Panamanian authorities seized six longliner vessels on Jan. 20 for fishing illegally in protected waters. They also opened an investigation into an additional 10 vessels that surveillance data showed had…
It’s November, springtime in Cancas, a coastal community in northern Peru, and the sea is calm; it only gets rough at the beginning of summer, which in the Southern Hemisphere…
Martín Maceda can still rattle off the exact date of his most memorable fishing encounter. On March 1, 2014, he was 8 kilometers (5 miles) off the north coast of…
On Jan. 15, 2022, more than 11,000 barrels of oil spilled into the ocean off the Peruvian coast. It flowed from a pipeline that had broken while the Mare Doricum,…
Plastic waste is increasingly causing problems for fishers. Fishnets bring up bottles, propellers get tangled in bags, water pumps get clogged with debris, and boats collide with bags of trash.…
Fisheries observers hold a job little known by the general public but essential to the health of the oceans: monitoring the work on industrial fishing vessels. The sector has its…
Rhythmic clicks, grunts and roars fill the Año Nuevo Island Reserve in California, home to a large breeding colony of northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris). For nearly 60 years, scientists…
For more than 10 years, researchers, civil society and community members and government officials in Ghana worked to create the West African nation’s first marine protected area (MPA). In January,…
Rosie knows the Lighthouse Reef Atoll like the back of her fin. She calls this atoll home and is a matriarch of the thriving population of Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus…
ROBERTSPORT, Liberia — The sun was scorching hot in the town of Robertsport as James Dayougar shook debris from his nets, which he’d just returned from fishing with moments earlier.…
JAKARTA/TANGERANG, Indonesia — Joy was mending his nets when a reporter from Mongabay Indonesia visited him last October in the fishing village of Ketapang in Tangerang district, on the northwestern…
Aotearoa New Zealand spent years spearheading the introduction of a new set of rules governing bottom trawling in the South Pacific Ocean, which more than a dozen countries adopted by…
On the fifth day after the burial of their chief, Seru Moce, 66, and other clan members gathered for a meeting to decide what portion of the sea to protect…
DENPASAR, Indonesia — Conservation foundations on the Indonesian island of Bali raised concerns in February over the volume of live sea turtles seized from traffickers so far this year. “The…
In his first week in office back in 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a historic commitment to conserve 30% of America’s lands and waters by 2030. Two years later,…
The mounting pressure on Brazil’s federal environmental agency (IBAMA) to approve the disastrous project to extract oil from the mouth of the Amazon River (see here and here) should be…
Within only a couple of weeks during their breeding season, more than 100 olive ridley turtles were found dead at Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar Beach. Conservationists blame the indiscriminate use of…
JAKARTA/BATAM, Indonesia — Mounting reports of illegal seabed dredging in Indonesian waters have raised ecological alarm bells following the resumption of a controversial policy of sand exports. On Feb. 10,…
MEXICO CITY — Fewer than 10 vaquitas, the world’s smallest porpoise, survive in the wild today, experts say. Illegal fishing has decimated their population in the Gulf of California, the…
BATAM, Indonesia — Stress levels among the population of Batam reportedly spiked in January after extreme rainfall over a saltwater crocodile farm allowed more than 100 captive predators to explore…
Small-scale fishers do labor-intensive work, generally in simple, locally owned boats using traditional technologies. Despite their toils, they are, as a group, often left out of social, health and economic…
Bottom trawling, a fishing technique in which vessels drag weighted nets along the seafloor, has long been condemned by conservationists for disrupting seabed habitat and capturing species indiscriminately. Yet it…
Hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) died on fish farms in Scotland in the final months of 2024. The mass mortality events took place as a parliamentary committee…
TANJUNG LEIDONG, Indonesia — At around 5:30 a.m., after the tide starts to recede, Zulkifli Dalimunthe rushes to the shore a stone’s throw from his house, where he anchors his…
Using only fins, divers wild-harvest abalone off eastern Australia's coast. The marine snail, known for its beautiful iridescent shell but sought for its meat, is a fishery worth more than…
In Finland’s freezing Arctic, lakes and rivers have nourished the lifeways of Indigenous Skolt Sámi communities for generations as they fished and herded reindeer. But three years of research undertaken…
When certain algae flourish in the sea, they produce neurotoxins that can sicken both humans and marine animals. Acute exposure to these toxins is known to kill whales and other…
Marine biologists diving in the Gulf of Thailand were thrilled in 2023 to rediscover several colonies of a rare type of ocean sponge once thought to be extinct in the…
The intrinsic value of mangroves and their related coastal ecosystems is getting more recognition than ever before, while actions to conserve and restore our planet’s coastal wetlands are gaining in…
This month Washington banned salmon aquaculture over environmental concerns, making it so there are no active operations on the U.S. West Coast. A new lawsuit now takes aim at operations…
Conservation groups in Panama are trying to halt the construction of a new port in the Pacific province of Chiriquí that they say could destroy breeding grounds and nurseries for…
A women-led reforestation effort has planted millions of mangrove trees with a high survival rate across swamps in Nigeria’s oil-rich and severely degraded Niger Delta. For decades, the Ogoni people…
