RIPPLE MARKS—The Story Behind the Story

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Author

Cheryl Lyn Dybas, a contributing writer for Oceanography, is a marine scientist and policy analyst by training. She also writes about the seas for The Washington Post, BioScience, Natural History, Canadian Geographic, Africa Geographic, and many other publications.

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Stories and First Paragraphs

They Met on the Silk Road—Tigers of the Riparian Tugai, Coniferous Taiga Once Mingled on Fabled Highway

In reeds tinged red in the Central Asian sun, a tiger roamed. There, in riparian forests that line rivers like the Vakhsh on the border of Tajikistan, the Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata) prowled.

Until its extinction in the mid-1900s, the tiger stalked Bukhara deer along tugai, thicketed watercourses that flow through Central Asia's otherwise vast, arid deserts...

Mirror Images—Identical Species Thrive in Antarctic, Arctic Seas

Polar bears live on northern ice, penguins on southern, with an 11,000-km distance between them. Life on the North and South Poles couldn't be more different.

Or could it?

The forbidding oceans of the Arctic and Antarctic have revealed a treasure trove of secrets to Census of Marine Life (CoML) scientists. They were stunned to find more than 235 species common to the seas around both poles...

Fueled by Sugar Rush and Remodeled Legs—Christmas Island Red Crabs Run for the Money

Santa and his globe-trotting reindeer have nothing on the red crabs (Gecarcoidea natalis) of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

In one of the most spectacular migrations on Earth, with the arrival of the monsoon rains each November or December, millions of red crabs set out on an arduous journey from an inland rainforest plateau to the ocean to reproduce....

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Full Article

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Citation

Dybas, C.L. 2011. Ripple marks—The story behind the story. Oceanography 23(4):8–11, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2010.15.

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