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” […]
Endangered whale shark fins were found smuggled into a shipment sent via Singapore Airlines to Hong Kong in May, activist group Sea Shepherd Global announced Wednesday. The fins from the endangered species were hidden within legal fins in a 989 kilogram (approximately 2,180 pound) shipment that traveled from Colombo, Sri Lanka through Singapore to Hong […]
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 […]
Last year, an international vaquita recovery committee rang alarm bells after reporting that there were just 30 left on the planet, with more recent estimates pegging the tiny porpoise’s population at only 12. Now, the plight of the world’s most endangered marine mammal—and the intense conservation efforts to save it—is the subject of a new […]
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 […]