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Tourists visiting Western Australia’s Pilbara are being told to give mating turtles plenty of space.

The Department of Environment says September is mating season for turtles and it is important they are not disturbed to ensure they breed in their natural surroundings.

Marine turtles travel long distances to breed, with some swimming more than 2,600 kilometres to find their perfect match.

Marine Conservation officer Marissa Speirs is urging boaters to take care and slow down to less than eight knots in shallow waters.

“I do understand that people are very interested,” she said.

“If you maintain a distance, if you’ve got binoculars that’s ideal, you can watch them from a distance and you know with a zoom lense you can see quite a lot through a camera as well.

“We do ask that people do try ...

BP’s bill for containing and cleaning up the oil spill has reached nearly $10bn (

The gentle ocean giant known as the basking shark

A beach litter survey and clean-up is starting across Wales this weekend, with Langland, on Gower, a focus.

Volunteers will be heading to 40 beaches across Wales surveying the amount of litter, as well as helping with the clean-up operation.

Organised by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), it is aiming to halve litter on UK beaches by 2015.

Litter on Welsh beaches is higher than the national average with more than 3,000 items per kilometre.

Gill Bell, MCS Welsh Officer, said, “Langland beach has given so much pleasure to thousands throughout the summer now it’s our turn to give something back.

“An hour or so of your time is all we ask to help give Langland back it’s sparkle.”

Langland is the “official” Welsh beach of the Marine Conservation Society Beachwatch programme and is cleaned qu...

Bacteria breaking down oil from the Gulf of Mexico leak have been fuelled by natural gas in the water, a study suggests.

Tests suggest that natural gas released during the leak gave bacteria within the water a “jump start” in degrading contaminants.

The leak followed a blowout and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in April which killed 11 people.

An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil was released.

The results are published in the journal Science.

Gas priming

David Valentine, from the University of California Santa Barbara, and colleagues, took water samples from within the immediate vicinity of the well head in June.

They found four distinct “hydrocarbon plumes” of oil and gas, with gas making up about two thirds of the contaminants.

Results suggested the gas was being rapidly c...

Ice floating on the Arctic Ocean melted unusually quickly this year, but did not shrink down to the record minimum area seen in 2007.

That is the preliminary finding of US scientists who say the summer minimum seems to have passed and the ice has entered its winter growth phase.

2010’s summer Arctic ice minimum is the third smallest in the satellite era.

Researchers say projections of summer ice disappearing entirely within the next few years increasingly look wrong.

At its smallest extent, on 10 September, 4.76 million sq km (1.84 million sq miles) of Arctic Ocean was covered with ice – more than in 2007 and 2008, but less than in every other year since 1979.

Walt Meier, a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, where the data is collated, said ic...

The world should safeguard coral reefs with networks of small no-fishing zones to confront threats such as climate change, and shift from favouring single, big protected areas, a U.N. study showed.

“People have been creating marine protected areas for decades. Most of them are totally ineffective,” Peter Sale, a leader of the study at the U.N. University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told Reuters.

“You need a network of protected areas that functions well,” he said. “It’s important to get away from single protected areas which has been the common approach.”

Fish and larvae of marine creatures can swim or be carried large distances, even from large protected areas.

That means it is often best to set up a network of small no-fishing zones covering the most vulnerable reefs,...

They’ve lost arms, legs and ankle parts, but nine survivors of encounters with sharks said Monday that the oceans’ greatest predator — not man — should fear the water.

The survivors gathered at the United Nations in New York to tell the world that their attackers, like the great white, desperately need protecting.

Paul de Gelder, an Australian navy diver whose right hand and lower right leg were torn off last year in Sydney Harbour, said he wanted to “speak out for an animal that can’t speak for itself.”

Rampant overfishing is driving some species to the brink of extinction, with 73 million sharks killed annually to feed Asia’s demand for shark fin soup.

“We’re decimating the population of sharks just for a bowl of soup,” de Gelder said.

The Pew Environment Group, a US-based organization t...

We know we have reached the end of the line with a number of fish species

After decades of protection, you might think that the world’s whale population is safe.

You would be wrong, at least in part.

According to the WWF wildlife charity, seven out of the 13 great whale species are still endangered or vulnerable.

Commercial whaling is one of the challenges they face, with an estimated 1,000 whales a year killed for the market, says the WWF.

Other hazards include toxic contamination and the effects of climate change.

But a more recent danger has arisen, in the form of collisions with ships.

Doubling of death rates

Nowhere is this phenomenon clearer than in the Mediterranean.

It is now estimated that around 20% of whales found dead in the Mediterranean had collided with a ship.

When you consider that vessels weighing more than 100 tons cross the Mediterranean ar...