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Whale carcasses sinking to the ocean floor bring a buffet of nutrients to the deep sea. But whales don’t have to be dead to be big movers of nutrients. Migrating baleen whales transport more than 3,700 tons of nitrogen and more than 46,000 tons of biomass each year from high-latitude feeding areas to warm, shallow breeding waters near the tropics, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications.

“In places like Hawaii, or the Caribbean, or the coastal waters of Western Australia, where nitrogen is often a limiting nutrient, migrating whales can have a big impact on the local biogeochemistry,” said Joe Roman, lead author of the new study and a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont.

Roman and his colleagues found that in some breeding areas, the ...

Australia’s coral reefs, including the lesser-known subtropical systems, are hit hard as the world faces its fourth, and most intense, global coral bleaching event on record, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) said on Monday.

Even typically resilient reefs, like those surrounding Lord Howe Island off Australia’s east coast, the world’s southernmost coral reef, are suffering, despite initially escaping mass bleaching seen elsewhere across Australia this year, said a UNSW press release.

More than 83 percent of the world’s reefs have experienced extreme heat stress since January 2023, which is the fourth global coral bleaching event, according to the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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When the UK became the first major economy in the world to commit to reducing its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, there was so little disagreement among MPs it was simply ‘nodded through’ without a vote, external. Six years on, the political climate is very different, the consensus at Westminster has shattered and reaching net zero is fast becoming a political dividing line. Labour has committed itself to an extra deadline: reaching clean power by 2030.

The Greens and Liberal Democrats want to hit net zero faster, the Conservatives are slamming the brakes on their policy and, for the first time, there is now a mainstream party, Reform UK, openly questioning the need to reach net zero at all.

Even a former Labour prime minister, Sir Tony Blair, has said that existing global a...

Great rivers of whale pee make a remarkable contribution to Earth’s cycling of nutrients, a new study reveals. While their giant poop tsunamis pump nutrients vertically, from the surface to the ocean’s depth, researchers have just calculated the astounding scales of their horizontal nutrient transport as well. Baleen whales undertake some of the longest yearly migrations, with humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) travelling up to 8,300 km (about 5,150 miles) from Antarctica to warmer wintering grounds. With them, the whales shuttle resources from nutrient-rich polar regions to the less resourced warmer regions of the oceans.

Amazingly enough, a huge amount of this nutrient distribution comes from whale urine, which disperses nitrogen and other elements through the ocean when nature ine...

Warm waters of South Pacific nestle a coral colony, unmatched in size, off the grimly far away island of Malaulalo. The coral, a Pavona clavus, measures 34 meters across, 32 meters long, and 5.5 meters tall, making it 12 meters larger than America’s previous record holder from American Samoa.

An underwater cathedral, this giant carcass of coral was captured in vivid shots during a National Geographic Pristine Seas expedition. Leading a team of videographer Manu San Félix, the group accidentally came across the coral while probing an area that was classified as a shipwreck.

“It is impressive to see something so big and so old-around 300 years old-bouncing back through such significant changes in the environment,” according to San Félix...

European leaders are facing growing pressure from campaigners and ocean advocates to strengthen regulation and the enforcement of protections afforded to many of their marine protected areas by banning destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling within their waters for good.

Led by a consortium of environmental campaigners including the Blue Marine Foundation, Oceana, Only One, and Seas at Risk, the Protect Our Catch campaign has published an open letter addressed directly to the French President, Emmanuel Macron and the EU Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans, Costas Kadis, which warns that without urgent action against trawling, Europe’s protected marine spaces risk being stripped of marine life.

Backed by a community of fishers as well as thousands of citizen activis...

The first-ever dissection of the world’s rarest whale has unlocked a succession of new-to-science discoveries, including that the spade-toothed whale bears tiny vestigial teeth, akin to human wisdoms, embedded in its gums and carries nine stomach chambers.

Not only has the weeklong examination of the spade-toothed whale – a species so rare it has never been sighted alive – provided a wealth of new insights into this vastly under-studied species, but it has broken new ground in how Indigenous groups can work alongside western science to further our shared understandings of the natural world.

The five-metre-long male spade-toothed whale washed ashore at Otago’s Taiari Mouth (a village on New Zealand’s south island) in July this year, marking the first time a complete specimen ha...

Why is the world still focused on climate mitigation when we should be prioritizing immediate climate action and carbon reduction?

Climate mitigation refers to strategies that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down the rate of climate change. While essential, it’s often a long-term solution.

What about climate action?

Climate action encompasses a broader range of strategies, including mitigation but also adaptation, resilience building, and disaster risk reduction. It focuses on both reducing emissions and preparing for the impacts of climate change that are already happening.

Why is immediate action crucial?

• Tipping Points: We’re nearing critical tipping points, like the melting of the Arctic ice cap, which could trigger irreversible changes.
• Increasing ...

The largest coral ever recorded has been found by scientists in the southwest Pacific Ocean. The mega coral – which is a collection of many connected, tiny creatures that together form one organism rather than a reef – could be more than 300 years old. It is bigger than a blue whale, the team say.

It was found by a videographer working on a National Geographic ship visiting remote parts of the Pacific to see how it has been affected by climate change.

“I went diving in a place where the map said there was a shipwreck and then I saw something,” said Manu San Felix.

He called over his diving buddy, who is also his son Inigo, and they dived further down to inspect it.

Seeing the coral, which is in the Solomon Islands, was like seeing a “ca...

Coral larvae reduce their metabolism and increase nitrogen uptake to resist bleaching in high temperatures, according to a study published November 12 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Ariana S. Huffmyer of the University of Washington, US, and colleagues. High ocean temperatures cause coral bleaching, which results from the disruption of the relationship between corals and their symbiotic algae, an increasing concern as global temperatures rise. 

However, relatively little research has examined the effects of high temperatures during early life stages of corals.

In this study, Huffmyer and colleagues exposed coral larvae to high temperatures at the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology. 

For three days during their first week of development, the larvae and their algal ...