The North Atlantic right whale population increased slightly in 2024 from the previous year, but marine scientists warn that federal protections are crucial to the recovery of the critically endangered species.

The 2024 population is estimated at 384 individual whales, a 2.1% increase over the 2023 estimate, and a continued slow, upward trend in growth over the last four years, according to the latest numbers released by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium earlier this week.

The modest increase follows a year in which researchers documented five right whale deaths, 16 entanglements, and eight vessel strikes, according to the consortium.

So far this year, no deaths have been logged. Scientists have documented one whale that has been injured in 2025 from being entangled in fishing gear, and one whale injured in a vessel strike.

“The slight increase in the population estimate, coupled with no detected mortalities and fewer detected injuries than in the last several years, leaves us cautiously optimistic about the future of North Atlantic right whales,” North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium Chair Heather Pettis said in a release Tuesday announcing the latest population estimate. “With small population increases year to year, we still need strong protective measures for continued growth. We don’t want to take our foot off the gas when it comes to management and conservation efforts.”

Though this year has thus far proved to be a better year for right whales, researchers were hoping for more than the 11 calves born in 2025.

Scientists note that of those, four were born to first-time mothers.

“In recent years, right whales have been delaying giving birth to their first calf until they are older,” Philip Hamilton, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, said in the release. “It is encouraging to see four of these older females join the reproductive pool this year. The future of the species rests on their broad backs.”

Scientists from the aquarium’s center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, work together to calculate annual population estimates.

Vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear remain the leading causes of death and serious injury to North Atlantic right whales.

Last December, a 3-year-old male spotted about 40 miles off the North Carolina coast was among at least three right whales observed to be entangled in fishing gear that month.

The juvenile male (Catalog No. 5132) was “observed with rope wrapped around its head and mouth, with lines attached to two marked buoys and a single line was trailing the animal by a distance of about three body lengths,” according to information provided by the Canadian government.

That whale, still entangled, migrated to waters hundreds of miles north of Canada’s East Coast, according to an update shared at the consortium meeting.

The yearly updated population estimate is revealed in coordination with the consortium’s annual meeting, which was held through Thursday in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The consortium was started in 1986 and includes research and conservation organizations, shipping and fishing industries, technical experts, U.S. and Canadian government agencies, and state and provincial authorities.

Nora Ives, a marine scientist with Oceana, took a quick break from the meeting Thursday to speak with Coastal Review by telephone.

“These protected species have huge ecosystem benefits to all of us on the planet,” she said. “Large coastal whales like the North Atlantic right whale fertilize our oceans. They kick off the oxygen cycle of the planet. We can all benefit from their recovery.”

Right whales migrate seasonally, spending their spring, summers in waters off New England and further north into Canadian waters to feed and mate.

In the fall, the whales travel south, sometimes more than 1,000 miles, to their calving grounds off shore from the Carolinas to northeastern Florida.

The modest increase in the 2024 population estimate, “proves how resilient these whales are and that they can recover if we let them,” Ives said.

“But we cannot do that without a fully staffed and funded NOAA and a strong Marine Mammal Protection Act, which is the underpinning of all this important work to recover our large coastal whale, the North Atlantic right whale.”

The Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted in 1972, requires the federal government to safeguard the life and well-being of all marine mammals within U.S. jurisdiction.

President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget includes massive layoffs at NOAA, slashing the administration’s Fisheries division by up to a third of the workforce that oversee the protections of marine mammals, and reduces funding for conservation of marine mammals and endangered species.

“That would be devastating for these programs,” Ives said.

Notably missing from this year’s meeting, Ives said, are NOAA employees, absent because of what is now the second-longest government shutdown in United States history.

“We have colleagues from the federal government who are not able to join us at this annual meeting to discuss the latest research and work toward solutions for the recovery of the North Atlantic right whale,” she said. “Our federal colleagues are doing their best to share their research remotely with prerecorded talks.”

Scientists are calling for the implementation of additional measures that would aid in the recovery of the right whale population, including the use of ropeless or on-demand fishing gear in crab fishing to reduce whale entanglements.

“That would be implemented only in places where whales are detected or expected, so really allowing for this dynamic and adaptive management that can both protect American livelihoods and our American fisheries while also protecting our coastal large whale as they migrate up and down the East Coast,” Ives said.

