Media Coverage

When whales migrate from polar waters toward the equator, they help move nutrients to parts of the ocean that typically don’t have a lot to spare, said Daniel Costa, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As they travel, whales release urea as waste, a source of nitrogen that’s useful…

Co-author Pete Raimondi, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, stressed the importance of locating “areas where kelp can persist on its own.” Doing so, he added, could help identify where kelp restoration efforts have the best chance at success. 

Researchers have observed elephant seals for more than 40 years and had never seen a male rescue a pup like this before. “It’s completely out of the ordinary,” said Daniel Costa, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since this is the first time anyone has seen anything like this from elephant seals,…

The finding that Mimas has an ocean is intriguing—but that ocean’s inferred youth is what has sent ripples through the scientific community. “The implications give one pause because they’re very surprising,” says Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved with the new study.

From fish to crabs, Alaska’s kelp forests are home to a rich diversity of marine life. How these underwater forests are impacted by climate change, which are expected to make the ocean warmer and more acidic, is the focus of of a new study by Lauren Bell from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"They eat a lot. They eat about a quarter to a third of their body weight every single day," explained Tim Tinker, a research ecologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and one of the study's Canadian co-authors. "And so whatever they're eating, they're going to have big impacts."

CNN followed an international team of whale experts throughout 2023, from Ari Friedlaender’s lab at the University of California at Santa Cruz to humpback breeding grounds off the Pacific coast of Colombia, and their feeding grounds at the bottom of the world. While Friedlaender has been collecting whale data for more than 25 years, his…

“We are very much in a changed environment,” said Mike Beck, director of the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And we’re not going to be able to rebuild back in the same places and in the same ways that we did before. We’re going to have to think…

Piper Walker, 22, an astrophysics major at UC Santa Cruz, collaborates remotely with researchers at Lick Observatory. Walker, from her Santa Cruz bedroom, even helped identify her first quasar.

Dan Hirsch, former director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, spent decades advocating for the cleanup of the Santa Susana Field Lab, known as one of the most contaminated fields in the U.S. Along with other activists, Hirsch worried that weak toxic clean-up standards set by the California Department…

The King City Rustler covered the release of a new report developed by UC Santa Cruz's Institute for Social Transformation that shares indicators for tracking inclusive economic development. “Accurate data is important for grounding discussions about challenges and opportunities we face in the region,” said Chris Benner, faculty director of the institute.