The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says that its vessel, the M/V Farley Mowat, was ambushed on Jan. 31 by a group of poachers posing as fishermen while the ship was conducting maritime conservation patrols in a vaquita refuge in Mexico’s Gulf of California. It’s the second such attack in less than a month. The conservation […]
She hasn’t let go. An endangered southern resident killer whale known as Tahlequah or J35, has carried her dead calf for an eighth day in a row as of Tuesday, the Seattle Times reported. Researchers scanned the waters all day before the mother orca and her deceased newborn turned up near British Columbia’s Southern Gulf […]
Update, July 20: Genetic testing by Iceland’s Marine Research Institute revealed the whale killed off the coast of Iceland that some experts thought was an endangered blue whale was actually a blue and fin whale hybrid, BBC News reported Friday. The findings corroborate the claims of the whaling company responsible for the kill. Blue and […]
For years, the Japanese government has hunted whales under the name of “scientific research.” Now officials are angling to resume commercial whaling at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting this September in Brazil. At the meeting, officials “will propose setting a catch quota for species whose stocks are recognized as healthy by the IWC scientific […]
Starbucks is being pressured to cut ties with popular Hong Kong restaurant chain Maxim’s Caterers Limited over its offering of dishes with shark fin. Maxim’s said it phased out the controversial product in 2017 but undercover investigators with the wildlife conservation charity WildAid found that the eatery still offers shark fin on a secret “premium” […]
More than 120 pregnant female minke whales were killed this year in the Antarctic Ocean as part of Japan’s controversial “scientific whaling” program. The numbers were revealed in a newly released report presented earlier this month at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) Scientific Committee meeting in Bled, Slovenia. According to the report, Japanese whaling vessels […]
In defiance of international protests, Japanese whaling vessels returned to port with another 333 minke whales on Saturday after its months-long hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in Antarctic waters. According to the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, among the whales collected, 152 were male and 181 were female. About 60 percent of the […]
More than 150 short-finned pilot whales stranded en masse at Hamelin Bay on the west coast of Australia early Friday morning. Most of the whales did not survive after beaching themselves, according to Jeremy Chick, incident controller at Western Australia’s Parks & Wildlife Service. Roughly 100 authorities and trained volunteers raced to save the 15 […]
A notorious Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish poaching vessel, famous for plundering the Antarctic, was arrested on March 13 in waters belonging to the West African state of Liberia by the Liberian Coast Guard, with assistance from the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd. The F/V Hai Lung, known to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic […]