Specimen No. 4 is a small, translucent jellyfish collected near Keyport on the Olympic Peninsula. Not much else is known about the little marine animal, stored in a glass jar labeled with cursive handwriting, other than the date it was collected: July 30, 1899.
“I thought it was so gorgeous,” says Jessica Tir (’23 MS Biol.) who recently retrieved the long-lost specimen, part of an old marine collection.
Bits and pieces, scattered across Heald, Eastlick, and Abelson halls, were found during preparations for the upcoming demolition of Heald Hall, slated for tear-down during the 2025-2027 biennium. The jellyfish was in the Eastlick batch.
The headlines paint a dire picture: By the 2030s, global warming could completely melt Arctic sea ice, imperiling the 19 known polar bear populations that range across the United States, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and Norway.
Could, as some fear, the trend spell extinction for Ursus martimus?
For two of the country’s premiere polar bear researchers—wildlife biologists KARYN RODE ’99 MS, ’05 PhD, and DAVID C. DOUGLAS ’86 MS, both of whom work for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center—the answer is a decided “No.”
But neither is the future rosy for the animals, according to Douglas, who uses satellite tracking to monitor their … » More …
Cori Kane calls it “underwater skydiving.” She’ll be out in the middle of the North Pacific, more than 1,000 miles from Honolulu and most anything else that might be called civilization. Flopping out of a perfectly good boat, she will rocket down nearly 300 feet in just a few minutes, encountering a strange and largely unexplored layer of ocean that’s less familiar to science than the deep sea. It’s the ecosystem of the mesophotic reefs, which lie at a depth often called the “Twilight Zone.”
“When you jump in, it’s like you’re transported to this other world,” says Kane. “There are fish everywhere. There are … » More …
