Blog Archives

The Danajon Bank in the central Philippines was once a geologic treasure chest brimming with marine life. It is the only double barrier reef in the Philippines and one of only six double barrier reefs in the world. Overfishing depleted stocks by 240 percent since 1960, according to one recent study, driving fishermen to more and more desperate measures in the hunt for dwindling numbers of fish.

As fish declined, the number of nets set in waters to catch them increased. It didn’t take long for discarded fishing nets to pile up by the ton on beaches and in gnarled root wells in the mangroves. Further offshore, these so-called ghostnets drifted untethered for years, snagging fish, sponges, crabs, and sea cucumbers—or settled on delicate reefs, smothering the corals.

Today, the same fisher...

Amid mounting concern surrounding of environmental damage on Thai islands frequented by tourists, Singha Estate in May opened a Marine Discovery Centre at the Phi Phi Island Village Beach Resort to raise awareness about the importance of marine biodiversity and conservation.

The Marine Discovery Centre houses four zones – the Shark Room, the Phi Phi Islands Room, the Clownfish Room and the Auditorium – and offers visitors interactive displays with educational material about unique marine species endemic to the region.

The new environmental attraction will also be a base for the re-introduction of clownfish, as well as breeding bamboo sharks and replanting coral reefs.

The company is also collaborating with national park officials, local communities and the Faculty of Fisheries at Kaset...

Drones guided by artificial intelligence to catch boats netting fish where they shouldn’t were among the winners of a marine protection award on Friday and could soon be deployed to fight illegal fishing, organizers said. The award-winning project aims to help authorities hunt down illegal fishing boats using drones fitted with cameras that can monitor large swaths of water autonomously.

Illegal fishing and overfishing deplete fish stocks worldwide, causing billions of dollars in losses a year and threatening the livelihoods of rural coastal communities, according to the United Nations.

The National Geographic Society awarded the project, co-developed by Morocco-based company ATLAN Space, and two other innovations $150,000 each to implement their plans as it marked World Oceans Day on Fri...

Wonderful coral. Easy dive profile. 30 meter plus visibility. We really liked this dive site. Big, big wreck with nice sponges and lots of fish in the vicinity. It lies on the sandy bottom of a beautifully reefed slope. Pristine coral. Terrific soft fans and loads of fish. Great dive!

In February 2018 the Government of Seychelles announced the creation of two new areas for marine protection covering 16 per cent (210,000 square kilometres) of its ocean:

• 74,400 square kilometres of mostly deep and some inshore waters surrounding the Aldabra Group, an archipelago 1,100 kilometres west of Seychelles’ main islands where endangered marine species live and breed, or migrate through.

• 136,000 square kilometres of deep waters stretching between the Amirantes Group and Fortune Bank, a swathe of Seychelles’ central ocean that includes areas important for biodiversity conservation, tourism and fishing industries.

The first area is a new Marine National Park that restricts almost all human activities in one of the world’s most ecologically important habitats, the waters a...

Life cycle of the bicolor damselfish, showing that understanding how the population changes depends on simultaneously studying the juvenile and adult fish on the coral reef as well as the larvae that disperse back to the same reef or between reefs in a metapopulation.

Populations of fish in the ocean are notoriously variable, waxing and waning in often unpredictable ways. Knowing what drives changes in fish population sizes is important for managing fisheries and conserving species.

For the first time, scientists have linked the ecology of adult fish populations inhabiting coral reefs with the dispersal of baby fish between reefs, reporting the dynamics of a living network called a “marine metapopulation.”

“It’s not like studying deer in a forest, where one need only count births and d...

Of the U.N.’s 17 goals to make the world a better place by 2030, one goal gets much less respect than the others. It’s not improving education. It’s not wiping out poverty and hunger. It’s Goal #14 — which aims to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.”

A new survey of 3,500 leaders in developing countries found that marine conservation is almost universally considered the least important of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals – essentially a checklist of priorities to help poor countries and aid organizations focus their attention on lifting the world’s most vulnerable people to a higher standard of living.

Several of the goals deal explicitly with environmental issues, and the new survey, con...

Japanese hunters caught and killed 122 pregnant minke whales as part of its Antarctic summer “field survey”. A report sent to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) reveals hunters caught 333 minkes in total. The team left Japan in November 2017 for the Southern Ocean and returned in March 2018.

Japan says its whaling programme is for scientific purposes, despite a 2014 UN ruling against its “lethal research” and widespread condemnation. In a new research plan published after the UN ruling, Japan said it was “scientifically imperative” to understand Antarctica’s ecosystem through collecting and analysing animals.

How many whales did Japan catch?
The country’s New Scientific Whale Research Program in the Antarctic Ocean (NEWREP-A) sent a report to the IWC detailing the 333 minkes cau...

Scientists working with dolphins at a marine park near Paris have attempted to measure how the animals feel about aspects of their lives in captivity.,In what researchers say is the first project to examine captivity “from the animals’ perspective”, the team assessed what activities dolphins looked forward to most. They found that the marine mammals most keenly anticipated interacting with a familiar human.

The results, they say, show that “better human-animal bonds equals better welfare”.

The study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, was part of a three-year project to measure dolphin welfare in a captive setting.

Lead researcher Dr Isabella Clegg worked at Parc Astérix, a theme park with one of France’s largest dolphinariums.

With colleagues at the University of ...

For the first time, scientists have videotaped sharks traveling a 500-mile-long “shark highway” in the Pacific, and they plan to turn it into a protected wildlife corridor in the ocean. Biologists have been attaching electronic tags to sharks near Costa Rica for years. They knew the sharks sometimes traveled south to the Galapagos Islands, but they’d never actually witnessed it. And they needed scientific — and visual — evidence to make their case for protecting the route.

To do that, they took some GoPro-style cameras and attached them to metal frames along with bloody fish bait. They’re called BRUVS, for “baited remote underwater video system.” The researchers dragged these contraptions behind a research vessel for almost two weeks.

And they waited, and waited, spending hours watchi...