Blog Archives

On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Crown-of-thorns starfish is the scourge of the deep as it eats and destroys large swathes of coral and threatens the overall health of the reef. This starfish is proving difficult to find and eradicate with conventional methods, so Queensland University of Technology researchers have created a hunter-killer robot – dubbed the COTSbot – that’s designed to automatically search out and destroy these aquatic pests.

Responsible for approximately 40 percent of the Great Barrier Reef’s total decline in coral cover, the COTS has been munching its destructive way for quite some time now...

The Duke Marine Lab is taking to the skies to study marine ecology and endangered species. After receiving Federal Aviation Administration approval Friday, the recently-opened Marine Conservation Ecology Unmanned Systems Facility aims to use unmanned aerial vehicle technology—or drones—to gather data more efficiently than ever before.

With the approval, the laboratory can now pilot drones stateside in addition to its already-sponsored missions abroad. The Beaufort, N.C., facility flew operational missions in August along with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Costa Rica to track the nesting patterns of endangered sea turtles.

“We’re interested in using these systems to go out and count animals, to study coastal habitats and obtain coastal imagery, to s...

The state government in Queensland, Australia, has for five decades sought to prevent shark attacks through a program that attacks sharks. But new numbers on killed sharks off the coast of some of the world’s best beaches indicate Queensland may be a bit more bloodthirsty than necessary.

During the 2014-2015 fiscal year, the state government helped kill 621 sharks: 251 tiger sharks, 173 whaler sharks, 111 bull sharks, and eight great whites, according to Bill Byrne, Queensland’s fisheries minister. He denies that the program aims to slaughter sharks en masse, but instead seeks to trap those that are considered a direct threat to swimmers and surfers.

Environmental activists, however, argue the program targets sharks that are in some cases endangered, including, notably, the great whi...

Jacksonville University researchers have embarked on a study of critical importance to scientists rearing and out-planting coral on the Florida Keys reef.

Mote Marine Laboratory, the Coral Restoration Foundation, The Nature Conservancy and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have spent millions of dollars rearing and out-planting coral on the Keys reef for nearly a decade.

Jacksonville University marine science professor Dan McCarthy and two of his graduate students are examining whether coral reefs flourish when more parrotfish are around to eat the algae that battle for space on the reef with coral or whether certain species of parrotfish feeding on the live coral itself might also damage them, McCarthy said.

McCarthy will be working with Mote, which gave the professor ...

Scientists have tested a surprisingly cheap and effective way to assess the health of vulnerable coral reefs and to monitor threats on remote atolls: eavesdropping.

In a study, published Aug. 6, 2015 in Marine Ecology Progress Series, scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) used low-cost autonomous underwater recorders over four months to collect “soundscapes” of reefs in in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They showed how the collective sound recordings of reef inhabitants painted vivid pictures of the reefs’ abundance and diversity.

In a second study, published the same day in Marine Pollution Bulletin, the researchers recorded boat noise — showing how it could mask vital sounds that organisms make to reproduce, feed, and find new homes...

Using laboratory-based experiments, researchers have identified the common characteristics of fish most vulnerable to being caught by trawlers.

They found fish that were less able to produce fast burst-type swimming to evade capture were more likely to end up in trawlers’ nets.

The data could help answer questions about fisheries-induced evolutionary change in fish populations, they added.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal.

“What we were interested in, within a trawling scenario, was whether there was a variation among the fish in terms of how likely they were to be captured,” explained lead author Shaun Killen from the University of Glasgow.

“We looked at what role individual physiology played in determining which fish were captured and which ones were...

Researchers from across the globe recently teamed up to accomplish what might seem like an impossible (and scary) task: counting as many of the ocean’s sharks as possible.

The giant shark census, dubbed the Global FinPrint, is expected to last three years and involves surveying more than 400 reef locations around the world. Researchers will use underwater cameras on the ocean floor to capture images of sharks and other animals as they pass by, and the scientists are calling on boaters, sailors and other ocean lovers to help get this equipment into position, according to the Global FinPrint website.

An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year, according to a study published in 2013 in the journal Marine Policy...

Some coral populations already have genetic variants necessary to tolerate warm ocean waters, and humans can help to spread these genes, a team of scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Oregon State University has found.

The discovery has implications for many reefs now threatened by global warming and shows for the first time that mixing and matching corals from different latitudes may boost reef survival. The findings are published this week in the journal Science.

The researchers crossed corals from naturally warmer areas of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia with corals from a cooler latitude nearly 300 miles to the south...

The coral reefs and gin-clear waters off the coast of Cuba offer some of the best diving in the Caribbean and some of the best-preserved reefs on earth. And if travel restrictions on U.S. tourism to Cuba are ever lifted, the remote Peninsula of Guanahacabibes could well become a popular destination for American divers.

The land and marine reserve encompasses some 200 square miles (518 square kilometres) on Cuba’s westernmost tip about 135 miles (217 kilometres) northwest of Havana. It juts into the Caribbean, with protected forests on land, aquamarine waters lapping at white sand beaches and pristine coral beds teeming with a colorful variety of fish just offshore.

In some ways, the peninsula is just as frozen in time as other aspects of life in Cuba, where 50-year-old cars are common and...

The crown of thorns starfish which has devastated large areas of the Great Barrier Reef has infested areas around the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast.

Surveys going back to the mid-1970s have shown the existence of the marine invertebrates in the reefs off the Pilbara coastline. However, the numbers being currently observed are much higher than seen in previous years.

Dr John Keesing is the Senior Principal Research Scientist with the CSIRO in Perth and has recorded 185 animals per hectare.

“Above about 10 crown of thorns starfish per hectare will cause noticeable damage on coral reefs.” he told ABC Mid West and Wheatbelt.

Though the numbers are high in Western Australia, they are certainly not as high as those seen on the Great Barrier Reef.

For Dr Keesing, who began studying the...