Scientists support existing federal rules that mandate vessels 65 feet or longer travel at 10 knots or less through designated North Atlantic right whale seasonal management areas in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and southeast.

Earlier this year, NOAA announced its withdrawal of proposed similar speed limits for vessels under 65 feet in length those management areas, though it “encourages” those vessels to slow to 10 knots or less.

“Another year of modest population growth is certainly better than a year of sharp decline, and we should celebrate that while also keeping our eyes on the work ahead,” Jane Davenport, a senior attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement. “We need new initiatives to reduce vessel strike and entanglement risk in the U.S. and Canada, and the current legislative attacks on the Marine Mammal Protect Act must end, or this iconic species’ extinction is all but guaranteed.”

A noted wildlife biologist and zoologist involved in researching North Atlantic right whales and credited for his work to conserve manatees, sea turtles and other endangered species has died.

The Clearwater Marine Aquarium announced Tuesday that Dr. James “Buddy” Powell, chief zoological officer at the aquarium and executive director of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, or CMARI, died Saturday, July 19, after a brief illness.

Powell, along with other CMARI scientists, collected more than 20 years of aerial survey data on North Atlantic right whales, an endangered species with only 360 individuals remaining, according to the announcement. Working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, CMARI’s data from wintertime, daily flights from North Carolina to Florida, the only known calving areas for this species, led to ship speed reduction, expanded habitat protection and halted whale mortality in the Southeast, the organization said.

For more than 50 years, Powell approached conservation issues using science and education and resulted in coastal protected areas in Florida, West Africa, Belize and Cuba.

“Buddy’s passion for marine research and his unwavering dedication made a lasting impact — not only on our mission, but on all of us who had the privilege of knowing him,” said Clearwater Marine Aquarium CEO Joe Handy. “Buddy was an integral part of our CMA and CMARI family. His intelligence, warmth and leadership will be deeply missed.”

For 20 years, CMARI researchers and staff were involved in rescuing and releasing manatees, along with other organizations in the Manatee Rescue and Rehabilitation Partnership. Powell long dreamed of making the Clearwater Marine Aquarium a home for manatees and spent years chasing that dream, navigating government funding and rallying private donors.

The CMA in August opened its Manatee Rehabilitation Center and welcomes manatees in need of care.

A native of Crystal River, Florida, Powell’s work began in the 1970s with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as a biologist and manatee specialist. In 1986, he moved to West Africa where he studied manatees and forest elephants for the Wildlife Conservation Society. He moved to Belize in the 1990s to manage WCS’s Glover’s Reef Marine Research Station.

Upon his return to Florida, Powell administered the state’s research program on marine mammals and sea turtles for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. In 2001, he became a vice president at Wildlife Trust where he oversaw the aquatic and national divisions. Powell also conducted research with North Atlantic right whales and the recently discovered Rice’s whales.

In 2008, Powell co-founded the Sea to Shore Alliance, a research, education and conservation organization, to improve the health and productivity of coastal environments for the endangered species and human livelihoods that depend on them. In 2019, Powell joined CMA as vice president of research and conservation when Sea to Shore Alliance merged with Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Powell remained executive director of Sea to Shore Alliance doing business as CMARI after the merger.

Powell was pivotal in creating the Right Whale Festival in Fernandina Beach, Florida, during the past 17 years. Co-hosted by Clearwater Marine Aquarium and NOAA Fisheries, the festival is held each November to celebrate the arrival of North Atlantic right whales as they migrate to the waters around Amelia Island from November through April. Each year, the event educates more than 25,000 people about these critically endangered whales and the efforts to protect them.

He was recently involved in research on Rice’s whales, a new species found in the Gulf of Mexico. He also helped begin the CMA Speaker Series in 2023, bringing Dr. Sylvia Earle, world-renowned oceanographer, to CMA in May.

Powell is survived by his wife, Maureen, and daughter, Morgan “Catherine.”

Powell received his bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from the University of Florida, his Master’s in marine affairs from the University of Washington, and his doctorate in zoology from the University of Cambridge in England.

He was the recipient of the prestigious Pew Award in Marine Conservation in 2000, has been featured on “Champions of the Wild” and National Geographic’s “Wild Chronicles” documentaries, and has been honored with multiple awards and certificates. Powell has authored two books, numerous scientific publications and popular articles.

With eyes roughly the size of softballs, it may stand to reason that one of the largest mammals on Earth should have exceptionally sharp vision.

