Turtle fibropapillomatosis (FP) is a disease of sea turtles. The condition is characterized by benign but ultimately debilitating epithelial tumours on the surface of biological tissues. FP exists all over the world, but it is most prominent in warmer climates, affecting up to 50–70% of some populations.
Haunani-Kay Trask was a Native Hawaiian activist, educator, author, poet, and a leader of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. She was professor emerita at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she founded and directed the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies. A published author, Trask wrote scholarly books and articles, as well as poetry. She also produced documentaries and CDs. Trask received awards and recognition for her scholarship and activism, both during her life and posthumously.
The Micronesians or Micronesian peoples are various closely related ethnic groups native to Micronesia, a region of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean. They are a part of the Austronesian ethnolinguistic group, which has an Urheimat in Taiwan.
European exploration and settlement of Oceania began in the 16th century, starting with the Spanish (Castilian) landings and shipwrecks in the Mariana Islands, east of the Philippines. This was followed by the Portuguese landing and settling temporarily in some of the Caroline Islands and Papua New Guinea. Several Spanish landings in the Caroline Islands and New Guinea came after. Subsequent rivalry between European colonial powers, trade opportunities and Christian missions drove further European exploration and eventual settlement. After the 17th century Dutch landings in New Zealand and Australia, with no settlement in these lands, the British became the dominant colonial power in the region, establishing settler colonies in what would become Australia and New Zealand, both of which now have majority European-descended populations. States including New Caledonia (Caldoche), Hawaii, French Polynesia, and Norfolk Island also have considerable European populations. Europeans remain a primary ethnic group in much of Oceania, both numerically and economically.
The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM) is a World Heritage listed U.S. National Monument encompassing 583,000 square miles (1,510,000 km2) of ocean waters, including ten islands and atolls of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It was created in June 2006 with 140,000 square miles (360,000 km2) and expanded in August 2016 by moving its border to the limit of the exclusive economic zone, making it one of the world's largest protected areas. It is internationally known for its cultural and natural values as follows:
The area has deep cosmological and traditional significance for living Native Hawaiian culture, as an ancestral environment, as an embodiment of the Hawaiian concept of kinship between people and the natural world, and as the place where it is believed that life originates and to where the spirits return after death. On two of the islands, Nihoa and Mokumanamana, there are archaeological remains relating to pre-European settlement and use. Much of the monument is made up of pelagic and deepwater habitats, with notable features such as seamounts and submerged banks, extensive coral reefs and lagoons.
Pacific Islander Americans are Americans who are of Pacific Islander ancestry. For its purposes, the United States census also counts Aboriginal Australians as part of this group.
Nicole Scherzinger is an American singer, songwriter, dancer, actress, and television personality. She was a member of the R&B-pop group and dance ensemble The Pussycat Dolls between 2003 and 2010. With only two albums and over 55 million records sold worldwide, The Pussycat Dolls became one of the world's best-selling female groups of all time.
Turbinaria ornata is a tropical brown algae of the order Fucales native to coral reef ecosystems of the South Pacific. Turbinaria ornata is more commonly referred to as crowded sea bells in the US and crowned sea bells worldwide. It can quickly colonize these ecosystems due in part to its method of dispersing by detaching older and more buoyant fronds that travel on surface currents, sometimes in large rafts of many individual thalli, or fronds. Some scientists are investigating whether the increase in density of seaweeds, and a decrease in living coral density, on coral reef ecosystems indicates a change in the health of the reef, focusing studies on this particular species of brown alga.
The Guam kingfisher, called sihek in Chamorro, is a species of kingfisher from the occupied United States Territory of Guam. It is restricted to a captive breeding program following its extinction in the wild due primarily to predation by the introduced brown tree snake.
Dictyosphaeria is a genus of green algae in the family Siphonocladaceae.
Seaweed, or macroalgae, refers to thousands of species of macroscopic, multicellular, marine algae. The term includes some types of Rhodophyta (red), Phaeophyta (brown) and Chlorophyta (green) macroalgae. Seaweed species such as kelps provide essential nursery habitat for fisheries and other marine species and thus protect food sources; other species, such as planktonic algae, play a vital role in capturing carbon and producing at least 50% of Earth's oxygen.
Colleen Marie Cavanaugh is an American academic microbiologist best known for her studies of hydrothermal vent ecosystems. As of 2002, she is the Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and is affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Cavanaugh was the first to propose that the deep-sea giant tube worm, Riftia pachyptila, obtains its food from bacteria living within its cells, an insight which she had as a graduate student at Harvard. Significantly, she made the connection that these chemoautotrophic bacteria were able to play this role through their use of chemosynthesis, the biological oxidation of inorganic compounds to synthesize organic matter from very simple carbon-containing molecules, thus allowing organisms such as the bacteria to exist in deep ocean without sunlight.
Isabella Aiona Abbott was an educator, phycologist, and ethnobotanist from Hawaii. The first native Hawaiian woman to receive a PhD in science, she became a leading expert on Pacific marine algae.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) is located in the Republic of Kiribati, an ocean nation in the central Pacific approximately midway between Australia and Hawaii. PIPA constitutes 11.34% of Kiribati's exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and with a size of 408,250 km2 (157,630 sq mi), it is one of the largest marine protected areas (MPA) and one of the largest protected areas of any type on Earth. The PIPA was also designated as the world's largest and deepest UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010.
Seaweed farming or kelp farming is the practice of cultivating and harvesting seaweed. In its simplest form farmers gather from natural beds, while at the other extreme farmers fully control the crop's life cycle.
Asparagopsis is a genus of edible red macroalgae (Rhodophyta). The species Asparagopsis taxiformis is found throughout the tropical and subtropical regions, while Asparagopsis armata is found in warm temperate regions. Both species are highly invasive, and have colonised the Mediterranean Sea. A third accepted species is A. svedelii, while others are of uncertain status.
Wendy Alison Nelson is a New Zealand marine scientist and world expert in phycology. She is New Zealand's leading authority on seaweeds. Nelson is particularly interested in the biosystematics of seaweeds/macroalgae of New Zealand, with research on floristics, evolution and phylogeny, as well as ecology, and life history studies of marine algae. Recently she has worked on the systematics and biology of red algae including coralline algae, distribution and diversity of seaweeds in harbours and soft sediment habitats, and seaweeds of the Ross Sea and Balleny Islands.
Ethel Sarel Gepp, also publishing as Ethel Sarel Barton, was a phycologist who specialized in the study of marine algae and is noted for her work reordering the genus Halimeda.
Nicole Dubilier is a marine microbiologist and director of the Symbiosis Department at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology since 2013 and a Professor of Microbial Symbioses at the University of Bremen. She is a pioneer in ecological and evolutionary symbiotic relationships between sea animals and their microbial partners inhabiting environments that harbour low nutrient concentrations. She was responsible for the discovery of a new form of symbiosis between two kinds of bacteria and the marine oligochaete Olavius algarvensis.
Ruth Deborah Gates was the Director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and the first woman to be President of the International Society for Reef Studies. Her research was dedicated to understanding coral reef ecosystems, specifically coral-algal symbiosis and the capacity for corals to acclimatize under future climate change conditions. Doctor Gates is most accredited with looking at coral biology and human-assisted coral evolution, known as super corals, as notably seen in the documentary Chasing Coral, available on Netflix.
