Blog Archives

A Canadian marine conservationist has jumped bail in Germany and disappeared.

The founder of US-based anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson, was detained in Germany in May after Costa Rica issued a warrant for his arrest.

He is accused of having endangered the crew of a Costa Rican ship that was fishing for sharks in 2002.

A Frankfurt court has ordered his re-arrest. But his lawyer was quoted as saying “he has left Germany for an unknown destination”.

The group’s confrontation with a Costa Rican ship happened in Guatemalan waters. Sea Shepherd alleges that the ship was engaged in illegal shark-finning – the practice of catching a shark, slicing off its valuable fin and returning the shark to the water, where it will usually die.

Mr Watson, 61, faced possible extradition to Costa Ri...

Does seagrass hold the secret to saving the world

Fertilising the oceans with iron to combat climate change can lock carbon away for centuries, research suggests.

Tiny marine plants induced to grow by the iron sink to the ocean floor taking carbon with them, a German-led team reports in Nature journal.

Iron fertilisation is one of the oldest ideas for a climate “technical fix”.

But much more research is needed before the approach could be put to use, the scientists say, and cutting emissions should be the priority.

There have been about 12 iron fertilisation experiments at sea down the years, stimulated by the pioneering theory of oceanographer John Martin.

In the 1980s, he proposed that in many parts of the oceans, the growth of phytoplankton – tiny marine plants, or algae – was limited by lack of iron.

Adding iron, he suggested, would e...

The fatal shark attack off western Australia at the weekend was the fifth such incident in less than a year.

The death of surfer Benjamin Linden, 24, who was apparently mauled by a large white shark, has sparked concern among government officials and prompted calls for the animals’ protected status to be lifted.

But are unprovoked attacks really rising in the region, and, if so, what might be behind such a trend?

Dr Bob Hueter, director of the Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Shark Research in Sarasota, Florida, cautions against jumping to conclusions.

He told BBC News: “When you have multiple attacks, it can be one of two things or a combination of both. The most obvious is that there are more sharks there in a place where people frequent for some reason.”

Dr Hueter pointed to the exa...

Reggae immortal Bob Marley has joined Barack Obama and Elvis Presley in the elite club of those who have biological species named in their honor.

In Marley’s case, it’s a small parasitic crustacean blood feeder that infests fish in Caribbean coral reefs, now known as Gnathia marleyi.

“I named this species, which is truly a natural wonder, after Marley because of my respect and admiration for Marley’s music,” Paul Sikkel, a marine biologist at Arkansas State University, said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Plus, this species is as uniquely Caribbean as Marley.”

Young Gnathia marleyi hide among coral rubble, sea sponges or algae, launching surprise attacks on fish, which they then infest, eating enough to fuel their growth to adulthood.

Adults don’t eat at all, Sikkel said, but manage to survive...

In what is regarded as the center of coral diversity in the world, the Tubbataha Reef in the Philippines is emerging as a model for conservation in the face of grave threats to the region

Scientists are to attach satellite tags to 20 basking sharks in an effort to better understand how the fish behave in the sea between Skye and Mull.

Marine biologists will tag sharks found in the waters around Coll, Tiree and Hyskeir, a group of rocky islets near Canna.

Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and the University of Exeter will track the fish over several months.

The public will also be able to monitor the sharks’ behaviour via a website.

The scientists said the project would provide information on the location and behaviour of basking sharks during the summer, and also track how far into deeper water they go in winter.

Project manager Dr Suz Henderson, from SNH, said the sharks visited Scottish waters every summer.

She said: “We want to know how the sharks use the waters between Sk...

South Korea has said it may reverse a controversial plan to resume whaling for “scientific research” if other options to study the mammals were available.

An official said on Wednesday that the country may consider other ways to study whales without killing them.

South Korea had cited scientific research rules last week as a reason to restart whaling.

But critics say the move was simply commercial whaling in disguise.

“We may not conduct whaling for scientific research if there is another way to achieve the goal,” said Kang Joon-Suk, a senior official of South Korea’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

He did not provide further details.

A South Korea delegation had announced during an International Whaling Commission meeting in Panama on 4 July that it would hunt whale...

This stark image shows the devastating impact of decades of intensive fishing of our seas.

An arsenal of environmental problems has been building beneath the waves, according to marine experts.

All this week the Belfast Telegraph is running a special

More than 85 percent of reefs in Asia’s “Coral Triangle” are directly threatened by human activities such as coastal development, pollution, and overfishing, a new report warned on Monday.

Launched at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, it said the threat was substantially more than the global average of 60 percent and urged greater efforts to reduce destructive fishing and run-off from land.

“When these threats are combined with recent coral bleaching, prompted by rising ocean temperatures, the percent of reefs rated as threatened increases to more than 90 percent,” the report said.

The Coral Triangle covers Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, The Solomon Islands, and East Timor and contains nearly 30 percent of the world’s reefs and more than 3,000 speci...