Humpback whales have some of the biggest eyes of any animal on the planet, or the oceans in which they migrate thousands upon thousands of miles during their lives.

But their journeys through open seas are done with limited vision, according to a newly published study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Duke University.

These mammoth creatures have to be very close to an object in order to see it in fine detail, which explains why they are particularly vulnerable to getting tangled up in fishing gear.

“Humans have exceptionally high spatial resolution of vision by comparison to most animals,” said Dr. Lori Schweikert, an assistant professor of biology and marine biology at UNCW. “But what is surprising is the fact that whales have the structure of the eye to support even better vision, but they don’t have that.”

Using a specimen of a humpback whale eye archived more than a decade ago at UNCW’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program, researchers were able to measure a humpback whale’s vision at 3.95 cycles per degree, or CPD.

CPD measures the number of black-and-white line pairs that appear within 1 degree of space.

To grasp this measurement of sight, Schweikert gave this example: hold one arm straight out and put your thumb straight up. The width to your thumb is about 1 degree of your visual space. Human eyes can resolve about up to about 60 cycles per degree.

Most animals have low spatial resolution of vision. In animals, the larger the eye, the greater their spatial vision. But for humpback whales, “they are just way off the line,” Schweikert said. “Way off.”

What researchers found when they cut into the eye is that humpbacks have unusually thickened eye walls. Nearly half of the depth of the whale’s eye was filled with its own wall, shortening the distance from the center of the lens of the eye to the retina.

That distance is called focal length.

“The longer the focal length, the sharper the vision that’s possible,” Schweikert said.

Researchers also found that the cell density in humpback whale eye retina was exceptionally low. These cells send visual information to the brain.

Based on their calculation of 3.95 CPD, researchers then modeled how humpback whales might visually perceive things in their natural environment.

The reality is, their vision, or lack thereof, is suited to their environment.

Humpbacks prey on huge bait balls of fish or krill that silhouette against an open light field, or light that is projected directly into a space without being redirected. They have few predators – mainly orcas, or killer whales, false killer whales, and large sharks, particularly great whites. And, when a humpback whale searches for a mate, it can see a potential love match well enough from a distance.

So, humpbacks did not need to evolve with the ability to see fine-scale things, Schweikert said.

Where a humpback whales’ sight gets it into trouble, she said, is when it comes across a structure in the ocean that has more visual fine-scale information, such as a net or gillnet. One of the leading causes of humpback whale deaths is entanglement in fishing gear.

“In our modeling of how they might be able to resolve this detail in the environment is that, at roughly three to four body lengths away would be where they might be able to start resolving the structure of the net. Based on swimming speed, that only leaves them a few seconds to get out of the way,” Schweikert said.

This helps explain why humpback whales get entangled as frequently as they do.

Humpback whales live in every ocean on the planet. They have one of the longest migrations, with some populations swimming up to 5,000 miles, of any mammal on the planet.

In additional to entanglements, vessel strikes are also a leading cause of humpback whale deaths.

To figure out ways to try and mitigate such human impacts to humpback whale, more studies will need to occur.

“I think that understanding how animals will interact with things in their environment is certainly more complicated that any one study or even a mix of studies that would take in all their sensory abilities to detect what’s in their environment,” Schweikert said. “It’s one thing to know if an animal can see it, but it’s totally another thing to know how they will respond. It’s quite possible that they can see some of the threats in their environment, but behaviorally, they are just not making the decision early enough to move out of the way.”

This study could be considered in the larger puzzle of those types of considerations, she said.

Deep-diving whales that rely on sound rather than vision to hunt in the ocean’s darkest depths are confusing plastic marine debris for prey, new findings suggest.

For the study, “Acoustic signature of plastic marine debris mimics the prey items of deep-diving cetaceans,” researchers from Duke University as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, compared the way sound bounces off plastic that is floating underwater to that of typical whale prey, in this case, squid and squid beaks.

It is widely assumed that seals and toothed whales mistake plastic for food because of appearance, particularly plastic bags and films that look like squid and jellyfish, according to the study, but that doesn’t explain why deep-diving species like sperm whales and beaked whales that use echolocation are ingesting plastic. To echolocate, the whale emits sounds that reflect off an object. The whale then interprets the object’s target strength, or measurement of the intensity of the sound’s echo.

