Mongabay series: Oceans

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…

Much of the fishing that takes place in international waters would be unprofitable without the billions of dollars in subsidies pumped in by governments to sustain the ecologically destructive industry,…

Coral reef conservation efforts will soon get a major boost with a global monitoring system that will detect physical changes in coral cover at high resolution on a daily basis,…

Fishing nets and lines kill more young white sharks living near Mexico and southern California than any other cause of death, a new study has found. A team of researchers…

A team of scientists has tracked a whale shark (Rhincodon typus) across more than 20,000 kilometers (over 12,000 miles) of ocean, the longest migration ever recorded for the species. In…

Zhang Lin spends much of his time with his right eye glued to a spotting scope, scanning the tidal flats of Rudong and other coastal regions of the Yellow Sea…

In a span of five days in late April, Mexican police arrested two men attempting to take hundreds of dried swim bladders, harvested from a critically endangered species of fish,…

Tomorrow, April 21, marks World Fish Migration Day. Many animal species make lengthy migrations as one-time or annual portions of their life cycle. Whereas journeys by birds between North and…

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has published the first list of foreign fisheries, detailing the risks that commercial fishing around the world pose to marine mammals. “The…

Brazil will soon have four vast marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Atlantic Ocean, covering an area of more than 920,000 square kilometers (355,200 square miles). The new designation will increase the…

North Atlantic right whales face an increasingly uncertain future. Despite two decades of intensive monitoring and protection, their numbers have hit a seven-year skid, with an estimated 451 right whales…

Australia is known for protecting its sea life in a 3.3 million square kilometer (1.3 million square mile) system of marine parks that covers 36 percent of the country’s oceans.…

Scientists have described a new zone in the Caribbean’s deep ocean, shining a light on a little-known world that’s home to numerous previously unidentified reef-fish species. The area in question…