Mongabay series: Oceans

New, highly detailed maps now reveal the state of the world’s wilderness, both on land and at sea, and the picture looks bleak. In a series of recent studies, a…

Read the other stories in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Maubere’s revival of tara bandu: Timor-Leste: Maubere tribes revive customary law to protect the ocean Timor-Leste: With sacrifice and ceremony,…

NUSA DUA, Indonesia — Global participants in the fifth Our Ocean Conference have pledged the highest amount of funding yet for new initiatives and commitments on the protection of a…

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…

Read the other stories in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Maubere’s revival of tara bandu: Timor-Leste: Q&A with a Maubere fisherman on reviving depleted fisheries Timor-Leste: With sacrifice and ceremony,…

Noise from ships changes the way that whales and dolphins communicate with each other, according to two studies published this week. Marine biologists know that an increasingly cacophonous ocean, filled…

A team of scientists has produced the most comprehensive assessment to date of trawling, a fishing technique that produces a sizable portion of the world’s seafood but is also seen…

Dead whales are a nutritional boon for polar bears, and they’ve likely helped bears survive lean periods during warm spells in the past when much of the Arctic was ice-free.…

MANILA, Philippines — Freedom Island is drowning in garbage. The last coastal frontier in the Philippine capital provides refuge to migratory birds and a thick mangrove forest there serves as…

Entanglement in fishing gear has claimed the life of a second North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) in 2018, according to reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).…

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…

"We need to keep this river clean,” says Muhammad Yusuf, a fisheries official from Padang, the capital of the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. “We’ve got to keep people from…

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,…

Whale sharks are capable long-distance swimmers, but it turns out that a lot of them are also homebodies. A new study published Aug. 9 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress…

For decades, researchers studying the global fishing industry had to cope with minimal data about what goes on out at sea. The ocean’s surface is so vast that most of…

While it might lack the coordinated attacks that lions or wolves can mount against their prey, a species of coral has shown that it, too, can pull together a collaborative…

New research confirms the fragility of life living in the world’s oceans, which are growing warmer and more acidic as carbon dioxide levels rise. The carbon dioxide that ends up…

Humans have wiped out most of the pristine parts of the world’s oceans, a new study has found. In the first global mapping of human impacts on marine environments, a…

JAKARTA — Suryadi, a cashier at a convenience store in Jakarta, says he prepares some 400 plastic bags every morning for the day’s shoppers. Sometimes he runs out before the…

Plant numbers have surged in a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean following the eradication of invasive rats that gobbled up seeds and gnawed away at vegetation, a new…

KUCHING, Malaysia — Conservationists have called on governments and the private sector to do more to mitigate the impact of global shipping activities on marine ecosystems and communities in the…

MEKONG DELTA, Vietnam — Shrimp farmer Nguyen Manh Hung lost his entire farm to erosion in 2016 after a series of ravaging droughts and floods. He and his family had…

TOULOUSE, France — Solving the problem of the growing amount of plastic in the ocean requires rethinking how we use and design plastic products, a group of scientists said at…

TOULOUSE, France -- Rats exact a punishing toll on island seabird colonies, decimating their numbers as they eat the birds’ eggs and young. Research has shown that fewer birds, and…

An increasingly ice-free Arctic could test the adaptability of marine mammals, a new study has found, as hundreds of ships in recent years have used the newly open polar seas…

Everyone loves a wildlife story. Watching the latest blue-chip natural history series complete with hushed narration about nature’s grandeur — or reading the latest online science about evolution or quirky…

The launch of an online crowdsourcing database for seagrass hopes to breathe new life into efforts to conserve the underwater flowering plants, which act as both important habitats for marine…

Shark-fishing outfits have for decades been catching dolphins, seals and other sea mammals to use as bait, helping drive some of those species closer to extinction, researchers have found. In…

PUNTA CANA, Dominican Republic — At 8 o’clock on a May morning the Caribbean Sea was calm, offering a clean window to the underwater realm. Flying 2,000 meters (6,560 feet)…

On Aug. 13 last year, the Ecuadorian navy intercepted a suspicious-looking vessel near the Galápagos Islands. Climbing aboard, authorities found freezers full of thousands of sharks, some of them endangered…