Sharks home in on faint bioelectric fields generated by the bodies of their prey which they pick up using sensitive detectors on their snouts.

When researchers from Duke University showed captive cuttlefish held in tank videos depicting the menacing silhouettes of a shark or predatory grouper fish they reacted by lowering the electric field dramatically. Being shown the shadow of a harmless crab produced no reaction.

Sharks home in on faint bioelectric fields generated by the bodies of their prey which they pick up using sensitive detectors on their snouts.

When researchers from Duke University showed captive cuttlefish held in a tank videos depicting the menacing silhouettes of a shark or predatory grouper fish they reacted by lowering the electric field dramatically. Being shown the shadow of a harmless crab produced no reaction.

A team of researchers from the University of Michigan focused on leatherback sea turtles nesting on St. Kitts, an island in the West Indies southeast of Puerto Rico. The team wanted to know what factors influence where and when the leatherbacks lay their eggs.

It has been suggested that characteristics of the sand, the slope of the beach and proximity to vegetation contribute to the success or failure of nests, but which factors cause female leatherback sea turtles to dig a nest in a particular spot has never been investigated.

With up to 10m tides, the Kimberley region in north Western Australia has the largest tropical tides in the world, creating naturally extreme and highly dynamic coastal habitats that corals from more typical reefs could not survive.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute were thus surprised to find that corals from the region are just as sensitive to heat stress and bleaching as their counterparts from less extreme environments elsewhere.