this development I looked into deep-sea mining again and at one particular problem that I hadn't covered in my previous features on the subject (2015, 2014), namely noise pollution. The feature is out now:

Mining noise set to rock the oceans

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 15, 8 August 2022, Pages R807-R810

FREE access to full text and PDF download

NB: as the 2022 features move into the open archives, I will add them to this thread on Mastodon.

Polymetallic nodules found on the seafloor at depths between four and six kilometres are the target of planned seafloor mining operations. Formerly known as manganese nodules, they also contain cobalt, nickel, copper and rare earth metals. (Photo: James St. John/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

followers of fishes

I'm not a scuba-diving kind of person, but from my armchair studies of marine biology I recall seeing many photos of larger fish species apparently being followed by smaller ones. Never thought much about it, until I came across a publication referring to the followers of manta rays as hitchhikers. That sounded like an interesting feature topic, so I had a closer look and discovered all sorts of marvellous things I hadn't known. In addition to the obvious ecology implication, the social network of marine species if you will, there are also interesting bits of physics about the suckers allowing hitchhikers to hold onto fast moving transport vehicles.

All this in my latest feature which is out today (I love the title, even if I say so myself):

Friends, foes and followers of fishes

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 16, 23 August 2021, Pages R973-R976

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my twitter thread with all 2021 features that are now in the open archives.

Manta rays are often seen with other species attached to them or following them closely. The image shows a giant ocean manta ray with some passengers. (Photo: Simon Fraser University/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

marine marvels

It has almost become a January tradition (since Fantastic species and where to find them in 2017) that I start the year writing a light-hearted feature on the wonders of the natural world. So this years it's all about sponges:

Magical mysteries of marine sponges

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 2, 25 January 2021, Pages R51-R54

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Many sponges have hidden mineral skeletons, but glass sponges have their glass structures on display, like this Venus’ flower basket (Euplectella aspergillum) found in deep waters of the Pacific. (Photo: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2012 Expedition (CC BY 2.0).)

PS Last year's "fantastic" feature was about evolutionary lineages losing or gaining legs when they change their way of locomotion:

Step changes in evolution

It is now in the open archives.

Where you'll also find the first feature of last year, about life after the anthropocene.

shipping news

For some strange reasons I keep seeing adverts for Arctic cruises, which drive me up the wall. The fact that one can now steer a whopping big cruise ship through the Northwest Passage and around the top end of the Americas is of course a consequence of our tragic failure to do something about climate change. But instead of reading it as a sign and changing our ways, we send ships to the formerly pristine Arctic waters to pollute and melt them some more.

So, well, after seeing too many of those ads I didn't book a cruise, but I wrote a feature about the Arctic shipping craze, which is out now:


Arctic shipping threatens wildlife

Current Biology Volume 28, Issue 15, 06 August 2018, Pages R803–R805

FREE access to full text and PDF download



The ice-strengthened passenger expedition vessel Marina Tsvetaeva is one of many vessels that can now travel through the Northwest Passage in the Arctic summer. Marine biologists predict the increase in shipping traffic will impact on vulnerable species including iconic marine mammals. (Photo: Allen Powell by a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.)

the trouble with whales

Así nacen as baleas
by Anxos Sumai
Galaxia 2007

English edition, translated by Carys Evans-Corrales:
That’s how whales are born, Small Stations Press, Sept. 2017

This short novel presents a triptych, with the outer parts set in a recognisably 21st century present and narrated by the nameless female protagonist, and the core in 1984, around her third birthday, with a detached narrator referring to her as “a Nena”, the girl.

The girl is grown up now and has an obsessive interest in the whales that serve as the leitmotiv, which she has managed to channel into a budding career as a marine biologist. Just now, however, her family has summoned her away from her field research in Baja California, Mexico, to attend to the family business built by her mother, which has created considerable wealth, with considerable strings attached.

The apparent conflict between her ambition as a scientist and the family expectations for her to take care of the business appears to be her big problem initially, but the look back into her childhood reveals a whole cupboard full of (whale-sized) skeletons and stray emotional baggage. In comparison, the present human resources problem appears eminently solvable. After all, working out who should run a thriving chain of hardware stores, that’s not the worst imaginable problem a family can have.

In the present, our marine biologist struggles in her dealings with the various females from her bed-ridden, possibly malade imaginaire, mother through to the girlfriend she left behind with the whales of the Pacific. Men tend to be mysteriously absent, such as her sea-faring father who never returned since she was born, and her brother whose room is preserved as a shrine and who only appears in the central 1984 narrative, or barely visible, like her uncle.

There is poetry in the way objects, animals and plants play important roles when the human communications fail in the claustrophobic environment of the family home where most of the novel is set. In spite of all the trauma involved, it manages, as the whale mascot with its 400-kg heart suggests, to remain very warm-hearted and optimistic.