“Assuming these animals are ingesting plastic at depth and not at/near the surface, they are consuming plastic without visually identifying it. Deep-diving toothed whales may therefore be misinterpreting acoustic cues when echolocating; presumably plastic’s acoustic signature resembles that of primary prey items, driving plastic consumption,” the study states.

Researchers for the new study found that 100% of the plastics they tested that are typically found in stomachs of stranded whales — plastic bags, rope and bottles — have either similar or stronger acoustic target strengths, which is how strong a sound wave is reflected off an object, compared to that of squid.

The findings support the study’s hypothesis that deep-diving whales are consuming plastic because of “a misperception of acoustic signals.”

Duke University doctoral candidate Greg Merrill Jr. led the peer-reviewed study published a few weeks ago in Science Direct.

From California, Merrill has been at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort for the past few years to examine the impacts of microplastics and large plastic marine debris on whales.

Merrill graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a bachelor’s in biological science in 2014. He then pursued his master’s at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he worked with northern fur seals, trying to understand how climate change was impacting their breeding success. That experience planted the seed for this study.

While he was working on his master’s, Merrill said he spent many months on the remote Pribilof Islands of Alaska in the middle of the Bering Sea where the threatened northern fur seal breeds.

“All too common a sight was a seal entangled in plastic debris, such as packing bands and discarded fishing net. The animals often died as a result. This motivated me to study the impacts of plastic pollution on other marine mammals like the deep-diving sperm whales and beaked whales off the North Carolina coast,” he said.

Merrill explained that these animals, in particular, hunt especially deep in the ocean where there is no light to see. Instead, they rely on echolocation, or biosonar.

“In other words, they use sound waves to locate and identify food. Because we know from autopsies of stranded whales that they are eating plastic, it occurred to me that plastic may be causing whales to misinterpret their echolocation signals. So, we wanted to see if that was true,” Merrill explained.

He said in simple terms, the study was to see if plastic in the water confused echolocating whales into believing it was instead food.

“We collected plastic trash from the beach and then blasted those objects and whale prey with various sound waves at sea using an instrumented called an echosounder mounted to the bottom of our research vessel. The plastic objects were strung up on monofilament fishing line and held underneath the instrument while the measurements were recorded,” he said.

An echosounder is a device that uses sound waves to measure the water depth or where objects are in the water. The hull-mounted echosounder tested three different sounds at the same frequencies of whale clicks.

“Based on the measurements we recorded, plastic has similar or stronger echoes than the whale prey items we tested. The way an object reflects sound depends on what it’s made of,” Merrill explained, for example what the plastic is made of or (its) thickness. “Plastic unfortunately ‘sounds’ the same as whale food.”

The study notes that plastic pollution in the oceans is pervasive and increasing with more than 1,200 marine species known to ingest plastic debris. For marine mammals, there are hundreds of examples of whales, seals, sea lions and manatees “consuming plastic, ingestion of which constitutes a major threat to individual health,” the study states. “Consequences of macroplastic ingestion include abrasion and perforation of tissues, infection, reduced reproduction and growth, suffocation, clogging the baleen filter false satiation, occlusion of the gastrointestinal tract, starvation, and ultimately death.”

The finding underscores just how complex the plastic pollution issue is, Merrill said, adding the most common plastics found in whale stomachs are plastic bags, single-use packaging, and fishing gear such as nets, ropes, and lines.

“I’m not sure many people would have ever imagined that the way something sounds could have such big consequences as affecting large whales who hunt so very far away from human activities. The scale of the plastic pollution problem is enormous, a global issue that requires policy action at the level of local all the way to international governments. And it is having so many impacts on our planet and on human health, Merrill said.

He encourages “anyone who cares about this issue” to contact their elected officials and let them know you want to see action on this front.

Michael Cove, a conservation ecologist and mammologist, told Coastal Review that “this research was fascinating and provides some much-needed insights into how and why marine mammals might intentionally ingest plastic waste that could severely impact them and ultimately lead to their deaths.”

The research curator for the mammalogy at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, Cove explained that so much of our perception of food and foraging is based on visual cues, because humans use their eyes to find food, “and that has been shown in research with seabirds and sea turtles, but many deep-sea-diving marine mammals are going off of sound through echolocation and not sight.”

