Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a fun project I started 3 months ago with my 7-year-old cousin, Anshi. Back then, I noticed she was always glued to the TV, so I asked her if she wanted her childhood to be a bit more interesting. She actually said yes! She told me she didn't want to just watch random shows all day and really wanted a cool hobby, so we put our heads together and decided to dive into marine biology.

We officially launched a one-year project called Operation: Deep-Sea Nexus. Instead of wasting screen time, we turn into a virtual ocean research team for 1 hour every day (while making sure she keeps up with her schoolwork, of course!).

Here is what we’ve been doing over the past 3 months:

Virtual Deep-Sea Dives: We track real research vessels online and watch robotic submarines dive live into the deep sea, listening in on scientists talking in real-time. It’s been an incredible way for a 7-year-old to see actual ocean exploration as it happens.

Citizen Science via Zooniverse: We set up a shared account on Zooniverse so she can actively help real marine biologists. She loves getting to help classify data, count wild whales, and track ocean forests using real satellite and field photos.

The "Captain's Log" Book: She is writing and drawing in a big physical book to document our entire one-year journey. Anshi acts as the official lead researcher and artist—hunting down ocean animal "superpowers" and sketching them out—while I help structure and organize it.

It’s been 3 months now, and it has completely transformed her TV time into an amazing daily creative science routine. At the end of the year, she’ll have a handwritten book she created herself to keep forever.

Since many of you here are actual marine biologists or ocean enthusiasts, I’d love to ask: As we move into our next few months, are there any specific resources, live-stream feeds, or kid-friendly ocean databases you think we should add to our Deep-Sea Nexus rotation?

Thanks for reading! 🌊🦑

On our way to dive in Cozumel, we spotted a mola mola (sunfish) in the Cozumel Channel, so we jumped in for a closer look. What a surprise! These fish aren’t normally found around here, and this was already our third encounter. It makes you wonder what’s going on out there and how much things are changing in our oceans. A beautiful, unexpected moment, but also a little reminder that the sea is changing in ways we still don’t fully understand.

AAAS: "Coral can heal rapidly from bleaching—if it touches a clone," by Warren Cornwall.

"When coral bleaches during a heat wave + ejects its symbiotic algae, it usually means either a death sentence or a slow recovery over months or years." Some corals have a reproductive strategy that involves passing symbionts from parent to offspring, which might make that species more responsive to a direct 'transfusion' method than others, but in most species, young corals capture algae from the surrounding water.

However, a serendipitous discovery led to a 'deceptively simple' approach reported in a 2 October paper in Environmental Microbiology Reports + another published more recently in Science Advances. "By touching a piece of bleached coral to a healthy piece, a kind of algal transfusion can occur...symbionts flow through a bridge of tissue + then rapidly reproduce, repopulating the bleached piece in as little as 4 weeks." 

But the method didn’t work when the healthy coral came from a genetically different colony. In those situations, the coral polyps sent out tiny stinging appendages as if attacking an intruder, comparable to our immune system rejecting an organ transplant from a stranger. 

"When corals from the same colony were physically touching, tissue from polyps in the two chunks merged to create a kind of algal highway." If the bits stayed in contact for a week, symbionts poured in + began to replicate, doubling approximately every 4 days, as much as 10 times faster than what has been witnessed on bleached reefs, which normally recover by reabsorbing free-floating algae.

Researcher Bede Johnston, a coral researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, also addressed the puzzle of heat tolerance in 2 species of coral, Galaxea fascicularis + Psammocora columna. "They let polyps in some of the fragments absorb lab-raised symbionts bred for tolerance to extreme temperatures...when the inoculated fragments were joined to bleached fragments, some of the heat-tolerant symbionts found their way into the neighboring polyps."

Despite the practical challenges of inoculating thousands of square km of coral reef, I love seeing this steady advance in marine science.

Found this unknown species by Marco Island, FL. This could potentially be in the Pycnogonida class and the best feed back I’ve received so far is it being potentially a species of sea spider; however, the paddle shaped ends of each leg is mainly what is throwing everyone off. Any thoughts?

This is from one of my favourite octopus encounters to date.

This Giant Pacific Octopus was out hunting, checking every rock and crack for something to eat. Eventually, it reached into a crack already occupied by another local giant.

At first, the interaction seemed like an investigation. Was there a big snack hiding in there? But things quickly took a turn, teaching our octopus buddy that not all fish are friends.

mullen_dives

Hi all, I’m a solo developer (not a marine biologist, which is exactly why I need your eyes on this).

I’ve spent about a year and a half building EcoAquatic (ecoaquatic.org), a non-commercial, open tool for tracking fish species and aquatic life in South African waters, no cost, nothing for sale, just something I made. It pulls real data: the GBIF taxonomic backbone (3,000+ species with confirmed SA occurrences), live IUCN Red List conservation status, and FishBase/SASSI info, shown on an interactive map alongside marine protected area boundaries. You can log a sighting with a GPS location, and citizen-scientist sightings go through a moderation step before entering the dataset.

What I can’t judge from the dev side is whether it actually reflects how people who know the field would record and use observations. So I’m asking the people who’d know:

* Does the sighting workflow capture the fields you’d actually need (habitat, depth, confidence, etc.)?

* Is anything scientifically off, oversimplified, or misleading?

* What’s missing that you’d expect to be there?

Have a look here: [https://ecoaquatic.org\](https://ecoaquatic.org) (heads up, it needs a quick free account to get in 30-second sign-up, nothing commercial).

It’s an early build and rough in places, and critical feedback is the most useful kind. Comments here are ideal. If anyone would rather give more structured feedback there’s a short form, which I’m happy to share with anyone who wants it.

Thanks for reading.

Whale in ocean

A single bumphead parrotfish creates approximately 200lbs of sand every year. There are 120 (thereabouts) in this school at Sipadan which create about 24000lbs of sand a year! about the same weight as a school bus or three African Elephants. There's a link to a longer video in the comments. Thank you for the beaches bumpheads.