At the Friday Harbor Laboratories, recovery is afoot. Scientists at this University of Washington facility in the San Juan Islands are working to help sunflower stars — a type of sea star — grow and thrive once again after their populations along the West Coast were devastated by a mysterious disease. “They’re gone in a lot of places, and a lot of what we’re doing here is testing out ideas for reintroduction,” said Jason Hodin, a researcher at the lab.
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A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has discovered a major cause for a drop in nighttime pollinator activity — and people are largely to blame. Nighttime pollution creates a chain of chemical reactions that degrades scent cues, leaving flowers undetectable by smell.
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Friday Harbor Laboratories’ sunflower sea star rearing lab recently was featured on the NBC show “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild.” It's part of an episode on the plight of the Pacific Ocean’s kelp forests — and what’s being done to save them.
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The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a massive geologic fault that last ruptured in January 1700. But while this fault has stayed quiet for centuries, it regularly generates small tremors that accompany gradual, nondisruptive movement along the fault. The tiny tremor events and slow slippage are known collectively as “episodic tremor and slip.” Seismic waves associated with these tremor events are recorded and tracked by the UW’s Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
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Though the El Niño period we’re in is natural and relatively predictable, its impacts on the global environment and economy have been significant — from sweltering heat in Australia to deep freezes across the southern U.S. El Niño may be giving us a glimpse of what’s to come if climate change is not soon curtailed.
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