Blog Archives

Hard coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef is near record lows in its northern stretch and in decline in the south, surveys by government scientists have found. A report card by the government’s Australian Institute of Marine Science says hard coral cover in the northern region above Cooktown is at 14% – a slight increase on last year but close to the lowest since monitoring began in 1985. A series of “disturbances” – coral bleaching linked to rising water temperatures, crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and tropical cyclones – have caused hard coral cover to decline to between 10% and 30% across much of the world heritage landmark over the past five years.

Mike Emslie, the institute’s acting head of long-term monitoring, said the report included glimmers of hope: individua...

It’s been a tough start to summer for the endangered North Atlantic right whale. Six were found dead last month in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, off Canada. Their deaths are prompting ocean officials to call for a swift response to protect the remaining 400 or so whales that are left. Part of this response came Monday night. Canadian officials announced protective measures for the right whale, including reduced ship speeds and increased aerial surveillance in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 

Patrick Ramage is the director of marine conservation for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Ramage is in Washington D.C. this week with IFAW, brainstorming for ways to better protect right whales. He spoke with WGBH Radio’s Judie Yuill about the plight of the North Atlantic Right Whales...

The sailing cargo ship Kwai docked in Honolulu last month after a 25-day voyage with 40 tonnes of fishing nets and consumer plastics aboard, gathered from what has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. 

The latest annual clean-up voyage by the non-profit Ocean Voyages Institute (OVI) used satellite imagery to specifically target discarded fishing gear. More than half a million tonnes of plastic nets – so-called ghost nets – are abandoned each year in oceans across the world, entangling and killing up to 380,000 sea mammals.

The circulating ocean current known as the North Pacific Gyre is believed to contain 1.8 trillion plastic items weighing over 80,000 tonnes...

Five small boats set out from Japan’s northern port of Kushiro on Monday with a simple aim: to find and kill minke whales. By 5 p.m., they had their first catch, according to activists following them. The ships would go on to catch another, Kyodo News Agency reported. Japan’s whalers hope to catch and kill hundreds more whales by the end of the year.

The hunt marked the official resumption of Japan’s commercial whaling industry after 31 years — and, with it, new controversy about the country’s insistence on whaling, despite concerns about cruelty and conservation, and amid dwindling consumer demand for whale meat.

On Sunday, Japan officially left the International Whaling Commission (IWC), an international organization that seeks to help conserve whales in the wild, whic...

Repeated coral bleaching events owing to global warming are having lasting effects on reef fish communities, including changes in biodiversity and permanent shifts in the range of fish species, according to a new long-term study published on 18 June in Global Change Biology (1). Future reef fish communities will have fewer species, dominated by herbivores and invertebrate feeding fish.

The international team of researchers led by Dr James Robinson of Lancaster University carried out six surveys of 21 Seychelles reef sites from 1994 to 2017. They tracked the recovery of reefs over the 16-year period before the next major bleaching event in 2016 and discovered permanent shifts in the range of fish species cohabiting the coral reef sites.

The authors then used statistical models...

Conservation of our natural world has never been so important; in fact, the environmental journalist John Vidal called biodiversity loss a “crisis even bigger than climate change.” Thirty-one percent of the world’s sharks and rays are threatened with extinction according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

These declines led to an interest in their conservation and sustainable management and one of the ways scientists and conservationists are coming together to protect sharks and marine biodiversity is through marine protected areas. Known better by their acronym, MPA, they are like the national parks we have on land in that human activities are strictly regulated than the surrounding area (or in this case, waters).

These places are given special pr...

A massive team of divers have broken the Guinness World Record for the largest underwater cleanup. The team of 633 people organised by Dixie Divers in Florida picked up litter from the seabed near the Deerfield Beach International Fishing Pier on Saturday.

The marine conservation non-profit project AWARE and the scuba diving agency PADI also supported the event, aiming to show how conservation is bringing people together more than ever before.

Arlington Pavan, who owns the Dixie Divers facility, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on the weekend: “It’s amazing to see everybody here, happy, just amazing.

“The last record took 24 hours and we did it in two hours, so it’s amazing.”

The Sun Sentinel reported that the Dixie Divers team broke the last record from 2...

The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn’t been seen in 12 million years, a Harvard scientist said in Chicago Thursday, and this pollution is rapidly pushing the climate back to its state in the Eocene Epoch, more than 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole.

“We have exquisite information about what that state is, because we have a paleo record going back millions of years, when the earth had no ice at either pole. There was almost no temperature difference between the equator and the pole,” said James Anderson, a Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the Ozone Layer.

“The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today,” Anderson said of thi...

Overfishing means to deplete the stock of fish, in other words, fish the ocean to its limits. Overfishing is one of the many problems in the world but unfortunately not a lot of people know about this problem. 

Overfishing causes problems in the food chain, since fish are a big factor and consumers in the food chain fishing too much can turn into a big problem. People in some parts of the world are experiencing invasive species such as rays and jellyfish and the cause is… overfishing. 

Fish help the ocean become healthier. Coral reefs help with the biodiversity in the seas by offering homes for all kinds of marine species, fish help the coral reefs by eating sea urchins, weeds, and stop diseases from spending.

Protecting fish is important so they can live and help balance the e...

A near record-size “dead zone” of oxygen-starved water could form in the Gulf of Mexico this summer, threatening its huge stocks of marine life, researchers said.

The area could spread over 8,700 square miles, scientists at Louisiana State University said Monday. That’s about the size of the state of Massachusetts. It’s also well above the five-year average of 5,770 square miles.

Experts blamed unusually high rainfall across the Midwest this spring that washed farm fertilizers along streams and rivers through the Mississippi River basin into the gulf.

The nutrients in the fertilizers feed algae that die, decompose and deplete the water of oxygen, the Louisiana scientists said.

“When the oxygen is below two parts per million, any shrimp, crabs and fish that can swim awa...