Fall is in full swing, and we’re eager to share some exciting new projects and productions!

This month, we released our second episode of Navigating STEM—a series that highlights MBARI staff, their path to a career in science, technology, engineering, and math, and their diverse roles that go far beyond the traditional scientist in a lab coat. 

In a similar vein, MBARI researchers worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to share acoustic data recorded by our underwater microphone deep beneath Monterey Bay. Pacific Ocean Sound Recordings on the AWS cloud brings these data to researchers around the world. Better information sharing has the power to accelerate discoveries and improve the world around us.

We’re also getting into the Halloween spirit with our most recent Weird and Wonderful video featuring the mystifying midwater amphipod Phronima. And be sure to check out our collection of Halloween videos on YouTube to learn more about some of the most bizarre deep-sea creatures our researchers have observed in the dark ocean depths.

Brian Kieft explains how as a software engineer at MBARI, he does a wide variety of work from coding to field deployments and driving boats—and how building radio kits and exploring the outdoors prepared him for an ocean career. Careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) include diverse roles that go far beyond the traditional view of a scientist. This episode continues our video series called Navigating STEM, where we’re sharing how our staff navigated the waves on the way to a career at MBARI—and where they’re going from here. There are hundreds of paths to an ocean STEM career, and some of them may surprise you! Watch here.

Many animals in the midwater—the vast expanse of water between the surface and the deep seafloor—are always on the move. Unlike its bottom-dwelling kin, the gossamer worm (Tomopteris sp.) lives in constant motion. This ethereal worm is a graceful swimmer that “dances” through the midwater with the rhythmic paddling of its swimming legs. A new study published in Integrative and Comparative Biology this summer from MBARI researchers Joost Daniels and Kakani Katija, with collaborators Karen Osborn and her team at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, has revealed the swimming behavior of gossamer worms in fine detail. Dive in.  

An underwater microphone located in the depths of Monterey Bay has recorded tens of thousands of hours of sound. That extensive acoustic archive has been invaluable to MBARI researchers and collaborators. This unique dataset has provided valuable insight into the ocean soundscape for the past six years—from the behaviors of whales to the impacts of human activities on marine life. Now, Pacific Ocean Sound Recordings makes more than 140 terabytes of acoustic data accessible to researchers around the world via the Registry of Open Data on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Read more.