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For the first time in more than 40 years, a great white shark has been recorded swimming off the Spanish Mediterranean island of Majorca. A wildlife conservation group captured footage of the shark wandering around the Cabrera archipelago.

The last confirmed sighting of such a fish in the Balearic Islands was by a fisherman in 1976.

Great whites can weigh up to two tonnes, grow to lengths of 20ft (6m) and reach speeds of 64km/h (40mph).

“The presence of great white sharks in Spanish waters has been a constant rumour,” biologist and documentary maker Fernando López-Mirones told Efe news agency.

“However, we’ve been unable to document their presence for many years.”

Scientists with Spanish conservation group Alnitak recorded the shark for over an hour.

“We watched the shark up close for 70...

The University of Queensland was part of research which found protected areas missed many unique ecosystems, and have a greater impact on fisheries than necessary. A collaboration with the University of Hamburg, Wildlife Conservation Society and The Nature Conservancy assessed the efficiency of marine protected areas, which now cover 16 per cent of national waters around the world.

UQ’s School of Biological Sciences researcher Professor Hugh Possingham said international marine preservation targets are falling short.

“International conservation targets such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals call for protection of at least 10 per cent of all the world’s oceans and all marine ecosystems,” he said.

“Despite a tenfold increase in marine protected areas since the year 2000 — ...

With Minecraft’s recent Update Aquatic populating the game’s oceans with kelp, sealife and colorful coral reefs, developer Mojang has now turned its attention to the real-life seas threatened by climate change, pollution and endangered natural reefs.

With the Minecraft Coral Crafters campaign, Mojang, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, is turning in-game designs from content creators into real-world underwater sculptures made from BioRock, an innovative technology that promotes coral growth up to five times faster than normal. The effort is led by Professor Wolf Hilbertz and Dr. Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.

“Coral Crafters is a celebration of the Update Aquatic,”  Emily Orrson, product marketing manager at Minecraft tells Heat Vision...

Experienced sailor Emily Penn has set out with an all-female crew to investigate the world’s largest accumulation of marine plastic. Her team will carry out scientific experiments on the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, now said to be three times the size of France.

Ms Penn said her own medical tests had convinced her of the potential toxic impacts of plastic, especially for women. Data will be shared with universities.

In March this year, scientists published their latest estimate of the size of what’s officially termed the North Pacific Gyre – this moving mess of plastic is better known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and is formed by winds and ocean currents that swirl the material around, in the same way that water spirals down a drain.

The study concluded that the amount of discard...

A package of funds to help local communities reduce plastic consumption is being launched at the first summit on marine litter in Oban. The one-day event brings together retailers, environmental groups and manufacturers to find new ways of reducing plastic in Scottish waters.

It has been organised by the Scottish government and comes on the eve of a ban on microbeads in Scotland.

Groups will be encouraged to create alternatives to single-use plastics.

• Non-recycled plastic costs Scotland £11m annually
• Why are microbeads controversial?

It could mean creating publicly available facilities which enable people to re-fill containers with drinking water rather than having to buy new bottles.

Another suggestion for the Action on Plastic Zero Waste Towns initiative is a scheme where takeaways ar...

The minimum to be expected to see in South-Pacific can be observed during the first ten minutes: multicolored tropical fishes, huge triggerfishes, tunas, banks of carangs and phosphorescent corals. In the following fifteen minutes, local specialities have been observed in drifting dive: a big mother loach, some small black-tipped and white-tipped sharks (a metre fifty maximum), some grey sharks (two metres fifty maximum) and a big tortoise at a distance within ten metres. With that, one already can be satisfied and it is what Gérald was thinking whereas they were crossing a rather beautiful coral platter but with no more surrounding fauna: “And here we are, it is finished … Not bad at all!”...

The Center for Whale Research (CWR) declared the whale, officially known as L92, “missing and presumed dead” on Friday. L92 had not been seen since November 2017 and was “conspicuously absent” from 2018 sightings. He was 23 years old.

With L92s death, the number of southern resident orca whales, who travel between waters in Washington State and southwestern British Columbia, fell to 75, the lowest it has been since 1984. Orca whales were listed as an endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 2005.

Despite a baby boom, the southern orca population has fallen by eight since 2016, The Canadian Press reported.

Deaths are being blamed on a decline in Chinook salmon, the whale’s main prey, as well as noise and boat traffic, The Seattle Times reported.

Conservationists are conce...

Amazing reef with large potato groupers, humpback wrasse, hawksbill turtles, and plenty of parrot, butterfly and angelfish. There has been some damage by dynamite fishing but there are still areas with good diving.

Lots of really nice hard and soft coral on this dive site but it was so full of reef fish that most of the time I couldn’t see much else. Great schools of barracuda, huge schools of snappers and some really nice bat fish. Cobias and schools of trevallies. Wonderful dive site.