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Just 20 miles north of where BP’s blown-out well spewed millions of gallons of oil into the sea, life appears bountiful despite initial fears that crude could have wiped out many of these delicate deepwater habitats.

Plankton, tiny suspended particles that form the base of the ocean’s food web, float en masse 1,400 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, forming a snowy-like underwater scene as they move with the currents outside the windows of a two-man sub creeping a few feet off the seafloor.

Crabs, starfish and other deep sea creatures swarm small patches of corals, and tiny sea anemones sprout from the sand like miniature forests across a lunar-like landscape illuminated only by the lights of the sub, otherwise living in a deep, dark environment far from the sun’s reach.

Scien...

Months after rescuers found them struggling and covered in oil, 33 endangered and threatened young sea turtles are finally going home to the Gulf of Mexico.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and the Audubon Nature Institute freed the turtles Thursday in waters about 40 miles southwest of Grand Isle, Louisiana.

This marked the latest mass release of turtles since about 500 were rescued in the weeks and months after the massive months-long oil spill.

“We were able to release these turtles because they’re now healthy, and we’re seeing recovery in the surface habitats of the Gulf of Mexico,” NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said in a news release.

The spill began after an April 20 explosion on the offshore d...

Forty two percent of the world

A Colombian project aimed at preserving sea life while providing employment has taken top prize in a contest marking the International Year of Biodiversity.

Coralina’s Seaflower Marine Protected Area was judged to have protected a “vast territory” of ocean, while helping fishermen make a better living.

Projects in Ghana, Japan, the US and several European countries were also lauded in the Countdown 2010 awards.

Prizes will be given at the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting here.

They mark the end of the Countdown 2010 project run by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) – the title being a reference to the declared but unmet international target of reducing the loss of biodiversity by 2010.

Despite the global failure on that target, the IUCN’s deputy directo...

The UN Environment Programme is turning to the wiki-world in an attempt to improve protection of the natural one.

Its new venture – protectedplanet.net – aims to help people visit little-known protected areas, so generating revenue and improving knowledge about them.

The launch at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting came amid reports warning that protection of the sea needs to be increased rapidly.

A target to protect 10% of oceans by 2012 will be missed by a long way.

Protected areas are one of the most effective ways of safeguarding plants, animals and ecosystems, said Charles Besancon, head of the protected areas programme at the UN Environment Programme (Unep).

“We know national parks and protected areas are important for many functions – they provide fresh water t...

British artist Jason de Caires Taylor used real people to create full casts and then placed them in the ocean off the east coast of Mexico to create a super creepy artificial reef in an attempt to grow coral and attract a marine ecosystem to the Cancun and Isla Mujeres National Marine Park. More pictures after the break.

The weird reef, reminiscent of a bunch of mafia victims being fitted with cement boots and dumped into a river, currently contains about 350 statues, and Taylor plans to anchor about 50 more.

Taylor

Biologists have discovered a new species of fish in one of the world’s deepest ocean trenches, previously thought to be entirely devoid of fish.

They captured images of the creature, a type of snailfish, in the Peru-Chile trench in the south-east Pacific Ocean.

The trench is more than 8,000m deep; the fish were found at 7,000m.

This is the fifth deep trench the team has investigated and they found it to harbour the greatest diversity of species of any they have explored.

Dr Alan Jamieson, the University of Aberdeen marine biologist who led the study, said that he and his team also captured images of a group of cusk-eels in what he described as a “feeding frenzy”.

“The eels were at 6,000m and we’ve never seen anything at that particular depth before,” he told the BBC.

“I’d put money on [th...

A new project aims to use old Royal Navy logbooks to help build a more accurate picture of how our climate has changed over the last century.

The public are being called upon to re-trace the routes taken by some 280 Royal Navy ships including historic vessels.

We volunteers will transcribe information about weather, and other events, from images of ships’ logbooks.

This will help provide invaluable information about the past climate.

The project, called OldWeather.org, will also help fill in gaps in our knowledge of an important stage in British history.

“These naval logbooks contain an amazing treasure trove of information but because the entries are handwritten they are incredibly difficult for a computer to read,” said Dr Chris Lintott of Oxford University, one of the team behind OldWea...

In a record-breaking journey, a female humpback whale has travelled across a quarter of the globe, a distance of at least 10,000km.

The event, reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, is the longest documented movement by a mammal.

Its voyage was also twice the distance that the whales typically migrate each season to new breeding grounds.

Scientists say the extreme behaviour shows how “flexible” these animals are.

Explore and adapt

The female whale was spotted and photographed twice – once at its regular breeding ground in Brazil, then later off the coast of Madagascar.

The shortest distance between these two locations is 9,800km.

The research team, led by Dr Peter Stevick from the College of the Atlantic in Maine, US, thinks the whale may have travelled this far in two dist...

Harmful algal blooms have the potential to lay waste to coral reefs.

Scientists studying coral reefs in the Gulf of Oman have issued the warning after being shocked by the impact of one large-scale bloom, which destroyed a coral reef in just three weeks.

Around 95% of the hard coral beneath the algae died off and 70% fewer fishes were observed in the area.

The rapidly growing patches of microscopic marine plants starve coral of sunlight and oxygen.

Coral reefs are increasingly under threat from environmental stress in the form of climate change, coastal development, overfishing, and pollution.

Climate change is suspected of causing a number of coral bleaching events, as rising sea temperatures stress coral communities.

But the latest study, published in the journal Marine Pollution Bullet...