Studies like Merrill’s show that there’s still a lot to learn about how some of the sperm and beaked whales forage. In many cases, there’s still much to understand about what they forage because they are feeding at such great depths, Cove explained. He has often assumed that most plastic consumption is incidental or intentional based on visual cues, citing Mylar balloons looking like squid as an example.

But this study, “points to intentional consumption of plastics based on their sound, which spells trouble for deep sea diving whales since the accumulation of plastic in our oceans continues to increase and it persists for thousands of years.”

Cove said that this work highlights and renews that calls to end balloon releases, especially in coastal areas, should be revisited and policies to reduce plastics entering marine food webs will be critical to maintaining maintain diverse marine mammal communities into the future.

“After all, marine mammals along with sharks and large fishes make up the top of the food chain, which largely regulate the lower trophic levels (links in the chain) and the loss of any species and that top-down regulation can have cascading effects throughout the community that could even influence fisheries and ecosystem health processes well beyond the deep ocean,” he said.

Coastal Review will not publish Monday in observance of Veterans Day.

WILMINGTON – The race is on to revive the ocean’s growingly imperiled coral reefs.

Damage and decay caused by everything from warming sea temperatures to pollution to overfishing to disease are erasing these underwater architectural structures crucial to other marine life and coastal shorelines.

University of North Carolina Wilmington researchers recently received grants totaling about $2 million that will allow them to further investigate potential ways of protecting coral against disease and climate change.

The funding, which comes from $18 million in global grants doled out to fast-track coral conservation and restoration research, also paves the way for a historian at the university to examine ethical questions about potential implications of releasing coral genetically modified to resist climate change into the wild.

Super coral?

In 2020, UNCW Associate Professor Nicole Fogarty and her team of researchers at the university’s Center for Marine Science became the first to spawn two species of endangered Caribbean coral in a laboratory.

In the three years since, the lab’s success at spawning baby coral prompted the move to a larger space — actually a separate building dedicated entirely to coral reproduction.

About a half-million larvae have been spawned with this year yielding the highest numbers yet. The lab has shipped roughly a quarter-million of those larvae to research partners in Florida and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for further experimentation.

“We can actually test the various stressors that corals are experiencing, especially the environmental stressors so namely things like increased temperature, decreased pH or ocean acidifications, changes in light intensity and light spectrum, and dissolved oxygen to mimic what’s occurring,” in their natural environment, Fogarty said.

She is part of a research collaborative that received a nearly $1.5 million, three-year grant and includes Jake Warner, a developmental geneticist and assistant professor, and Nathan Crowe, a science historian and associate professor, who will work in conjunction with researchers with the University of the Philippines.

Fogarty will provide coral larvae spawned in her lab to Warner, whose research team will then use genetic editing tools to try and create corals that can resist warming sea temperatures and other climate change-related phenomena.

Warner said researchers will also be able to study corals in ways that scientists haven’t been able to do before, including examining the functions and interactions of genes and proteins, a field referred to as functional genomics.

Warner stressed that coral genetically modified in his lab will remain there.

“Now we’re not engineering corals and then putting them back out into the wild,” he said. “The goal is to develop this technology so that if we ever decide we don’t need it, we don’t have to reverse engineer it, it’ll just be there ready to go because using this kind of technology in the wild brings some very important ethical considerations.”

That’s where Crowe comes in.

He explained that only recently have researchers begun to think about genetically modifying organisms to combat climate change.

“And those conversations have been only almost completely around climate change issues on land so the marine environment opens up new questions about aims and goals for the marine environment and creating new ways in which these corals could spread,” he said.

Crowe said it is important that these conversations are held now to help regulators make future policy decisions relating to releasing genetically modified corals into the wild.

The team plans to share its findings during the International Coral Reef Symposium to be hosted in New Zealand in July 2026. Crowe plans to host a conference at UNCW in summer 2025, inviting scholars to discuss the study.

“The idea, rather than kind of providing them just the technology and then letting them figure out what issues to consider, the hope is to provide those types of laid out various issues, concerns, potentials for the technology, so that each individual policy group can do what’s right for them,” he said. “So often we have developed these technologies and then, in retrospect, think about the issues that they might bring up. Then, what happens is, and we’ve seen this over and over again, the realities of those technologies can then make people feel as though they have very limited options.”

“CMS and UNCW are really doing some of the foremost work in this area in the world and so it’s really an important place for us to have these conversations,” he said.

