Category: Featured
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James Cameron could make history in a submarine
The media is buzzing today with news of James Cameron’s upcoming solo journey into the Challenger Deep. At 35,768 ft (more than 6.7 miles!) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, it’s the deepest spot on Earth. He broke a solo depth record yesterday during a test dive. Jacques Piccard and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh,…
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Fact checking the 60 Minutes segment on Gardens of the Queen
60 Minutes ran a really great piece on Jardines de la Reina or Gardens of the Queen (GQ), last night. GQ is a spectacular reef off of Cuba’s south coast with abundant predators including goliath and black grouper and Caribbean reef sharks. My PhD student Abel Valdivia (seen in the video above) is from Cuba and GQ…
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Helen Scales’ five ocean books
To continue our new series BOOK HOOK here’s my top five sea reads, which come courtesy of The Browser who recently gave me the delicious task of picking my top 5 books about the ocean – a perfect challenge to set an ocean fanatic/writer like myself. The only trouble I had was narrowing down to JUST FIVE…
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Underwater “Paper Parks”?
From this week’s Nature: “The easiest way to create a nature reserve from a car park is simply to declare it as such. The land is then designated as protected, and counts towards the relevant government’s targets to set aside a certain amount of its territory from development. That is a ridiculous example, of course,…
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Of polar bears and tipping points
This is a guest post by Dr. Gregory Thiemann, an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Greg is a polar bear expert that I met in Canada recently when we both worked with Polar Bears International on their Tundra Connections project. As I write this, I’m on a Calm Air flight enroute…
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Beluga whales 1, Sarah Palin 0
From the Center for Biological Diversity – my new favorite NGO: There’s huge news today out of Alaska: A federal judge just rejected the state’s attempts to deny Endangered Species Act protection for Cook Inlet beluga whales. Today’s ruling is a major victory in our decade-long battle to protect the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale,…
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Warming-induced killer crab invasion threatens Antarctic biodiversity
[Editor’s update: One of our observant readers and experts on deep-sea crabs, Dr Thomas Shirley of Texas A&M, points out that the photo above taken from the Mail article is of the tanner crab (Chionoecetes sp.), NOT the the giant king crab Neolithodes yaldwyni that is moving onto the Antarctic shelf. This is correct –…
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Bluefin land on the Red List: SeaMonster interviews the expert team
Every five or ten years since 1963 a growing number of wild animal and plant species have been assessed for their risk of extinction to provide hard data useful to conservation and management. The unlucky ones found to be slipping go on the “Red List” overseen by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature…
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Resurrection of a collapsed ecosystem: Cod rebound in North Atlantic
The catastrophic collapse of the mighty cod in the early 1990s was an iconic disaster in the history of humankind’s relationship with the ocean. New research now shows that, after decades of near extinction, cod is rebounding and dragging the collapsed ocean ecosystem back with it — bringing a rare and welcome ray of hope…
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Anatomy of a shark heist
Below is a guest post by Lindsey Carr, a PhD student in my lab at UNC. Lindsey is doing her dissertation research on the dynamics of shallow subtidal communities across the Galapagos archipelago. Her post is excerpted from a report she wrote for the Galapagos National Park about the catch found on the illegal vessel.…