Eleven suspected abalone poachers have been arrested in northern California, officials said Friday.

Since the tide was unusually low in Mendocino County, California Department of Fish & Game wardens were aware of the increased risk of poaching activity and kept their eyes on the coast line, including the coral reefs that had become exposed as the water disappeared.

American fishing captain Linda Greenlaw, best known for her depiction in the book “The Perfect Storm” and the film on which it was based, has been convicted of illegally entering and fishing in Canadian waters.

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.

North Carolina State University engineers have created a non-toxic ship hull coating that resists the build up of barnacles.

As reported earlier here and here, the retired 523-foot military vessel “Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg” was scheduled to be sunk this month to become an artificial reef off the Floridian coast, and we can now happily report that everything has gone according to plan.

Eleven of the 18 freshwater stingrays living at the U.S. National Zoo died over the holiday weekened, together with two arowanas. All dead fishes were residents of the zoo’s Amazonia exhibit; a 55,000-gallon (208,000 L) aquarium designed to replicate a flooded Amazon forest. Zoo officials are now suspecting low oxygen levels to be behind the sudden mass death.

Picture [...]

“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.

The 2009 whaling season has now started in the waters off Iceland.

Iceland and Norway are the only two countries that openly defy the international whaling moratorium; Japan is instead using a loop whole, claiming their whaling to be carried out for scientific purposes.

Four Pacific Angel sharks have been born at the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco, USA. The pups weighed between 115 and 120 grams at birth and measured 21-24 cm.

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.

After acknowledging the failure of current fishery policies within the union, EU officials are now considering banning the practice of discarding fish at sea.

In this blog we have written a lot about the sensitive issue of bottom trawling, but unlike what many of us think, the bottom trawling debate is not a new 20th century environmental concern.

If you want to learn more about how the charismatic creatures known as stingrays feed, you should check out a new study published in the most recent issue of Neotropical Ichthyology.