UNCW Center for Marine Science

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Today at Trinity Landing - A Senior Living Community Marine Science Masters student AJ Camper presented on: “The Beautiful Swimmer: The importance of blue crabs and a deep dive into their early life stages."

A portion of Camper's research was conducted with devices deployed off the docks at Trinity Landing and UNCW Center for Marine Science to achieve comparison data. He developed a 'bingo-es' game for residents with prizes too.

Community outreach! Local Partners! Student Experience!

UNCW's doctoral candidate, Jamie Clark's sea turtle research and partnership with The Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center was featured on WWAY TV news.

Clark's work is dedicated to developing new tools for age estimation in living sea turtles through calibration with our current method - Skeletochronology (counting growth rings within histologically processed bones, collected from stranded animals).

She works with collaborators at NOAA and other universities to establish relationships with both near-infrared light and genetics with bone-ages for more real-time age estimation of living turtles.

Read more 👉🏼https://www.wwaytv3.com/uncw-researcher-studies-kemps-ridley-sea-turtle-bones-to-better-estimate-age/

All work is permitted research (NC WRC ES # 25ST41 and NMFS ESA Permit 21233).

CONGRATS to Dr. Monica Rother, UNCW Environmental Sciences Department, with co-researchers Andrea Hawkes and Phil Bresnahan, UNCW: Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences who have been announced as 2026 Faculty Researchers by the WRRI - Water Resources Research Institute of the UNC System.

Project Title:
"Canaries in the coal mine; ghost forests signal ecosystem and water quality degradation"

Image: Madison Gerdes extracting a tree core from a bald cypress along Smith Creek, NC.

Learn more about the importance of this project:
https://wrri.ncsu.edu/wrris-2026-faculty-researchers-announced/

🌊 Celebrate World Sea Turtle Day! 💙

Learn more about sea turtle research at The Ramirez Lab!
https://www.mdramirez.com/

Today we celebrate the oldest of sea turtles, the Leatherback!

Leatherbacks survived the extinction of the dinosaurs at 150 million years old. They grow faster than hard-shelled turtles and have the widest global distribution of all sea turtle species.

Today is Green Sea Turtle Day!
Green sea turtles have a sharp and finely serrated beak, which is perfect for grazing in seagrass beds and scraping algae off of hard surfaces. Their diet consists of marine plant life, such as seagrass, algae and seaweeds.

President Woodrow Wilson made the observance of Flag Day official by a presidential proclamation on May 30, 1916. Did you know about Flag Etiquette? https://nationalflagfoundation.org/etiquette/ See less

During Sea Turtle week, today is Hawksbill Day! These sea turtles are named for their narrow head and sharp, bird-like beak.

Hawksbills can reach into cracks and crevices of coral reefs looking for food. Their diet is very specialized, feeding almost exclusively on sponges.

We continue celebrating Sea Turtles this week, remember ... be cool and help sea turtles!
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