Mongabay series: Oceans

KAMPOT, Cambodia — As the Trapeang Sangke estuary opens up into the Gulf of Thailand, the dense green mangroves that line its edges taper off in stages, from thick, full-grown…

The government of Belize halted all exploration for oil in its territorial waters from Dec. 29, becoming one of the first developing countries to turn away from oil in favor…

A single Pacific bluefin tuna sold for 36.45 million yen, or $323,111, during the famed New Year auction at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market last Friday, Jan. 5. The sale took…

Vast swaths of the world’s oceans are turning into “dead zones” as global warming and pollution strips them of oxygen, threatening marine life on a massive scale, a new study…

The Trump Administration has unveiled its plan to open nearly all of the United States’ coastal waters to oil and gas drilling. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced…

1. U.S. drops out of Paris In our 2015 ocean top 10 list, we celebrated the adoption of the Paris Agreement as a monumental achievement for slowing the warming, acidification…

TANINTHARYI, Myanmar — When viewed from the bow of a boat, the shoreline near the city of Myeik in southern Myanmar is all green. In every direction, low-slung mangroves blanket…

Scientists have for the first time captured extensive visual documentation of predation events that underpin deep-sea food webs. The research, which relies on hundreds of video observations captured over nearly…

For years, sovereign rights in the South China Sea have been an object of fierce contention among the states that border it: the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Vietnam (all…

KEP ARCHIPELAGO, Cambodia – It’s not long before midnight and an outlaw trawler has been spotted. The captain — a weather-gnarled old fisherman wearing just boxer shorts — winces as…

A sliver of ocean on the Southern Africa coast is getting a new chance at success thanks to an agreement announced Dec. 6. The National Administration of Conservation Areas of…

The past couple weeks have brought major news about two important new marine reserves. On November 24, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a decree creating the Revillagigedo Archipelago National…

Some of the fishing boats around Phu Quoc Island off southwestern Vietnam use trawl nets that drag along the seafloor, catching everything in their sweep. Others send divers into the…

VaquitaCPR, the emergency conservation team pulled together by the Mexican government in a desperate attempt to save the vaquita from extinction, announced last Friday that its capture program had come…

Trump’s 2018 budget, if adopted, threatens to kill already precarious Northwest salmon fisheries — crippling the local economies of US and Canadian communities and tribal nations.

The agency responsible for looking after the Philippines’ fish stocks has pledged to step up the science behind its management of the resource as it announced new reforms to the…

The modernization of fishing practices over the past 50 years has secured India’s position as the world’s seventh largest seafood producing nation, with 3.4 million metric tons of marine animals…

A new alliance, introduced today at an EU-hosted conference on oceans in Malta, has joined the global effort to shore up legality in the seafood industry. Between 11 million and…

It’s not just the Great Barrier Reef — coral reefs around the globe are in decline due to climate change, ocean pollution, and a number of other impacts of human…

The fourth and final meeting of a United Nations Preparatory Committee ended last week with a recommendation that the UN General Assembly convene treaty negotiations aimed at protecting the high…

Dave Ebert pulls up an image on his computer screen. The object in the picture is shaped like an oversize arrowhead, thin, yellowish, and fraying at its edges. It’s a…

After a two-year-long campaign that saw nearly 700,000 people call on Thai Union Group to shift to more sustainable and ethical canned tuna, the global seafood giant has committed to…

The slideshow in this story contains an image that some readers may find disturbing. Forbidding black cliffs relentlessly shuddered by massive Southern Ocean waves give way to a mountainous interior,…

Even if all the world’s nations fully cooperated to reduce carbon emissions and limit climate change, elevated carbon dioxide levels will continue to harm our oceans in the coming decades.…

New evidence lays out the intricate trade in animal body parts that conservation groups say are driving two marine species in Mexico’s Gulf of California closer to extinction. The battle…

Whales, dolphins, sea turtles and fish living off the coast of Gabon now enjoy similar protections to those designed to safeguard the Central African nation’s gorillas, elephants and other land-dwelling…

Ocean oxygen levels have been dropping since the 1980s in a pattern consistent with expectations from global warming, according to a new analysis of 50 years of global ocean data.…

The federal prosecutor for the Brazilian state of Amapá has requested that the environmental licensing process for oil giants BP and Total to begin drilling in deep water near the…

Research released last month suggested that the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and oil spill caused $17.2 billion in damages to the Gulf of Mexico’s natural resources — and a slew…

DENPASAR, Indonesia — A recent spate of busts has placed Bali in the spotlight once again as a key domestic market for endangered sea turtles. In February, Bali marine police…