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Global warming has caused such extensive damage to the Great Barrier Reef that scientists say its coral may never recover. According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, baby coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have declined by 89% due to mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017. The study measured the number of surviving adult corals in the […]

Leading American non-profit The Nature Conservancy (TNC) this week launched a radical plan to protect more than four million square kilometres of the world’s oceans over the next five years through ‘Blue Bonds‘  designed to unlock $1.6 billion of funds for marine protection. The plan is to help as many as 85 countries refinance their […]

The climate action group Greenpeace released a report Thursday which lays out a plan for how world leaders can protect more than 30 percent of the world’s oceans in the next decade—as world governments meet at United Nations to create a historic Global Oceans Treaty aimed at strictly regulating activities which have damaged marine life. […]

Four scientists have banded together to make the case against the farming of octopuses, arguing that these intelligent cephalopods are wholly unsuited to life in captivity. Octopuses are difficult to farm and, despite efforts to do so for many years, they still make for a tricky business model. The biggest problem has been keeping young octopuses (known as larvae) alive, in part because […]

Corals that can survive Hong Kong’s ‘apocalyptic environment’ offer insight into how to better protect reefs elsewhere Successful conservation projects have the potential to transform the seas of southern China and beyond By Stuart Heaver, South China Morning Post In the chilly waters of Hoi Ha Wan Marine Park, in Sai Kung West Country Park, […]

Increasingly, scientists are relying on data gathered by volunteers to make their research happen. Authored by by Alastair Bland, Hakai Magazine A team of seven scuba divers crawled along the seafloor in a shallow bay off Tasmania, Australia, parting tufts of seaweed and peering under small rock ledges as they hunted for a rosy-hued fish […]

By David Jones Volunteers from all over the world are taking part in a citizen science project to help scientists work out how bad microplastic pollution really is. Plastic pollution has become pervasive, pernicious and persistent. In 2016, global plastic production was around 335m tonnes and it continues to be released into our rivers and oceans on […]

By Judy Lehmberg At the end of the semester in the advanced invertebrate zoology course I took, my rather dry, boring professor made the only joke I remember him ever uttering. We had just finished the phylum Echinodermata, the starfish and their relatives, who may not look too advanced but are the most advanced large phylum of […]

Gil Rosenthal learned to scuba dive in college, and since then he’s never been able to stay out of the water. Like most divers, he’s fascinated with marine life, and how, through the experience of diving, a colorful array of beautiful reef fish — angelfish, damselfish, wrasses, and others — swim all around him. It’s […]

REVEALING NEMO’S TRUE COLORS If you know a kid younger than 10, then you also know the names Nemo and Dory. And just in case you’re one of the few humans on the planet who don’t know what I’m talking about, these were the “stars” in the phenomenally successful animated film, “Finding Nemo.” Nemo was […]