The fossilised skull of a gigantic predator has been found off the English Channel coast of southern England.
An algae bloom stretching from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state to the northern parts of Oregon has killed thousands of seabirds by stripping them of the natural oils that keep them waterproof. Without these oils, seabirds quickly get wet and succumb to hypothermia.
The Indonesian Navy (TNI AL) has officially announced that they are deploying five warships and one reconnaissance plane to protect the Natuna waters from illegal fishing and poaching.
According to geologist James W. Castle and ecotoxicologist John H. Rodgers, both of the Clemson University in South Carolina, toxin-producing algae caused or contributed to the mass extinction of dinosaurs.
In order to survive until it becomes a skilled hunter, a shark pups is born with an enlarged “super liver” that functions as a food source for several months.
The annual whale expedition off the Japanese port city of Kushiro ended this weekend after having caught 59 minke whales, the Japanese Fisheries Agency said in a statement.
Researchers from Emory University have identified the first fish to have switched from ultraviolet vision to violet vision, i.e. the ability to see blue light. This fish in question – a type of scabbardfish – is also the first example of an animal where a deleted molecule has resulted in a change in visual spectrum.
A research team from the National University of Singapore announced this week that they have created the world’s first semi-cloned fish – a female medaka fish named Holly.
A 10-year study of Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge alligators has yielded some surprising results. Despite having plenty of suitable males to choose among, up to 70 percent of the female gators in this Louisiana refuge preferred to mate with the same male year after another.
According to a new UN report, marine plants take 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere each year as they use the carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Most of these plants are plankton, but planktons rarely form a permanent carbon store on the seabed. Instead, mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds are…
The National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, UK has received some attention in the press after chartering a Boeing 767 to fly in a 42-tonne cargo of Caribbean fish for a new exhibition.
In most species, a male specimen will usually don’t invest a lot of time or energy in caring for young when there is a good chance that he is not their father. There are how ever exceptions to this rule, such as the Ocellated wrasse.
The Jordanian government has announced its plans to extract over 10 billion cubic feet of water per year from the Red Sea and send most of it to a desalination plant to produce drinking water.
In the ocean, krill live together in swarms, some of them stretching for tens of kilometres. Krill swarms are some of the largest gatherings of life on the planet and this naturally poses some puzzling questions to science: Why are krill living together? How do they find each other? Why are some swarms enormous when…
Florida anglers are being sharply criticized after a video of them free-gaffing a Mako shark off South Florida this week was made public on the Internet.
The rare Gangetic dolphin (Platanista gangetica) has been declared National Aquatic Animal of India. A few days after the formal declaration, which took place at a National Ganga River Basic Authority meeting in New Delhi earlier this week, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar announced that he has directed state authorities to put a halt to…
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…
The Maldives is planning to ban shark fishing in its waters, a move which would make the Maldives the first nation in the region to enact such a protective law.
Compared to the record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008, the Arctic Sea ice has made a slight recovery in 2009, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. Despite this positive change, the minimum sea ice extent in 2009 was the third lowest since satellite record-keeping started in…
A gigantic underwater museum filled with 400 sculptures will be created in Mexico’s West Coast National Park in on the Yucatán Peninsula. The artistic director is Jason de Caires Taylor, famous for his underwater sculptures, but other artists will also be involved in the project.
A marine park will be formed at Camden Sound, Australia, in an effort to protect the Humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). Once hunted to the brink of extinction, the humpbacks have already bounced back considerably thanks to conservation efforts and they are now much sought after by whale-watchers, particularly off parts of Australia, Canada, and the…
An international team of researchers have shown how one single gene mutation is capable of making the medaka, a Japanese killifish, loose its attractive colours and display a drab grey colour which renders them significantly less attractive to medakas of the opposite sex – unless that potential mate is grey too.
Telling a wild salmon from a farmed one can be tricky, especially if you don’t want to kill or injure the fish in question. To solve this problem, Dr Elizabeth Adey of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) have developed a way of using fish scale analysis to determine the origin of a salmon.
Fancy, a four-year-old Chihuahua, survived for more than 24 hours under water after being left inside a capsized riverboat. She was onboard a houseboat that sunk in the river near Toledo, USA after hitting a stump.
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.
Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of South Carolina has managed to solve a conundrum that’s been puzzling marine scientists for roughly a decade – where does all the oceanic phosphonate come from?
The gar family, famous for containing the largest fresh water fishes in Mexico, is currently at risk of becoming extinct – something which Mexican researchers are working hard to prevent.
The world’s first shark sanctuary will be created by Palau, a small island nation in the Pacific Ocean.
We have updated the crocodillian section of the site and it is now possible to find info about most crocodillians in it. American Alligator American Crocodile Black Caiman Broad Snouted Caiman
If you’ve ever wondered how the eyes of flatfish like flounder and sole ended up on one side of the head, you should take a closer look at a newly published article by Dr Matt Friedman.
According to Australian Southern Bluefin Tuna Association chief executive Brian Jeffriess, industry experts expect the tuna stocks to have recovered by 2013.
For the first time since 1947, a new species of cartilaginous fish has been described from Californian waters. The new species – Hydrolagus melanophasma – belongs to a group of sharks known as Chimaeras or ghostsharks.
When a six-foot-long gelatinous animal turned up off Brazil’s Bahia cost, initial accounts quoted scientists calling the creature “completely new, scientifically speaking.” However, fish experts taking a closer look at the video footage have now managed to identify it as being a member of Ateleopodidae, an elusive family of deep-sea fish known as jellynoses or…
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…
After a long period of internet problems we are finally back online and news posting should return to normal from now on. Thanks for being patient during the last two months.
A team of scientists at the Michigan State University has found a new, more efficient method for cloning zebra fish.
Dr Parker, from James Cook University’s School of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, and collaborator Professor Rocky de Nys, from JCU’s School of Marine and Tropical Biology, have just received a $7,000 Collaboration Across Boundaries grant to prove their theory that feeding seaweed to cow will improve their digestion and make them produce less methane.
Bermuda’s first Lionfish Tournament resulted in just four participants returning with lionfish for the weigh-in. Although this might sound disheartening, it is actually happy news for Lionfish project leader Chris Flook of the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo since it indicates a relative scarcity of lionfish in Bermuda waters.