Scientists from NOAA and its state and nonprofit partners have applied at-sea chemical sedation to successfully free a young North Atlantic Right Whale off the coast of Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA.

BOSTON – The fishery police underwent an audit recently to see how they were using the federal fines they collected. It has been discovered that the fines collected from fisherman were spent on things such as cars for managers, and a week long training seminars in Norway.

Due to the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, also known as the BP Oil Spill, parts of the Gulf of Mexico is closed for both commercial and recreational fishing.

The red snapper population living in the Gulf of Mexico is showing signs of recovery, according to new information obtained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States (NOAA).

A previously unknown field of endangered Staghorn coral has been found in Florida waters by scuba divers belonging to the non-profit group Palm Beach County Reef Rescue.

A 19.5 feet long squid – that’s almost 6 meter – has been caught in the Gulf of Mexico by a group of scientists from the NOAA’s* Southeast Fisheries Science Center and the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service. This is only the second known giant squid caught in the Gulf of Mexico and the last one was collected 55 years ago.

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.

coral reef

The Nature Conservancy and its partners’ staghorn and elkhorn coral recovery project, including Lirman’s nursery in Biscayne National Park, will receive $350,000 to help save U.S. reefs.

A Cape Cod company is now launching a timer that might help save dwindling populations of sea turtles from being decimated by fishing nets.

The new device is a 7-inch (18 cm) long silver cylinder capable of keeping track of how long a net has been submerged. Federal research indicates that a vast majority of entangled sea turtles will survive if they are rescued and given a chance to breath within 50 minutes.

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.

According to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS), Greenland intends to ask permission to hunt a quota of 50 humpbacks over five years. The request will be put forward at an international key meeting on Tuesday where the 40 year long moratorium on whaling will be discussed.

Thanks to a system of underwater hydrophones, scientists have been able to document the presence of North Atlantic Right whales in an area where they were believed to have gone extinct.

U.S. and Canadian scientists have documented the first known migration of blue whales from the coast of California to areas off British Columbia and the Gulf of Alaska since the 1965 ban of commercial whaling