It was on the third day of the OCEANOISE conference that things started to gel. The themes and loose ends of the previous days began convening on the session topics – which were “Riverine and Coastal,” “Management and Policy,” and “Seismic.” Like water, all of the so many different ideas and flavors began flowing together.
Zooplankton Mandala Day two of the OCEANOISE-2026 conference was every bit as rich as Day 1. The “sessions” were “Polar,” “Sensitivity and Pathology,” and “Behavior.” “Polar” largely examined the complex assumptions we make about things like masking, and the limits…
I “laid an egg” (intentionally) by stating that 40% of the ships at sea are transporting fossil fuel, so the most direct way of accomplishing the stated goal would be to use less fossil fuel.
One of the virtues of OCEANOISE is that while it includes many academics, it also includes people in ocean policy, marine conservation, and ocean industries. So a lot of work gets done – not just through the presentations, key notes, and poster sessions, but also through the long lunches and social events that orbit around the many discussions stimulated by the programming.
Pages from the Ocean’s Story Much of what we know about the ocean begins with a signal. A whale’s call moving through dark water. A life form thriving where sunlight never reaches. A legal protection that holds — because people…
Welcome back to Bright News from the Blue. In times of fracture—when change outpaces adaptation—our attention returns to systems that have long navigated complexity without collapse. Across deep time, the ocean endures through evolutionary intelligence, shaped by coexistence and continuity rather than extraction and…
I suspect this will really open up our understanding of the culture of fishes, much like video drones have really advanced our understanding of how whales and dolphins play with each other (substantiating my hypothesis that “play is the universal language.”)
By way of this semantic legerdemain they would open up the floodgates for extractive and construction industries to run roughshod over their operation areas without regulatory oversight or legal consequences.
We’ve arrived at an odd inflection point that has arisen now that National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is on the DOGE chopping block.
Needlefish at night – photo Umeed Mistry Our last newsletter was an overview of the phenomenology of the sound perception of fishes in the context of lab-produced auditory threshold testing – revealing that measuring the acoustical sensitivities of fishes in…