Building biological defenses

Researchers looking at ways to restore and protect coral reefs know the clock is ticking.

Natural processes and human activities have severely damaged many of the world’s coral reefs.

Scientists predict that, if this trend continues, living corals on many of the world’s reefs will be dead in 20 years.

Coral reefs cover more than 4 million acres of sea floor in waters of the United States and its territories in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.

More than 25% of all marine species live in coral reefs.

In addition to their importance to marine life, coral reefs also serve as coastal shoreline guardians.

“They provide this solid, basically limestone structure that’s surrounding coastlines and that’s really important for preventing runoff and also coastal protection from storm surges,” said UNCW Assistant Professor Blake Ushijima. “You can imagine the amount of force from (coastal) storm surges and runoff that can occur.”

Ushijima has received a more than $400,000 grant to fund ongoing research on developing probiotic treatments to protect coral against stony coral tissue loss disease, or SCTLD.

This disease is decimating coral in the Caribbean, which is experiencing one of the worst disease outbreaks in recorded history for corals.

SCTLD is particularly dangerous because it attacks coral tissue, melting the tissue away like a flesh-eating disease.

“Some of the most susceptible corals, you have 100% mortality,” Ushijima said. “It’s just gone.”

The grant awarded to Ushijima will be used to open a site in San Andres, a Columbian Island, adding to the small number of hubs being established in the Caribbean where researchers are testing for different probiotics and developing potential treatments against SCTLD.

These hubs, including those being built in Montserrat in the Leeward Islands and the Dominican Republic, include so-called bio secure facilities. Water used in these facilities is treated to remove potentially bad microbes and re-treated before it is released back into the natural environment.

Testing probiotic treatments at different facilities throughout the Caribbean will help scientists discover which treatments work best for corals in those regions.

Brain corals and maze corals, which build the bases of reefs, are particularly susceptible to SCTLD, Ushijima said.

“This disease seems to specifically target what we call the mounding coral, like the brain corals,” he said. “They’re solid limestone. The bad part is those tend to be slower growing, but they’re building the very structures of the reefs.”

SCTLD affects at least 24 of the 50 or so coral species in the Caribbean. The disease was discovered off the coast of Miami in 2014 and has since spread to two dozen different territories and countries, Ushijima said.

He is partnering on the project with researchers from the Perry Institute of Marine Science and University of Massachusetts Lowell as well as various Columbia-based organizations.

“We know (SCTLD) is a waterborne disease, but we don’t know how specifically it’s transmitted, but it’s reached across the Caribbean so it’s very unprecedented,” Ushijima said. “The scary part is it’s not going to be the last disease outbreak. It’s just one of many that will occur just from how this world is going. The more we encroach on it, the more battered the environment and more pollution, climate change, it’s going to cause all these chain reactions.”

MOREHEAD CITY — Tucked away on the floor near a couple pieces of equipment in the busy aquaculture lab at Carteret Community College is an unassuming round, nearly waist-high, clear tank with a few sections of hard, white plastic pipes roughly the diameter of salad plates placed on the bottom.

Inside one section of T-shaped pipe, a female common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has been incubating her eggs. Over the last week, her hundreds of thousands of eggs have been hatching, filling the tank with tiny gray wiggly specks, the paralarvae or newly hatched octopuses. 

Aquaculture Operations Manager Bryan Snyder explained Wednesday morning that the female octopus had been hiding in the pipe with her remaining eggs. Aquaculture is the farming and husbandry of aquatic organisms. 

“She probably still has a few unhatched eggs in there. They don’t hatch at exactly the same time,” Snyder said, adding that the mother’s job while the eggs are incubating and hatching is to protect her eggs and keep water moving over the eggs.

Snyder was in the middle of teaching students in his hatchery management II class how to spawn clams. They were standing around a spawning table, a long, narrow tank that can hold about 6 inches of water. The students had carefully placed rows of clams in the water, which was set at a temperature to simulate winter conditions in the wild. Snyder was explaining how to properly increase the temperature to encourage reproduction.

The class focuses on facility needs, hatchery production planning and propagation techniques for species, including clams, shrimp, catfish, hybrid striped bass and rainbow trout. It’s the next step for students after taking the basics of fish and shellfish propagation taught in hatchery management I.

