A global study tracking nearly 13,000 individual marine animals has uncovered a sharp disconnect between where these animals actually spend their time and where marine protections exist. The findings raise…
Trawling vessels pursuing fish are damaging marine ecosystems in Canada’s West Coast waters and could be operating illegally in some cases, and yet they work with insufficient transparency, a new…
PLACENCIA, Belize — After Hurricane Iris decimated the coral reef at Laughing Bird Caye National Park in 2001, many wrote off the UNESCO World Heritage site as a coral graveyard.…
Climate change has already caused significant declines in coral reef coverage globally and is expected to do much further damage in coming decades. Some scientists have held out hope that…
As oil companies push for drilling on the Amazon coast, an underwater war silences the ocean’s most vocal creatures.
MARERENI, Kenya — The scorching afternoon sun stretches across the semiarid landscape of Marereni, in Kenya’s Kilifi county, where salt and sea shape both the land and the lives that…
KARACHI — From the sands of Manjhaar Beach on the far outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan, an island is just visible 10 kilometers, about 6 miles, offshore. Mist rising from the…
ASTURIAS, Spain, and YUCATÁN, Mexico — On a mild February morning, Isaac Blanco quickly places half a sardine into each cage as his brother, Julio, steers their boat along the…
“I lost my sons, nephews, and grandson in this tragedy. I lost my older brother’s son. I can say that I lost almost ten relatives in this shipwreck. It is…
Among the many spectacular reef fishes swimming the Indo-Pacific corals, from Africa to Oceania, is the big-eyed, bulge-faced, thick-lipped, blue-green humphead wrasse, also known as the Napoleon wrasse. It’s among…
The European Union remains a major hub for global wildlife trafficking, with nearly 5,200 seizures reported in 2023. The confiscations mostly involved critically endangered European eels (Anguilla anguilla), timber and…
Tiny, translucent and no longer than a finger, juvenile European eels, also known as glass eels, might not look like much. But demand for these slippery creatures, particularly in East…
Clownfish are known for their remarkable ability to change sex to survive. Turns out, one species, clown anemonefish (Amphiprion percula), popularized in the Pixar hit movie Finding Nemo, have yet…
The movie Jaws, released on June 20, 1975, was one of the very first Hollywood summer blockbusters, and remains one of the highest-grossing films of all time, adjusted for inflation.…
Prochlorococcus, a genus of bacteria that’s key to oxygen production in the ocean, tends to disappear when faced with marine pollution. It lives throughout the sunlit layer of tropical oceans…
This May, divers found stony coral tissue loss disease on corals in Laughing Bird Caye National Park, Belize, for the first time. The team from Fragments of Hope, a nonprofit,…
Sending scuba divers down to survey corals is time-consuming and expensive. In recent years, scientists have developed other methods to determine what kinds of corals are down there just by…
Researchers behind an incentive-based fisheries program in Indonesia have reported a drop in shark and ray bycatch, but also warned of an unexpected rise in the intentional capture of these…
Samoa, an archipelagic country composed of nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean, is on the frontline of climate change. Rising sea levels, ocean warming and acidification all pose significant…
In the twilight depths of the Gulf of Mexico, about as deep down as a football field is long, U.S. Navy divers carefully snip small branches of corals with gloved…
For national and international policymakers, decisions on how to regulate — and whether to allow — exploitative human activities such as deep-sea mining require good information. A new study suggests…
Where are all the marine animals going? Given the vastness of the oceans, the countless species that live in them, and the lack of a global data set, it’s not…
In 2023, biologists Lauren Stefaniak and Marie Nydam had time to kill before their university workshop on marine invertebrates began, so they drove to a marina not far from Los…
Fish farms boomed globally in recent decades — more than half the world’s seafood now comes from aquaculture — but it’s not a boom all environmentalists support. One argument that critics…
In December 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than a dozen mega cruise ships were stationed in Bahía de La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, due to the tourism shutdown.…
The search for intelligent life is looking in the wrong direction. There are billions of stars in our galaxy, some of them older than our sun and with Earth-like planets…
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center's Ocean Reporting Network, where Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a fellow. BUSAN, South Korea — Delegates from more than 100 nations and thousands…
SAINT-DENIS, La Réunion — The intergovernmental body that regulates tuna fisheries in the Indian Ocean agreed to a suite of shark conservation measures, including rules to curb shark finning and…
MIRISSA, Sri Lanka — Sri Lankan waters are considered a haven for the largest creatures ever to have lived, the blue whale, a rare place for a resident, year-round population…
Coral restoration won’t save reefs from global warming, according to a recent study – at least, not the way we’re doing it now. The study, conducted by researchers at the…
This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance. In Native Hawaiians’ genealogical stories, says Solomon Kahoʻohalahala, the coral polyp is considered the oldest ancestor, and they hold spiritual relationships…
Overfishing in Southeast Asia’s coastal waters has been reported since the 1970s, driven by overcapacity, high demand and population growth. While most studies point to the depletion of nearshore fisheries,…
