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A herring in the North Sea, a crab in the Wadden Sea or an anemone fish on a coral reef, ... biologists like to think in terms of individual species that all have their own place within food webs in ecosystems across the world. "But that is surely…

The expected increase in extreme weather could make the bottom of tidal flats more unstable. That's shown by NIOZ researcher Zhengquan Zhou in the PhD-thesis he will defend at Utrecht University on September 7th. "With the increase in heat waves,…

The disappearance of nature in front of dikes in the pounding waves, as well as the return of resilient nature on the boundary of land and water, obey many more rules than one might think. Conservationists and nature managers who know these laws, can…

Artificial reefs in the Wadden Sea, made from discarded pear trees are teeming with marine life after more than a year underwater. That's shown in experiments by Jon Dickson, PhD candidate at NIOZ. "After four months, we already saw lots of fish and…

Over the past 500 million years, different single-celled organisms in the oceans have discovered at different times and also under very different conditions how to build a ‘shell’ around their single cell. “Six different strategies under just as many…

‘Wet gets wetter, dry gets drier’. That mantra has been used for decennia to predict how global warming affects the hydrological cycle. Climate models predict that much of tropical Africa will enjoy a future with wetter weather. The question is why…

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries implemented social distancing measures, which significantly reduced transmission rates of the virus. Scientists at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), Wageningen University & Research…

A new ecosystem has been discovered in volcanic caves beneath hydrothermal vents at a well-studied undersea volcano at 2.500m depth. Using an underwater robot, scientists overturned chunks of volcanic crust, discovering cave systems teeming with…

(For Dutch, scroll down) NWO has awarded a Veni funding of EUR 280,000 to Oscar Franken of the University of Groningen and NIOZ. This will allow him to further develop his own research ideas over the next three years.