Is ritual slaughtering of animals on the beach to blame for two fatal shark attacks in the waters off Port St Johns this year?

After two young men died after being attacked by sharks, a task team was set up to investigate the attacks and their conclusion, presented in an official report released on Tuesday, is that the sharks were attracted to the beach by the smell of blood and other animal remains from the ritual slaughtering of animals.

An important step in the ground-breaking Clean Seas Tuna breeding program was taken today when millions of dollars worth of Southern Bluefin Tuna was airlifted from sea pens off South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula to an on-shore breeding facility at Arno Bay.

Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology have undertaken what is believed to be the very first CT scan of eggs inside a coelacanth fish.

“I was surprised to see that all the eggs were the same size,” said Dr Norihiro Okada, a bioscience professor at the university and a member of the research team. “I hope to do research into why this is.”

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.

To demonstrate the level of toxic material in a brand of anti-dandruff shampoo, a Danish television presenter poured diluted shampoo into a fish tank on a 2004 episode of the consumer affairs show she fronted.

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.

A new cichlid species has been described from the Río Negro and Río Tacuarí basins in the Uruguay River drainage by Uruguay ichthyologists Iván González-Bergonzoni, Marcelo Loureiro and Sebastián Oviedo.

In a recent issue of the journal Zootaxa, researchers Gertrud Konings-Dudin, Adrianus Konings and Jay Stauffer have described and named three new species of cichlid from the genus Melanochromis; two of them being fairly widespread among aquarists keeping African cichlids.

Indonesia will create Southeast Asia’s largest marine park in the Savu Sea, Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries Freddy Numberi said on Wednesday at the World Ocean Conference in Manado, Sulawesi.

The Savu Marine National Park will cover 3.5 million hectares in an incredibly diverse area where you can find no less than 500 coral species, over 300 recognized species of fish and ……

While conducting magnetic experiments in 2006, the company SharkDefense Technologies discovered how certain metal alloys would keep sharks away by affecting the shark’s electric sense.

Have you ever tried to keep a seahorse alive in an aquarium only to fail miserably? Well, to add insult to injury, these creatures seem to be much sturdier than previously believed, because how else can you explain the amazing survival of a British seahorse found three miles inland in Weymouth, Dorset?

As reported earlier today, a Sarpa salpa fish has been caught in British waters, the first one since 1983 and the fourth one ever reported from the United Kingdom. The fish received a lot of attention, not only for being so far out of its normal range but also for being, well – far out in general. Sarpa salpa sports golden stripes along its body and can cause hallucinations in humans when ingested; hallucinations that may last for several days.

Sarpa salpa, a fish species capable of causing long-lasting hallucinatory experiences in humans, has been caught far north of its normal range. Normally found in the warm waters of the Mediterranean and off the African west coast, Sarpa salpa is an unusual guest in northern Europe. Only three previous recordings exist from British waters, with the third being from 1983 when a single specimen was caught off the Channel Islands.

Scientists are unaware of the state of nearly two-thirds of Europe’s fish stocks and do not have enough information to assess the exact scale of the crisis the European fishing industry is facing, says the European Commission.

Genetic pattern analysis strongly suggests that California and British Columbia urchins are not connected via larval dispersal and comprise two distinct populations. Sea urchins have one of the longest larval periods of any known marine invertebrate and it has therefore been tempting to assume that ocean currents must be mixing urchin larvae all over the place, making it difficult for any distinct populations to form. But research results from the University of California now indicate that these two Pacific populations are two clearly separated ones.