Melissa Márquez

3 weeks ago | forbes.com | Melissa Márquez

Click. Click. Click. Marine biologist Dr. Carolin Nieder, working on her Ph.D. at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, was stumped. "When I first heard the sound, I thought […] they sound like electric sparks," Nieder, who is now at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said. Her project was focused the hearing abilities of several shark species that called New Zealand home, and this sound shouldn’t be there. “I kind of knew that sharks are silent, that they don’t make any active sounds.

3 weeks ago | forbes.com | Melissa Márquez

“One of the best things about being a marine scientist is that you never know what you might see next in the sea.” That was certainly the case for marine biologist Professor Rochelle Constantine and her colleagues at the University of Auckland, who did not expect to find an octopus riding a shark. But that’s exactly what they witnessed in December 2023 while surveying the waters of the Hauraki Gulf near Kawau Island, off the northern coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

3 weeks ago | forbes.com | Melissa Márquez

For decades, stomach content analysis has been the go-to method for studying the feeding habits of sharks and rays. This technique, which involves dissecting the stomachs of euthanized animals, provides a snapshot of their recent meals. While highly effective in identifying specific prey species, SCA has historically required large sample sizes, sometimes exceeding a thousand individuals in a single study.

1 month ago | biorxiv.org | Anastasiya Buzuk |Melissa Márquez |Jackson Ho |Yaxi Liu

AbstractThe cytosolic iron-sulfur cluster assembly (CIA) targeting complex is responsible for maturation of cytosolic and nuclear iron-sulfur enzymes, numbering >30 proteins critical for fundamental processes such as DNA replication and repair. Up to 25% of these client proteins terminate in a targeting complex recognition (TCR) motif. This carboxy-terminal tripeptide motif recruits the CIA targeting complex (CTC) to the client so that the metallocluster can be inserted.

1 month ago | forbes.com | Melissa Márquez

Over the past 13 years, great white sharks have increasingly made their presence known off Maine’s coast. More than 100 individual sharks have been detected, with the majority of sightings occurring in recent years and notably in shallow waters. This shift in behavior has prompted researchers to dive deeper into understanding what these sharks are doing in Maine’s waters, and their latest findings have just been published in Frontiers in Marine Science.