The classes are part of the college’s Aquaculture Technology program that focuses on saltwater species like oysters, clams, softshell crabs, and marine finfish like flounder, drum and bait minnows, according to the website. Program graduates have the option to continue their education at the college, transfer classes to a four-year university, start their own fish or shellfish farm, or work as a technician at any aquaculture operation.

Aquaculture Department Chair David Cerino told Coastal Review Thursday that the program has had several octopuses lay eggs over the years, but they didn’t have all the live feeds needed for successful rearing. “We are hoping to have a better chance this time applying what we have learned in previous attempts,” he said.

Cerino said they collected the female octopus along with a male Nov. 4 at Radio Island. 

“We put both in the tank together and they immediately mated,” he explained. “We then released the male that same day to avoid aggression between the two.”

Snyder said while looking at her tank Wednesday that the octopus she was older and had probably already mated before. “They can hold onto the sperm package from the male for quite a while before they fertilize their eggs, but we actually watched this one mate. We took the male out because they are cannibalistic, they’ll eat each other.”

The female stored sperm until about Jan. 18 when she laid the eggs. The eggs incubated for 21 days before they began hatching and have continued for about a week with peak hatch on days two and three, Cerino said.

Typically, a common octopus will lay between 100,000 and 500,000 eggs at a time. After the eggs hatch, the mother octopus usually dies. 

“That’s the normal lifecycle,” Snyder said. “They’re not very long-lived animals, they normally live a year or two, and then once they reproduce that’s the end of their natural life cycle, generally.”

Snyder continued that having a pregnant octopus while a hatchery class is taking place is “a good trial for not only our students but us as well” because larvae are difficult to raise, and most people are not successful.

Snyder said they’ll release some of the paralarvae back into the wild and they’ll also try and raise the octopuses.

Snyder said that they’ve built a larval system in the lab to raise the paralarvae. This system has four tanks that can house up to 6,000 paralarvae per tank. Snyder said they move the paralarvae by scooping them up with a lab-grade pitcher, then the pitcher is floated inside the tank so the water temperature in the pitcher will acclimate to that of the water of the tank and then they’ll gently release the paralarvae into the tank.

“We don’t know how successful we’ll be once they turn into hatchlings — to juvenile octopus,” he said, adding that’s when they turn cannibalistic. “We have to add a lot of hiding spots to the tanks so they don’t eat each other.” 

Cerino said that the tanks are 100-gallon black tanks with moderate aeration. 

“We add brine shrimp nauplii and two species of copepods daily as food for the paralarvae and add three species of microalgae to nutritionally enrich the feeds and add color to the water, reducing light penetration and improving visual contrast of the prey for feeding,” Cerino said. “We periodically exchange the water in the tanks to maintain water quality. Published reports of rearing attempts suggest that successful rearing for the first 30 days is readily achieved, but survival to juvenile octopus at about 45-50 days is very low.” Nauplii is plural for nauplius, the is the first larval stage for many crustaceans. Copepods are small crustaceans. 

As of Thursday, “we have very high survival and the paralarvae are feeding well,” Cerino said.

In the lab beside the female octopus’ tank, it’s hard not to notice the row of tanks housing pairs of clownfish, another species the class is learning to breed.

The way the tank is set up, a shelf placed inside acts as a reef rock, where the clownfish will stick the eggs, “but sometimes if their water quality isn’t just right or they get stressed out, they’ll actually eat their eggs and try again,” Snyder said Wednesday.

The bigger fish in the tank is the female and the next biggest is the male that she breeds with and there’s a bunch of other males that just kind of hang out, Snyder explained. When the female dies, the biggest male will turn into a female and then the next biggest male will move up the ranks.

Snyder said they’re trying to grow corals, too, and have a touch tank onsite filled with animals collected from Bogue Sound, which is just behind the aquaculture building.

The touch tank has whelks, clams, vegetarian snails and other marine life, he said. The tank is a way to teach students how to care for a bunch of different animals and learn which can live together.

Ever mosey through a museum and pass by a display of those little ethanol-filled jars holding spineless creatures and think “big deal” as you head to check out the dinosaur exhibit?

Turns out, the contents of those jars are rife with clues that may help researchers unlock some of the mysteries of our coastal environment and help them better gauge the effects of climate change and pollution.

