Lunge-feeding humpback whales plunge into dense schools of small fish to feed on them. However, these small fish tend to be pretty fast. So, just how do huge whales sneak up on such speedy prey if they are as huge and overbearing as a ... well, whale?

This question became the focus of a study at Stanford University. Its findings was subsequently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

For the study, an international team led by researchers at KAUST's Red Sea Research Center collected a total of 88 mucus samples from the back and gill skins with lesions as well as from healthy skins of 44 wild-caught blacktip reef sharks caught in the wild around the Seychelles Islands.

Researchers sequenced the samples to identify the bacteria present in them, then compared the samples from the different sharks and tested them to detect changes in response to injuries.

Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Centro de Investigaciones Marinas—Universidad de La Habana (CIM-UH) have discovered that offshore coral reefs that are also protected tend to be healthier than nearshore ones.

In the study, seawater from 25 reefs in Cuba and the Florida Keys in the US were tested for nutrients and other parameters that would give researchers a glimpse into the microbial community present.