Blog Archives

One of the cleverest creatures in the animal kingdom has discovered an unconventional way to get high. And, so, maybe the New Year celebrations were a lot of Puff!.

Some dolphins are (ahem) puffing on puffer fish, which release nerve toxins when provoked that can cause a narcotic effect, reports London’s The Sunday Times. Underwater footage from a new two-part BBC1 documentary series, “Dolphins: Spy in the Pod,” shows young dolphins milking the fish of their toxins and then passing the fish to other dolphins.

“This was a case of young dolphins purposely experimenting with something we know to be intoxicating,” Rob Pilley, a zoologist and a producer on the series, told the Times...

Endangered North Atlantic right whales may be more at risk from oil exploration than previously thought. New research from Cornell University suggests the rare marine mammals are present throughout the year at varying distances off the coast of Virginia, putting them at risk from the acoustic impacts generated by seismic airguns — used to probe the ocean floor for oil and gas deposits.

Biologists estimate that there are only about 500 North Atlantic right whales. Right whales and other large whales are highly sensitive to the intense pulses of low-frequency sound such as those produced by seismic airguns...

Although some scientists suggest that coral reefs are headed for certain doom, a new study by University of Florida and Caribbean researchers indicates even damaged reefs can recover. In a 13-year study in the Cayman Islands, warm ocean temperatures led to bleaching and infectious disease that reduced live coral cover by more than 40 percent between 1999 and 2004. But seven years later, the amount of live coral on the reefs, the density of young colonies critical to the reefs’ future health, and the overall size of corals all had returned to the 1999 state, the study showed.

Much of the reef surrounding Little Cayman Island is protected, so damage from fishing, anchoring and some other human activities is minimized, said UF researcher Chuck Jacoby, who helped with the study.

“Nevertheless...

In addition to providing shelter and being an important part of a marine ecosystem, coral reefs can also serve as a record of long-term changes to the ecosystem. According to a new study published on Sunday in the journal Nature, an analysis of Pacific corals has revealed changes at the bottom of the marine food web observed in recent decades in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre may have started over 150 years ago.

The study team reached their conclusion by analyzing a hard protein material in coral exoskeletons that incorporates chemical signatures from the corals phytoplankton food sources.

“They’re like living sediment traps, recording long-term changes in the open ocean that we can’t see any other way,” said study author Matthew McCarthy, professor of ocean sciences at Universi...

We’ve known for a while that the ocean is rapidly becoming too acidic for some forms of marine life to survive. We know that this is caused by continued rising emissions of carbon dioxide, which dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean to form carbonic acid, which in turn dissolves/corrodes calcium carbonate-based coral reefs and shellfish.

Now we also know that ocean acidification does more than break down marine skeletons—it can actually cause behavioral changes in individual organisms. Simply stated, ocean acidification is making fish anxious—or, at least, anxiety as we measure it in fish.

Scientists from UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Canada’s MacEwan University recently published this surprising finding in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological S...

Coral has been prized in Japanese jewellery since ancient times. As early as the Nara period, in the 8th century AD, the royal crown of Emperor Shomu and his Empress Komyo incorporated 10 hanging, red jewellery coral beads from the Mediterranean Sea.

With the depletion of the Mediterranean’s coral resources, Japan itself has increasingly become the main source of top-grade material, and an increasing demand from wealthy Chinese has encouraged poaching in Japanese waters.

The Japanese and Chinese governments recently agreed to work together to stamp out jewellery coral poaching from the waters of Okinawa – a rare case of co-operation between the two countries.

Hiroshi Hasegawa, an environmental chemistry professor at Kanazawa University on the Sea of Japan said there was a correlation b...

Scientists have used satellite observations to create a set of high-resolution 3D maps of the entire Great Barrier Reef – a critical step towards identifying, managing and protecting what lies beneath the waters. Sitting off the east coast of Australia, the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system, covering more than 344 000 sq km. The reef’s diversity of life faces numerous threats such as climate change, pollution, fishing and outbreaks of the coral-preying crown-of-thorns starfish.

While these coral reefs are ecologically significant, they have proven difficult to map from survey vessels or aircraft owing to their shallow nature and remoteness.

The German aquatic remote sensing company EOMAP has used satellites to overcome these hurdles...

Meet Charlotte Burns – the youngest scuba diving junior master in the world aged just twelve. The schoolgirl, from Biggin Hill, Kent, has been diving since she was legally allowed to at the age of 10 and has already completed more than 70 dives. Coming from a family of divers, Charlotte was always likely to be a natural underwater, but even they are surprised at her development.

In just 16 months she has gone from trying her first dive, to enduring fierce storms in Cyprus and freezing temperatures of -4C in Scotland. She recently went back to Larnaca, Cyprus, where she completed examinations to become a fully-qualified instructor.

Charlotte, who has undertaken helicopter underwater escape training and ice climbing, also had to take further tests to show her scuba diving knowledge and sk...

HMNZS OTAGO departed Dunedin yesterday to monitor fishing activities in the Southern Ocean. New Zealand-designated Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) inspectors from the Ministry for Primary Industries will be on board to conduct compliance checks on the Southern Ocean’s legal fishing fleet.

“New Zealand takes its commitment to Southern Ocean conservation seriously. It is vital that, as a CCAMLR member, we play our part in tackling illegal fishing activities,” Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully says.

Having conducted patrols in the Southern Ocean for the last three seasons, HMNZS OTAGO has sound operational experience of the extremely challenging weather conditions.

“HMNZS OTAGO deployment is a good example of the way New Zealand Defence Force assets support...