Mongabay series: Coral reefs

WEST SUMBAWA, Indonesia — More than a decade ago, Amiruddin would climb aboard a small fishing boat under the cover of night armed with around 10 bombs. Amir, as he…

TATEYAMA, Japan — The late summer heat was no concern for University of Tokyo professor Nina Yasuda and her student research team, who descended on Tateyama, an aging resort town…

Riding his bike to work in the Netherlands’ Zeeland province, Tjeerd Bouma passed fields of pear and apple trees. His mind wandered. As a coastal ecologist at the Royal Netherlands…

As climate change raises global sea temperatures, coral bleaching events are becoming more frequent and intense around the world. Yet researchers say some coral reefs may have found a way…

KURUWITU, Kenya — Six days a week, Katana Ngala reports to his workplace, a rudimentary open-air workshop by the beach. Neat and well-shaded under huge palm trees, his workshop is…

How do you make people care about protecting marine habitats and wildlife? You tell stories, says Enric Sala, an explorer-in-residence and founder of the Pristine Seas project at the National…

Marine heat waves have led to widespread population declines of Australian shallow reef species, particularly those associated with temperate reefs, new research suggests. In a new study published in Nature,…

KAHU-KAHU, Indonesia — Fishers in this village on the northwestern tip of Selayar Island, in eastern Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province, are a fortnight into a community experiment. For three months,…

In April 2009, ocean explorer Enric Sala and a team of marine biologists dove into the waters around the southern Line Islands, an uninhabited archipelago in the central Pacific that…

Ultra-strong fibers, multi-legged robots, pain relievers — all are human innovations inspired by spiders. Now, conservationists in Indonesia are rehabilitating coral reefs using what’s known as the coral spider technique.…

In the eastern waters off Hong Kong, a group of scientists searching for coral-eating nudibranchs stumbled upon a colorful surprise: three new species of sun corals. These orange, purple and…

“When I was a kid, it was easy to find and catch fish and to see hatchlings of turtles walking around the beach on my way to school,” says Matla’ah,…

The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing a sixth mass bleaching event, the marine park’s authority confirmed today after completing aerial surveys of the region. This is the fourth time the…

On May 25, 1946, the United States detonated the first underwater nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to see what kind of damage it would cause. This…

Coral reefs are a unique and biodiverse natural ecosystem and economic keystones for many communities and nations. They only cover about 0.2% of the ocean floor but support 25% of…

Escalating ocean temperatures stemming from climate change are devastating the world’s tropical coral reefs. In response to the stress, corals, which are animals, sometimes unceremoniously jettison the algae that live…

Ten countries in the western Indian Ocean are banding together to create a network of marine conservation areas under the banner of the Great Blue Wall. The idea is to…

Nestled on the ocean floor in Southeast Asia are five sensor-filled boxes that will reveal the future of coral reefs. For the past year, from their secret location, the Bluboxx…

Feisal Abdalla spends his days on the sea, taking tourists on whale-watching, snorkeling and diving trips. He and his wife, Amina Sabel, also manage a string of ecotourism cottages along…

Israel’s “energy gateway” between East and West looks set to take off thanks to a new oil transport deal struck with the U.A.E. But locals, NGOs, scientists and Israeli government…

MANILA — In the town of Pilar in the central Philippines, a community of 11,308 residents looks after one of the most successful marine protected areas in the country: the…

PALAWAN, Philippines — Nicole Tayag, 30, learned to snorkel at 5 when her father took her to the teeming waters of Coron to scout for potential tourist destinations back in…

PALAWAN, Philippines — In a span of six months, Philippine environmental authorities have seized 150 tons of giant clam shells from a string of operations across the island province of…

Fish populations in coral reefs off Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique are being harvested at unsustainable rates, new research has found. In the study published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress…

SAMAL ISLAND, Philippines — Sixty-five-year-old Ruby Gutierrez wakes up at exactly six in the morning, and after preparing breakfast for four grandchildren (she has 13) heads off to the Adecor…

In our last Reefscape story, we explored the northern Marshall Islands in search of answers about the long-term effects of nuclear fallout on coral reefs. We visited Rongelap and Ailinginae…

Some corals look like giant boulders, others like branching trees—anything but what they actually are: animals. That is, unless you are lucky enough to see coral at night, when their…

On the morning of March 1, 1954, the United States tested its largest thermonuclear bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Code-named “Castle Bravo”, the explosion was more than…

Some corals stand a chance of surviving the current rise in global sea temperatures, a team of scientists recently reported, thanks to the diversity of their algal counterparts. They found…

The government of New Caledonia voted on Tuesday to establish marine protected areas across 28,000 square kilometers (10,800 square miles) of waters around the French overseas territory, safeguarding coral reefs, marine habitats,…