Across Caribbean coasts, sargassum is covering the beaches. This smelly seaweed doesn’t just stink — it also kills fish and other marine life and impacts local economies by making activities like kayaking and snorkeling nearly impossible. In June, the amount of sargassum broke the all-time record for the amount of this brown seaweed in the […]
Scientists have long known that corals glow fluorescent in the deep, but, until recently, they didn’t know why. Now, a new study published in Communications Biology last month has an answer: to attract prey.
The ocean conservation nonprofit announced the winners of its annual photo contest in a blog post last Monday, in the latest iteration of a tradition that’s been running 15 years. “The annual Ocean Conservancy Photo Contest presents a unique opportunity to engage our audience in a fun way,” Ocean Conservancy said in an email to EcoWatch.
Police are investigating the mysterious injuries of more than 30 endangered green sea turtles on the remote Japanese island of Kumejima. The turtles–discovered by locals July 14–had been stabbed in their necks and flippers and were lying motionless on the beach, The Asahi Shimbun reported.
Sometimes all it takes is a single photograph to change someone’s mind or inspire them to take action. For Catherine Collins and her husband Douglas Frantz, that was a photo of a yardstick plunged 32 inches into filth below a salmon farm near Port Mouton, Nova Scotia.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston has ruled to reinstate bans on lobster fishing gear in an area about 1,000 square miles off of the coast of Maine. The ban is a conservation measure meant to protect endangered right whales. In 2021, the National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as […]
Environmental organizations Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic have conducted one of the most ambitious voluntary research projects to examine the size of the plastic waste problem in the UK. The results of The Big Plastic Count show that UK households dispose of close to an estimated 100 billion pieces of plastic packaging every year, while recycling […]
In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan triggered an underwater mudslide, which caused an oil production platform owned by Taylor Energy Co. LLC to collapse. The company capped nine oil wells, but the remaining 16 remained open, spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This spill, the country’s longest-lasting, is still ongoing, and in a new count, […]
Is market-based decision making compatible with a sustainable relationship between people and nature? A new assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that decisions about nature are being made based on a narrow range of values that precipitate biodiversity loss. “Biodiversity is being lost and nature’s contributions to people […]