Bad weather can make it hard to navigate. It’s hard to see where you’re going if there’s fog or heavy rain, so you can find yourself off course and in trouble.
For a while, biologists have suspected that bad weather can make it hard for whales and dolphins to navigate, too -- not fog and rain, but space weather. Space weather is caused by magnetic storms on the Sun. Giant eruptions can spray Earth with energy and charged particles. That can disrupt satellites, interfere with radio communications, and knock out power grids.
If it took more than four years for your eggs to hatch, no one could blame you for seeking a way to speed things up. It appears that deepsea skates, a relative of sharks and rays, have found a way to do exactly that—by using the volcanic heat released from hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean.
