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A baby sperm whale found washed-up on a beach in Wales had plastic sheeting and other marine rubbish in its stomach, experts have said. The 22-foot long male calf washed up near Abersoch, Gwynedd, on Tuesday and is the first sperm whale to wash up on the Welsh coast in over 100 years. A post-mortem examination found that the animal was malnourished and below a healthy weight.

Experts from the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) who conducted the post-mortem were perplexed as to how it had found its way to such shallow waters given the species generally lives in deeper southern waters which are hotter and where they feed on giant squid.

Rob Deaville, of the ZSL, said: “A large piece of blue plastic sheeting was found in the stomach and ...

With mystery oil slicks still moving down Brazil’s coast, the Brazilian Navy sent more ships on Thursday to try to prevent the pollution of unique coral reefs of the Abrolhos Archipelago marine park, a haven of South Atlantic Ocean biodiversity. Marine biologists warn that the thick sludge of crude oil that has washed up along 2,500 kilometers (1,553 miles) of northeastern beaches for the last two months would have a devastating impact on the five small islands of Abrolhos.

The Navy, which deployed two frigates to join a task force of ten ships, said oil came ashore on Thursday at Belmonte in Bahia state, just 235 kilometers north of the archipelago.

“It would be a bigger environmental disaster that what we have seen so far on the beaches,” said Yara Novelli, professor at the University...

Researchers from the University of Plymouth have contributed to a new book addressing some of the most pressing challenges in marine conservation. Senior Research Fellow Dr. Emma Sheehan and Research Assistant Tom Mullier are among those to share their expertise in “Marine Protected Areas: Science, Policy and Management,” published by Elsevier.

Working alongside Dr. Jean-Luc Solandt from the Marine Conservation Society, and Dr. Sophie Elliott, from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, they contributed a chapter recommending an approach to Marine Protected Areas (MPA) management which isn’t only limited to protecting vulnerable areas of seabed within the UK’s vast network of MPAs.

Their paper outlines the legal tools the UK already has to protect the seabed from damaging activi...

Scientific research doesn’t usually mean being strapped in a harness by the open paratroop doors of a Vietnam-war-era Hercules plane. But that’s the situation I found myself in several years ago, the result of which has just been published in the journal Marine Biodiversity.

As part of the Ocean Cleanup’s Aerial Expedition, I was coordinating a visual survey team assessing the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

When the aircraft’s doors opened in front of me over the Pacific Ocean for the first time, my heart jumped into my throat. Not because I was looking 400m straight down to the wild sea below as it passed at 260km per hour, but because of what I saw.

This was one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, and the amount o...

Yesterday, the state of New York faced off with ExxonMobil for oral arguments in the trial alleging that the company misled investors by providing false assurances that the company was adequately costing climate-related risks. But win or lose, that doesn’t mean an end to deliberate misinformation campaigns. Here’s what we should all know about how to resist those efforts by Exxon and other big corporate actors.

Scientists have known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels is causing climate change. There is so much evidence that at least 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. It’s as settled as the link between smoking and cancer.

The fossil fuel industry has known about the role of its products in global warming for 60 years...

Interview with Chloe Harvey, Director of The Reef-World Foundation, about how the charity’s implementation of the Green Fins initiative in Egypt—in partnership with the UN Environment Programme—is helping protect coral reefs in the Red Sea.

The Reef-World Foundation—the international coordinator of the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Green Fins initiative—has just announced the launch of Green Fins Egypt, the programme’s eleventh country worldwide, in partnership with the Chamber of Diving and Watersports. We spoke with Chloe Harvey about the launch of Green Fins Egypt and what this means for the protection of coral reefs in the region.

There is strong and growing demand for Green Fins around the world—why was Egypt chosen as the initiative’s latest destination?

Egypt...

Australia will push for a million square kilometres of the Antarctic ocean to be protected as a marine sanctuary at an international forum in Hobart this week. Bids to preserve a large area of pristine ocean off east Antarctica have struck opposition in the past, including at last year’s meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, where China and Russia played a part in blocking the proposal.

Australia is co-sponsoring the proposal for an East Antarctic Marine Protected Area, along with the European Union, and will resubmit it at this year’s CCAMLR meeting. The organisation’s membership includes 25 nations and the EU.

The plan requires the support of all members for it to proceed.

The environment minister, Sussan Ley, said the decision to pur...

Conservation groups have expressed concern over the 2020 Baltic Sea fishing quotas set by the EU’s Agriculture and Fisheries Council (AGRIFISH). Total allowable catches (TACs) set by AGRIFISH fall well above the sustainable limits recommended by scientific advisors, despite a clause of the Common Fisheries Policy which commits the EU to meet sustainable fishing levels by 2020.

Andrea Ripol, Fisheries Policy Officer for the marine conservation NGO collective Seas at Risk, said: “It is outrageous that despite the legally binding deadline to stop overfishing for all fish stocks by 2020, European Fisheries Ministers have set five out of ten fishing quotas for 2020 for the Baltic Sea beyond the legal requirements for sustainable fishing levels...

The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Trump administration Thursday for failing to protect cauliflower coral around the Hawaiian Islands, the agency said in a news release. The bushy, shallow-water species has been devastated by ocean warming triggered by human-caused climate change.

A strong marine heat wave is now hitting Hawaii’s coral reefs hard, and researchers predict massive coral bleaching and death, the released stated. Cauliflower coral coverage around Hawaii declined by 36% from 1999-2012, and current conditions are expected to worsen that decline.

“Cauliflower coral is like the canary in the coal mine of our warming oceans. Marine life around Hawaii will suffer without bold actions to protect coral reefs,” said Maxx Phillips, the center’s Hawaii director...