Shark Advocates International is giving a warm welcome to progress towards helping conserve sharks. This progress was made at the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) this week.

A brand new kind of fish has just been found in one of the dark “lifeless” areas of the ocean. It was previously thought that the area was devoid of fish, researchers say.

Researchers from the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University and the Smithsonian have brought the first frozen Hawaiian coral bank into existence to try and prevent them from becoming extinct and to preserve their diverse population in Hawaii.

It has been over 3 weeks since BP has capped its spewing oil well. The skimming operations to help clean up the mess have all but ground to a halt, and researchers are saying that less than a third of the oil remains in the Gulf of Mexico.

The first global census of life in the sea has logged some 230,000 species, however a ten year study on the subject performed by over 300 scientists warns of mass extinctions.

The Lynx Nudibranch, known in scientific circles as Phidiana lynceus, is a rather interesting marine animal. It can be amazingly efficient at getting rid of hydroid pests, but it must have access to a continuous source of food.

There have been two separate studies in which researchers discovered that the ocean heating up has caused a massive decline in the amount of plant life in the ocean over the past 100 years. The studies also indicated that there is a link between the ambient temperature of the water of the ocean and the different patterns of marine biodiversity.

Bowhead whales apparently have the ability to sniff the air! This discovery could drastically change our theories on how baleen whales find their food, as researchers now have a sneaking suspicion that the bowhead whales actually sniff out swarms of krill, their main food source.

Barnacles are capable of attaching themselves to virtually any underwater surface; from whale skin and turtle shells to ship hulls and pier structures. Just how they manage to keep themselves anchored has remained a mystery; a multimillion mystery since barnacles increase fuel consumption by adding additional drag to the submerged parts of marine vessels. Scientists knew that the barnacles used a type of glue, but they didn’t understand how it worked and why it was so strong.

Lack of iron is a limiting factor for plankton growth in many parts of the ocean, especially in the southern oceans and parts of the eastern Pacific. Scientists at the University of Leeds, UK, have now showed that acid in the atmosphere breaks down large particles of iron found in dust into small and highly soluble iron naonparticles; particles which can be easily absorbed and utilized by oceanic plankton.

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.

In 1998, the gobies vanished from a section of the Great Barrier Reef as the corals became bleached. The corals have now re-colonized the bleached areas, which are located just of Orpheus Island, but the gobies haven’t returned. This lack of goby fish is puzzling Australian researchers, who had assumed that the gobies would return as soon as the corals bounced back.

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.

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.

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