“The power of museum collections is that they’re a combination of donations from a variety of different sources, each with their own stories and usefulness, but when you put them together that really provides something that can be used in ways that we may not comprehend quite yet,” said Bronwyn Williams, research curator of non-molluscan invertebrates at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Williams and Megan McCuller, collections manager of non-molluscan invertebrates, oversee what is ostensibly the largest research collection at the museum.

Non-molluscan invertebrate is a fancy term for animals that don’t have spines — think shrimp, worms and crabs.

Since its creation in 2017, this collection has grown to include tens of thousands of specimens collected as far back as the mid-1800s from freshwater, land, and near and offshore marine habitats of the Carolinas, mid-Atlantic region, and the Southeast.

It is a separate collection from the museum’s mollusk collection, including mussels, clams, snails, octopuses and squids.

Specimens preserved in ethanol-filled jars, vials and, for the larger critters, buckets or tanks, are housed in a building suitable for storing thousands of containers filled with flammable liquid a few miles away from the Museum of Natural Sciences main building in downtown Raleigh.

This means the collection is primarily out of view day to day, barring the occasional display of a small fraction of non-molluscan invertebrate, at what is said to be the state’s most-visited museum.

Williams’ and McCuller’s work is more of a behind-the-scenes job, one that entails cataloging information that can include details about who got a specimen, where and when it was collected, and why it was collected.

And the specimens have come through a variety of means, whether from someone fishing off a pier stretching out from the ocean shore, a research vessel, orphaned collections donated to the museum, employees of the museum, even a World War II American airman who collected specimens from the shores of Australia during a stint overseas.

In many cases, the more Williams and McCuller dive into that history, the more they discover, and they want to share that with the public and with researchers.

“We want to teach and tell other people about what is back here,” Williams said. “We want everybody to know what we have here and why it’s so important. This collection is invaluable from a biological standpoint. It can be used to address questions about changes in distribution or connectivity. It can be used to monitor for invasive species. People have used it to dig in and identify diversity that we didn’t know we have.”

McCuller is one of only a few researchers who study bryozoans, small invertebrates found in most marine communities that can grow on everything from barnacles to coral skeletons.

When she first took her job at the museum a few years ago, she looked inside a jar of hard skeleton corals and spotted what looked like bryozoans. She has identified up to 19 different species of bryozoan in a single jar.

To date, McCuller has identified more than 1,200 colonies of bryozoans in more than 200 lots from the museum’s non-molluscan invertebrate collection.

The museum’s collection of saltwater crayfish has helped researchers understand the impacts of invasive species to some of North Carolina’s coastal habitats.

Red swamp crayfish, native to many Gulf states, is one of several crayfish species shipped live for human consumption. These delectable edibles were introduced into North Carolina waters decades ago, taking over habitats once abundant with crayfish native to the state.

“It’s actually very rare to find the native crayfishes now and we can document that in the collections,” Williams said. “Invasive red swamp crayfish were not being collected in these areas frequently prior to 2000. After 2000 we’ve seen the red swamp crayfish really explode in terms of its geographic coverage in portions of eastern North Carolina.”

A collection acquired from Charleston, South Carolina, tells the story of an invasion of Asian tiger shrimp off the South Carolina coast after a batch of the species reportedly escaped from an offshore research lab.

Sometime between 2015 and 2016, a father and his young son brought to the museum an Asian tiger shrimp they collected while pier fishing off the North Carolina coast.

“That’s, I think, one critical story of how museum collections can be used to look at changes in the distribution of things,” Williams said. “Our ultimate goal for this collection is to have it be well known and well respected.”

McCuller, armed with a list of “fun facts,” shared a few in a recent telephone interview with Coastal Review.

The oldest specimen in the non-molluscan invertebrate collection is two jars, also referred to as lots, of white shrimp, gathered in 1855.

The largest specimen is a horseshoe crab, roughly 24-28 inches in diameter, collected in 1975 from Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina.

One of the most popular among museum guests is a giant isopod, a distant cousin of crabs found in deep, cold waters of the sea. It looks, as McCuller describes it, like a “really large roly-poly.”

There are also a couple of deep-sea tube worms collected in 1966 by the Duke Marine Lab at a depth of more than 5,000 meters below the ocean’s surface.

Anyone interested in touring the museum’s fluid collections may contact Williams at bronwyn.williams@naturalsciences.org or McCuller at megan.mcculler@naturalsciences.org.

You may also follow them on Twitter at @mccullermi and @bwwilliamslab.