Sea Lamprey spawning sites have been discovered in the River Wear at Chester-le-Street, County Durham, by local anglers. After being alerted by the fishermen, the Environment Agency found no less than 12 spawning sites, known as redds, measuring up to a metre across.
The water was released from the North Pine Dam in southeast Queensland between Monday morning and Tuesday night as heavy rains were threatening to overfill the dam.
The United Nations Environment Program has now released the first study of the impact of marine debris throughout the world’s oceans. The report found that plastic, especially bags and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, makes up more than 80 per cent of all rubbish found in the oceans.
According to predictions made by a team of NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Louisiana State University, and the University of Michigan, the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” is likely to become record big this summer. If there predictions are true, we will see a dead zone the size of New Jersey (7,450 to 8,456 square miles). Additional flooding of the Mississippi River since May can however increase these numbers even further.
During recent years, massive jellyfish congregations have appeared along the Northeast U.S. coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Mediterranean, in the Black and Caspian Seas, and in South-East Asian coastal waters.
“Dense jellyfish aggregations can be a natural feature of healthy ocean ecosystems, says Dr Anthony Richardson of the University of Queensland, but a clear picture is now emerging of more severe and frequent jellyfish outbreaks worldwide.”
The work towards replenishing depleted stocks of wild sea cucumber with captive hatched ones is moving forward at a steady pace; two Philippine hatcheries has now successfully managed to hatch sea cucumbers outside their natural habitat and one batch, comprised of roughly 2,000 juveniles, has been released inside sea pens in the Philippines.
The intricate symbiotic relationship between reef building corals and algae seem to rely on a delicate communication process between the algae and the coral, where the algae is constantly telling the coral that the algae belongs inside it, and that everything is fine. Without this communication, the algae would be treated as any other invader, e.g. a parasite, and be expelled by the coral’s immune system.
regon State University, the NASA Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry Program, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Maine/Orono, University of California/Santa Barbara, University of Southern Mississippi, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Cornell University, and the University of California/Irvine.
“We are not asking fishermen to stop fishing, only asking them to start releasing their catch,” says marine scientist Edd Brooks.
Brooks is a scientific advisor for the not-for-profit Company Shark-Free Marina Initiative, SFMI, who has just instigated a new strategy for preventing the deaths of millions of sharks belonging to vulnerable or endangered species.
Acesulfame K passes through the human body into wastewater, survives water treatment and accumulates in groundwater, Swiss researchers have found.
A group of conservationists and scientists are planning a research trip to the world’s largest rubbish pile; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, the Pacific Trash Vortex, or simply the Great Plastic Vortex; this gyre of marine litter has been gradually building over the last 60 years but we still know very little of this man-made monstrosity.
The Snubfin dolphin (Orcaella heinsohni), recognized as a species as recently as 2005, have been spotted while utilizing a rare hunting technique previously only noted in the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris), a close relative of the Snubfin.
The first-ever comprehensive global report on the state of shellfish has been released by The Nature Conservancy at the International Marine Conservation Congress in Washington, DC.
As reported earlier this week, Danish television presenter Lisbeth Koelster was put on trial after deliberately pouring diluted anti-dandruff shampoo into a fish tank housing 12 guppies. The aim of the “experiment” was to demonstrate the level of toxic material in the shampoo. After being subjected to the shampoo, all but one of the fishes died and a Danish veterinarian who watched the show decided to press charges.
A sinking date has now been set for the retired military vessel scheduled to form an artificial reef off Key West in Florida. If everything goes according to plan, Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg – a 523-foot-long military ship that used to track Russian missile launches during the Cold War – will be sunk seven miles (11 km) south of Key West on May 27.
