Mongabay series: Oceans

On April 10, 2019, a fishing vessel known as Da Wang left Taiwan to sail out into distant waters in search of tuna. Two months into the voyage, a disturbance…

Balintang, PHILIPPINES — “Seaweeds are important to me because they give me joy when we plant them,” says Melinda Gimotea, as she crouches down among the pile of seaweed seedlings…

U.N. member states came tantalizingly close to sealing a deal for a high-stakes, legally binding treaty to conserve biodiversity on the high seas, areas beyond national jurisdiction that comprise two-thirds…

JAKARTA — The Citarum River that skirts the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, is infamous as the most polluted river on Earth. The rivers inside Jakarta aren’t in much better state, either,…

JAKARTA — Indonesia plans to expand protection of its seas to cover an area nearly the size of Germany by 2030 — and then tripling it by 2045. The country…

A new study has found that nearly 90% of assessed marine life will be at high or critical risk by the year 2100 if climate change accelerates along a high-emissions…

Healthy coral reefs, with their brightly colored corals and bustling schools of fish, are easy to spot underwater. New research into the marine soundscapes of reefs in the Sangkarang Archipelago…

DHAKA — Wasim Ali, 45, lived in one of the 55,000 houses destroyed by the deadly Super Cyclone Amphan in May of 2020. The tropical storm whipped up a tidal…

For years, seabird ecologist Jennifer Lavers longed to survey the colonies of short-tailed shearwaters on Figure of Eight Island off the coast of Western Australia. She’d identified this remote island…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has abandoned a plan to contract out long-term fishing rights to companies, following intense criticism from small-scale fishers and experts that the move would effectively…

DJERBA, Tunisia, and SICILY, Italy — On the deck of the Ghanem, which in Arabic means “winner,” sit eight boxes crawling with life. Blue legs and claws teem with each…

JAKARTA — Seagrass meadows are the fishing grounds of choice for many households in four Indo-Pacific countries, according to a new study that calls for better-informed management of these often-overlooked…

It starts with tiny deep-sea fragments — shark’s teeth or slivers of shell. Then, in a process thought to span millions of years, they get coated in layers of liquidized…

A new model that links climate change-reduced oceanic oxygen levels to smaller ectotherms predicts marine microorganisms could shrink as the world gets warmer, with impacts up the food chain, impacting fisheries.

In deep waters off the coast of Japan, a hermit crab is wearing haute couture. On its shell is the new-to-science anemone species Stylobates calcifer, named after the fire demon…

On July 12, oceanographer and geographer Dawn Wright was sealed inside a submersible, traveling to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Wright and…

In late June, New Zealand parliamentarian and Māori activist Debbie Ngarewa-Packer boarded an international flight to begin a 40-hour journey to Lisbon to attend the U.N. Ocean Conference. At various…

For decades, the nomadic Bajo people have crisscrossed the seas of Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. But due to pollution, climate change, overfishing and other harmful practices, their way of…

JAKARTA — Coastal communities in the tropics that rely heavily on both agriculture and fisheries are most vulnerable to the losses caused by high global carbon emissions, a new study…

RAROTONGA, Cook Islands – Every Saturday, a group of Cook Islands Māori youth slide into scuba gear, grab sticks from the ironwood trees (Casuarina equisetifolia) growing along Rarotonga’s beachfront, and…

Nearly one in four people across the planet don’t have access to a nutritious diet. But the latest “State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture” (SOFIA) report by the U.N.’s Food…

Earth’s vast underwater kelp forests are a vital source of food, pharmaceuticals, and more, while storing huge amounts of carbon. These undersea forests are also at risk, but researchers are working to restore them.

LISBON — Should we mine the seabed, a part of the world rich in resources, but less mapped than the surface of the moon? A growing number of politicians, scientists…

JAKARTA — Small-scale fishers in Indonesia will be exempt from an end to “harmful” subsidies agreed by governments at the World Trade Organization. Indonesian negotiators citing existing fishing quotas that…

International wildlife trade regulator CITES recently decided to allow an aquaculture company in Mexico to export captive-raised totoabas, a large fish categorized as being in danger of extinction under Mexican…

GORO, New Caledonia – Known widely as the “Madagascar of the Pacific,” New Caledonia is coated in remnant Gondwana rainforest and surrounded by reefs rich in marine life that constitute one…

GORO, New Caledonia — On the south side of Grand Terre, the largest and principal island of New Caledonia in the south Pacific, mountains rise like a spine out of a…

When is seaweed much more than seaweed? In the United States, seaweed farms are sprouting up all over the country, but on the east end of Long Island, New York,…

Talks aimed at curbing harmful subsidies for fisheries concluded in Geneva in the first multilateral trade agreement the World Trade Organization (WTO) has struck in almost a decade. The body’s…

March 2 marked a historic day for the global effort to eradicate plastic pollution. The United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) finally passed a draft resolution to create an international, legally…