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Fourteen Greenpeace activists, including at least four from the UK, have been charged with piracy by the Russian authorities. They were among a 30-strong crew on a Greenpeace ship that was protesting against oil drilling in the Arctic. The group was arrested last month after two of the protesters tried to board an oil platform owned by the Russian state-controlled firm Gazprom.

Greenpeace has called the charges “irrational, absurd and an outrage”.

‘Piracy of an organised group’

The 14 activists were taken from jail to the Murmansk office of the Investigative Committee, the Russian equivalent of the FBI, the BBC’s Daniel Sandford reports from Moscow.

There they were formally charged with “piracy of an organised group”, an offence that carries a 15-year prison sentence.

Those charged inclu...

Teeming with species, tropical coral reefs have been long thought to be the areas of greatest biodiversity for fishes and other marine life — and thus most deserving of resources for conservation. But a new global study of reef fishes reveals a surprise: when measured by factors other than the traditional species count — instead using features such as a species’ role in an ecosystem or the number of individuals within a species — new hotspots of biodiversity emerge, including some nutrient-rich, temperate waters.

The study, by an international team of researchers including graduate student Jon Lefcheck and Professor Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

Led by Dr...

Attempts to maintain biodiversity in the world’s oceans could be targeting the wrong areas, with the seas around the UK as important as coral reefs. That is the findings of a new report by scientists from the universities of Dundee and Portsmouth. They examined the importance of each species rather than simply counting the number of species in a given area. They found areas with fewer species, like those around the UK, were more affected by issues like pollution.

The researchers claim the study, published in the journal Nature, challenges conventional wisdom about what biodiversity means.

‘Catastrophic collapse’

Professor Terry Dawson, from the University of Dundee, said: “Conventional global conservation priority has focused on tropical sites having high biodiversity richness in terms...

A new study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has found that healthy shark populations may be a key to the recovery of endangered coral reefs. Monitoring of reefs off Australia’s north-west coast shows that where shark numbers were lower due to fishing, herbivores important fishes in promoting reef health -were also significantly lower in numbers. AIMS Principle Researcher and co-author of the study, Mark Meekan said that at first glance the result might seem strange.

“However, our analysis suggests that where shark numbers are reduced we see a fundamental change in the structure of food chains on reefs. We see increasing numbers of mid-level predators – such as snappers – and a reduction in the numbers of herbivores, such as parrotfishes”, Dr Meekan said.

“The parro...

Sea-ice extent in the Arctic appears to have arrived at its yearly minimum, scientists report.

The US National Snow and Ice Data Center says this summer’s marine floes were reduced in cover to 5.10 million sq km (1.97 million sq mi).

This low was reached on 13 September.

It represents almost 50% more ice than the spectacular satellite-era record-minimum achieved this time last year – when floes were reduced to just 3.41 million sq km (1.32 million sq mi).

The NSIDC describes this summer’s cover as a “temporary reprieve”.

Steadily warming conditions in the far north have seen the annual mean ice extent since 1979 – the beginning of continuous space-based observations – fall by about 4% per decade.

This year represents the sixth smallest cover recorded by the satellites...

Coral reefs provide a home to fish and protect coasts from eroding. But, they are threatened, and have suffered from ocean warming. In the Seychelles, a project is underway to transplant healthy coral onto dying reefs.

It’s early afternoon as the divers resurface. One by one, members of the team climb on board the boat that has been anchoring off the coast of the small Seychelles island of Cousin in the Indian Ocean. They start shivering in the heavy winds shaking the boat, and look exhausted. The’ve just finished their second dive of the day; each was one-and-a-half hours long.

They’ve been busy underwater, cleaning the ropes and nets of what they refer to as their “coral nursery” – a set of ropes and nets hanging from pipes, which are in turn fixed on the ground...

Conserving the country’s precious marine resources begins with showing fisher folk that protecting natural habitats will redound to more money for them, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-Philippines).

“Local communities are the delivery systems of conservation,” WWF-Philippines vice chair and chief executive officer Jose Ma. Lorenzo Tan said at the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) Philippines Forum in Makati City on Wednesday.

He stressed the importance not only of promoting sustainable livelihood for coastline communities but of showing fisher folk that they can earn good profits through sound business practices.

“By delivering bottom-line results that not only provide livelihood but create wealth, we exert a profound influence on sustainably transforming systems an...

Across the nation thousands of college students have joined a campaign, inspired by author and climate activist Bill McKibben, to get their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies just as they once got them to purge their portfolios of companies doing business with apartheid-era South Africa.

Yet even many of today’s climate activists are not fully aware that the greatest impacts of fossil-fuel fired climate change are likely to be felt in our ocean and coastal regions...

Federal and state fisheries on Saturday will open areas currently closed to spearfishing in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in hopes of putting a larger dent in the local lionfish population. Invasive lionfish are voracious predators that threaten Florida’s marine ecosystems and prey upon more than 70 species of native fish and invertebrates.

Lionfish easily fend off predators with their 18 venomous spines, making them a new top predator on the reef. They also reproduce every four days, year-round.

Recognizing the need to eradicate the fish, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have loosened restrictions for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation’s (REEF) lionfish derby on...