An international team of researchers have shown how one single gene mutation is capable of making the medaka, a Japanese killifish, loose its attractive colours and display a drab grey colour which renders them significantly less attractive to medakas of the opposite sex – unless that potential mate is grey too.
Florida seems to have gotten its very own alleged sea monster. It lives in the waters off Singer Island in the Lake Worth Lagoon, not far from the Riviera Beach Florida Power & Light plant.
A team of U.S. scientists has documented the first transmission of the lethal phocine distemper virus from the Atlantic Ocean to a population of sea otters living along the coast of Alaska.
The first confirmed sighting of a leucistic Southern elephant seal has occurred on a beach on Marion Island, fairly near Antarctica. The entire seal is creamy white, except for eyes and nose which sports the brown colour normally seen in elephant seals.
As reported earlier , the European Union has decided to ban the import of seal skin and other seal products hailing from commercial seal hunting.
This has upset Canadian seal hunters since Italy and Denmark, both members of the European Union, are two major importers of seal products.
Yesterday, the European Parliament voted to ban most seal products from the European market. The legislative resolution was adopted with 550 votes in favour, 49 against and 41 abstentions.
Suggestions from the European Parliament’s will only become law if adopted by the European Council of Ministers, which represents the member states. The legislative report on the seal products ban was agreed with the European Council of Ministers in first-reading.
New laws proposed for managing the seas around Scotland include a year round ban against killing seals. If passed by MSPs, the new laws will make killing or injuring a seal an offence except under licence or for animal welfare concerns.
Modern seals, walruses, and sea lions are all descendants of animals that once lived on land but eventually swapped their terrestrial lifestyle for a life in the ocean. Until now, the morphological evidence for this transition from land to water has been weak, but researchers from Canada and the United States have now found a remarkably well preserved skeleton of a newly discovered carnivorous animal: Puijila darwini.
Tagged Seals are helping Australian scientists learn a great deal more about places, in the deep oceans of Antarctica, where they themselves can not travel. This summer 7 female Weddell Seals were tagged to help researchers gather information on the changes global warming is having on the oceans. The Weddell Seal is a constant inhabitant of the Antarctic, and they […]
In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA) have decided to investigate if the ribbon seal should be protected by law, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. NOAA will also investigate the situation for three other species of ice seal: the bearded seal, the spotted […]
