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Some quotes stay with you forever.

One that’s stayed with me came from Rafael Centenera, a general assistant director in Spanish fisheries ministry, when I interviewed him in Vigo, Europe’s busiest fishing port, in 2007.

“For sure we are friends of fish,” he said. “But still more, we are the friends of fishermen.”

The reason these 16 words have stayed with me is that they encapsulate perfectly the approach to managing fisheries that has held sway for many years in most of Europe and indeed much further afield.

What it implies is that a bit of restraint and conservation is fine – so long as it doesn’t get in the way of fishermen’s profits.

What that stance implies in Spain has been laid out more clearly than ever in a new report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist...

The Marshall Islands government has created the world’s largest shark sanctuary, covering nearly two million sq km (750,000 sq miles) of ocean.

The Pacific republic will ban trade in shark products and commercial shark fishing throughout its waters.

Tourism, including diving, is a staple of the Marshall Islands archipelago, which is home to just 68,000 people.

Sharks and their near relatives such as rays are seriously threatened by issues such as habitat loss and fishing.

About a third of ocean-going sharks are on the internationally-recognised Red List of Threatened Species.

“In passing this [shark protection] bill, there is no greater statement we can make about the importance of sharks to our culture, environment and economy,” said Senator Tony deBrum, who co-sponsored the bill through ...

Coral reefs are plagued by a long list of problems that can injure the fragile ocean ecosystems: Ocean acidification due to global warming, plankton blooms, emerging diseases, pollution and overfishing. Researchers have now added one more to that list: earthquakes.

Just as earthquakes can cause devastation on the ground, they can also be catastrophic underwater, a new study has found.

In May 2009, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake hit the western Caribbean, causing avalanches in half of the lagoonal reefs in Belize studied by Richard Aronson, head of the department of biological sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology. It was, however, not the first event to wipe out large portions of the reef.

Aronson and his team have been studying the same 144-square-mile (373 square kilometers) area f...

A very rare humpback whale that’s entirely white has been spotted near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The whale’s thought to be a few weeks old and was spotted by a local man.

He said: “I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I just grabbed my camera. Then the white calf approached my boat, seeming to want to check us out.”

White whales are rare – the reef’s rep says there are only 10-15 among the 10,000-15,000 humpback whales living along Australia’s east coast.

And it’s even rarer for them to be completely white like this one.

Source: bbc.co.uk

Image: AFP

Michael Cohen, 42, was about 50 yards from the shore when he was attacked at lunchtime today. Witnesses said one of his legs was bitten off and the other was badly mangled.

Mr Cohen, a part-time accountant who lives in Cape Town, was dragged from the sea by friends who were with him at the city

An international team of scientists has achieved a major breakthrough in fishing sustainability on coral reefs which could play a vital role in preventing their collapse.

A preliminary study finds that scuba diving may help improve muscle movement, touch sensitivity and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in people with spinal cord injuries.

The small pilot study, presented Saturday at the Paralyzed Veterans of America conference in Orlando, Fla., involved 10 wheelchair-dependent disabled veterans who had suffered spinal cord injuries an average 15 years earlier and who underwent scuba diving certification.

Pre-dive tests checked the participants’ muscle spasticity, motor control, sensitivity to light touch and pinpricks, plus depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Eight people completed the program and the study also included nine health controls who served as dive buddies.

Among the disabled vets, resea...

It’s a process that has taken two years and involved nearly a quarter of a million people who use or depend on the sea for their livelihood.

But at long last, the project set up to develop proposals for new Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) in the South West has finally made recommendations to the Government.

The report, by Finding Sanctuary

Leaders from eight countries launched an initiative last week to prevent the extinction of sharks, symbolizing the latest development in the growing movement to safeguard the ocean

The government of the Maldives has complained after the UK’s Daily Telegraph website carried a satirical blog post saying the island nation is to be omitted from the Times Atlas of the World.

The supposed omission was said to be due to impending climate change.

The low-lying islands of the Maldives are at risk from rising sea levels.

The spoof blog post was taken seriously by several media outlets in the Maldives.

The Telegraph blog post was written by a climate change sceptic, James Delingpole.

On Monday, scientists said the new edition of the Times Atlas had exaggerated the scale of ice-cover reduction in another part of the world, Greenland.

Mr Delingpole’s blog said the next edition of the famous atlas would continue what he called its “Climate Change alarmism”, by completely erasing s...