This February, MBARI geologists are using the research vessel Western Flyer and remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Tiburon to explore several submarine canyons and undersea landslides off the Southern California coast.

Scientists studying a whale carcass in Monterey Canyon recently announced the discovery of two new species of unique worms that feed on the bones of dead whales.

Wart-like bumps of stinging cells cover the feeding arms and bell of a newly described deep-sea jelly. The description was published by MBARI biologists in this month’s issue of the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom.

In photographs, it looks like a big red spaceship cruising the ocean depths. But it’s actually a new species of jelly that was discovered and described by scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. MBARI scientists published their research on this unusual animal in a recent online version of the journal Marine Biology.

In the late 1930s, California's sardines supported the biggest fishery in the western hemisphere, with more than half a million tons of fish caught each year. By the mid-1950s, the sardines had virtually disappeared. Although fishing pressure may have played a part in this process, new research published in the current issue of Science indicates that the sardines' demise was part of a 50-year cycle that affects not just California, but the entire Pacific Ocean.

In February of 2002, MBARI researchers Robert Vrijenhoek and Shana Goffredi discovered a recent whale fall while exploring the outer portion of the Monterey Canyon with a remotely operated vehicle.

Robert Vrijenhoek, an evolutionary geneticist at MBARI, has spent his career studying how an organism’s genes can shape its interactions with its surroundings, the evolution of its species as a whole, and—if the animal is endangered—its conservation. Thirteen years ago, he turned his attention to the exotic organisms that populate hydrothermal vents and cold seeps.

After four years of work and numerous test runs in the Monterey Bay, a team of MBARI engineers took the institute's first autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, for a trial cruise in the Arctic Ocean last fall. The group spent a month aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Healy, testing the AUV and its components under and along the Arctic ice sheet.

The Gulf of California sits at the northernmost end of an immense underwater mountain range called the East Pacific Rise, which extends across the Southeastern Pacific Ocean almost to Antarctica.

MBARI remotely operated vehicle Tiburon recorded observations of an unknown species of squid during dives off the coast of Oahu in May 2001.