Humans are not infallible.  We get sick, we get injured.  Humans are a clever bunch though, and since prehistoric times we have used medicine to try and heal our ailments.  Medical science has made huge leaps and bounds, providing treatments and vaccinations, surgical procedures, and physical and psychological therapies that have allowed people to survive – and thrive – injuries and illnesses which would have once been fatal.  Medical science never stops evolving, learning and searching for more ways to keep us in tip-top condition.  That search includes delving beneath the ocean waves.  Here’s just a couple of examples of how medical science has been furthered by studying ocean creatures:

Taking away the pain with… venom?!
The humble snail.  Not the most exciting of creatures you would think.  Cone snails (Conus) are a genus of marine snails…marine snails that hunt.  Predating on worms, small fish and molluscs these slow-moving hunters are equipped with a toxic harpoon.  One speared, their prey is paralyzed and slowly but surely the cone snail can make its way over and feast.  It’s not all pain though, as a paper by Dr Fedosoc from the Russian Academy of Sciences and colleagues points out.  It seems that the toxins have another use too – the development of pain killers.

Just a word of warning if you do come across a cone snail.  They will have a go at humans too.  Most species will just sting you badly, but some can kill!

The ocean is vast and has been greatly explored in the last decades. But there is still much to be discovered. With clear plans for 2015, NOAA’s research vessel – the Okeanos Explorer – has already begun its field season and is currently mapping in the Caribbean.

Last year saw two successful expeditions, one in the Gulf of Mexico, where biological diversity was the focus, and the other in the Atlantic, returning to the scene from the year before where they explored seamounts and submarine canyons in their own backyard.

This year the Okeanos is focusing its attention first on the Caribbean and later on the Pacific. Plans for the field season consist of two expeditions where high-resolution maps will be produced and new seafloor footage documented.

Mother turtles find their way back to nesting beaches by looking for unique magnetic signatures along the coast, according to a new study published in Current Biology.

Loggerhead turtles, for example, leave the beach where they were born as hatchlings and traverse entire ocean basins before returning to nest, at regular intervals, on the same stretch of coastline as where they started. How the turtles accomplish this natal homing has remained an enduring mystery until now.

Several years ago, Kenneth Lohmann, the co-author of the new study, proposed that animals including sea turtles and salmon might imprint on magnetic fields early in life, but that idea has proven difficult to test in the open ocean. In the new study, Brothers and Lohmann took a different approach by studying changes in the behavior of nesting turtles over time.

SCUBA Travel have released their annual list of the best-selling diving books and DVDs of the year.

For fourteen years SCUBA Travel have published the top ten list, and its contents remain remarkably constant. Coral Reef Fishes: Indo-Pacific and Caribbean by Lieske and Myers has, in its various editions, been continually in the list since its inception in 2001. Another longstanding entry (since 2003) is Dive Atlas of the World: An Illustrated Reference to the Best Sites by Jack Jackson.

Newcomer this year is UK Dive Guide: Diving Guide to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales by Patrick Shier. The first time a British dive site guide has made it.

All the books (and the single DVD featured) are either guides to dive sites or sealife indentification books. Diving novels, histories and memoirs have fallen out of favour.

Whales may sing for their supper, a study in the open access journal Scientific Reports suggests.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) work together whilst foraging on the bottom for food – but how do they co-ordinate their behaviour? Susan Parks of Syracuse University believes she may have the answer.

Her research group have been monitoring humpback whales for a decade.