Fish and aquatic news

Thousands of Greenland sharks get caught and die in nest off Greenland each year, but their meat is toxic to humans and the carcasses are therefore thrown back into the sea.

A married couple based in Florida Keys have been sentenced to prison for lobster poaching and will have to pay 1.1 million USD to restore the marine sanctuary in which they carried out their illegal activities

A 100 metre by 100 metre* anchor-free zone will be established in Studland Bay in Dorset bay to protect the largest seahorse breeding colony in the United Kingdom.

Yesterday, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced that France backs Monaco’s call for an international trade ban for Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna.

The Netherlands now join Norway in the effort to save the European eel Anguila anguila from extinction.

Significant areas of coastal wetlands have been restored and enhanced in Port Arthur, Texas. The largest restoration took place in the Lower Neches Wildlife Management Area near the Gulf of Mexico where historic water flow has been brought back into roughly 1,300 acres of wetland.

As of August 12, 2009 the harvesting of krill in the in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) off the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington will be prohibited by federal law.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have developed an aquatic robot capable of collecting algal cells from the ocean and extracting the genetic information needed to identify them.

When the writers of the movie “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon” decided they needed a book on sharks to set the stage for their newest b-flick, they didn’t make up a phoney professor and write the necessary lines on their own. Instead, they used a very real book written by a very real Manhattan based marine conservationists

Larry, a 3-foot-long Tawny nurse shark (Nebrius ferrugineus) has been moved from his cramped dwellings in a Burbank pet store to the Birch Aquarium, a public aquarium and museum capable of offering him much more spacious accommodations. The Birch Aquarium is a part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, which in turn is part of the University of California in San Diego.

Ballast water is great for stabilizing a ship in rough waters. Unfortunately, it is equally great at carrying all sorts of aquatic organisms across the world before releasing them into new ecosystems where many of them become problematic invasive species.

Tens of thousands of crab pots litter the ocean floor, forming lethal obstacle courses of plastic lines and weighed-down metal cylinders. Lost crab pots are responsible for killing a long row of air breathing ocean dwellers, such as whales, sea lions and turtles.

Ever wondered how the turtle got its shell? So has a Japanese team of scientist and they decided to investigate the subject by comparing turtle embryos with those of chicks and mice.

The invasive kelp Undaria pinnatifida is has now spread from Los Angeles to San Francisco Bay, despite eradication efforts.

New coral reefs and hills have been discovered in Lónsdjúp, off Iceland’s eastern coast.