Radio Program

Our regular Science and the SeaTM radio program presents marine science topics in an engaging two-minute story format. Our script writers gather ideas for the radio program from the University of Texas Marine Science Institute's researchers and from our very popular college class, Introduction to Oceanography, which we teach to hundreds of non-science majors at The University of Texas at Austin every year. Our radio programs are distributed at to commercial and public radio stations across the country.

June 13, 2010

The guy who came up with the expression “drinking like a fish” knew what he was talking about. Although it sounds a little kooky, saltwater fish have to guzzle saltwater to help them survive in a saltwater environment.

A fish has to maintain the proper amount of sodium, chloride, and other dissolved minerals -- the “salt” in saltwater -- in its tissues.

But the water around the fish doesn’t want to cooperate. It tries to even out the distribution of freshwater and saltwater by passing through a fish’s skin and gills.

June 6, 2010

TV shows like “Planet Earth” and “The Blue Planet” offer spectacular views of life in the oceans. These programs were made possible in large part by the work of a single man. He helped develop underwater photography and scuba diving, and he hosted the first TV show that regularly transported viewers into the undersea realm.

May 30, 2010

When a patient in ancient Greece was in great pain -- from headaches to gout to childbirth -- a physician sometimes prescribed a dose of fish. The patients didn’t eat the fish, though. Instead, the fish gave them an electric shock that numbed the senses. The Greek name for the fish was narke, and it’s where we get the modern word “narcotic.”

May 23, 2010

The west coast of Tasmania is raw and wet. Gale-force winds commonly buffet the island, which can get up to a hundred inches of rain a year.

May 16, 2010

It’s been a ritual for three decades. Every other day, circumstances permitting, a scientist from the University of Texas Marine Science Institute patrols a stretch of beach on Mustang Island, near the town of Port Aransas. Tony Amos notes the weather conditions, counts the number of people and cars, and lists the trash he finds. Most important, though, he counts the birds: herons, gulls, plovers, pelicans, and many others -- more than four million birds in all.

May 9, 2010

The last time NASA launched a craft named Aquarius, it wound up serving as a lifeboat -- it helped the three astronauts of Apollo 13 get home safely. The next Aquarius could help life across the entire planet by providing a new look at how the oceans respond to global climate change.

Aquarius is a joint mission between NASA and Argentina. The robotic probe could launch as early as late spring. It has several goals, but the main one is to monitor the salt in the world’s oceans.

May 2, 2010

When is a spider not really a spider? When it’s scuttling along the bottom of the sea.

Biologists have discovered more than a thousand species of sea spiders. They look a lot like their terrestrial cousins, with lots of gangly legs extending from a slender body. But they’re not true spiders. Instead, they’re probably distant cousins -- perhaps a part of the group that branched off tens of millions of years ago.

Sea spiders are found around the world, from the tropics to the Arctic and Antarctic, and from shallow coastal waters to the deep ocean.

April 25, 2010

In 1873, a character in a Jules Verne novel bet that he could go around the world in 80 days. Less than a century later, an American submarine did it in 61 -- entirely underwater.

The U.S.S. Triton was the largest submarine yet built -- half again the length of a football field, and powered by two nuclear reactors.

April 18, 2010

It looks like something out of a cartoon -- a tool to help Popeye cut open a can of spinach, for example. But the sawfish is a real creature, and it uses its long, toothy “saw” to dig up its own meals.

There are actually two kinds of fish with saws. One is the sawshark. It’s a true shark, with a streamlined body and gills on its sides. A typical adult is about 3 to 5 feet long. The other is the sawfish -- a type of ray with a flattened body and gills underneath. It’s much bigger than the sawshark -- up to 20 feet or more.

April 11, 2010

As fall gives way to winter in the southern hemisphere, one of the world’s largest migrations churns the waters off the southeastern coast of Africa. Sardines -- about 30,000 tons of them -- follow the current to warmer waters. Sharks and dolphins herd groups of the fish, penguins pick them off from below and seabirds from above, and whales gulp down gigantic mouthfuls.

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