Ocean Conservation & Tidalpunk

The annual competition draws thousands of entries from across the world and brings together images from below the water’s surface that show the diversity and challenges of subaquatic life

Despite their distinction as one of Earth's oldest lifeforms and the key role they play in sustaining coral reef ecosystems, marine sponges are vastly understudied.

Sponges are notoriously difficult to study, for a variety of reasons.

I’m campaigning for legal protection for cleaner fish, because no one has done a proper assessment of the impact of removing them from Scottish reefs

Exceptionally warm global waters will not disappear. However, we can avoid the worst impacts of climate change and even hotter water temperatures by taking rapid action to strengthen local, state, and national climate policy initiatives.

A new study finds that the rate of ocean warming has more than quadrupled over the past 40 years — and pinpoints why.

Biologist says the massive numbers of jellyfish and algae in Tasmania’s Storm Bay are ‘drivers of harm in the ocean’

She said filming the Aurelia aurita – moon jellyfish – swimming through bioluminescent organisms on Thursday was “the most magical thing I’ve seen in my life”, but also a sign of something wrong.

Shallow coastal waters are hotspots for methane emissions, releasing significant amounts of this potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. New research highlights how tides, seasons, and ocean currents strongly influence methane emissions and how tiny microorganisms, called methanotrophs, help reduce their impact. These findings are part of a dissertation by NIOZ Ph.D. candidate Tim de Groot, which he will defend on January 31, 2025 at Utrecht University.

More, here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/01/250123163516.htm

In the sea as on land, climate change is driving shifts in the abundance and distribution of species. Scientists are just beginning to focus on why some fish predators and prey — like striped bass and menhaden on the U.S. East Coast — are changing their behavior as waters warm.

Kochi: The fisher community will intensify its strong protests against the deep-sea mining proposed by Centre off the Kerala coasts.

In a landmark ruling, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court concluded that the government must set limits on human activity, like industrial fishing, to protect marine ecosystems’ natural cycles.

Ecuador, in 2008, became the first country in the world to recognize in a national constitution that nature, similar to humans and corporations, has legal rights. More than a dozen other countries have through legislation or court rulings recognized that ecosystems or individual species have rights, including to live, persist and regenerate.

Until now, all of Ecuador’s Constitutional Court rulings regarding nature’s rights have involved ecosystems on land, mangroves and wild animals. Lawyers familiar with rights of nature jurisprudence say the coastal marine ecosystem case, released late last year, is a landmark decision that extends heightened protections to the country’s vast aquatic ecosystems.

Research on Scott Reef off Northwest Australia has shown that local coral connections help boost the resilience of remote atoll reef systems following bleaching and storms.

The research, based on extensive modeling of currents and other oceanographic variables, (...)

The study, reported in a paper published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, investigated the Scott system of reefs, an isolated group of three coral atolls 300 km off the northwest coast of Australia.

“These people are book smart, but when it comes to common sense, they have nothing,” said Travis Dardar about the project. Dardar is a Cameron-based fisher and founder of the group, Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (FISH).

According to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law, in the best-case scenario, the injection of captured carbon may temporarily disrupt fisheries because of drilling and seismic testing.

In the worst-case scenario, underwater carbon sequestration wells could fail and release the stored carbon, killing off the plants, fish and even the people in boats in the waters above. Storing carbon also has potential global implications, if, as opponents claim, carbon capture and sequestration will allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain the status quo as one of the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gasses.

The research “has revealed that storing carbon dioxide underground is not an exact science,” IEEFA said. “It may carry even more risk and uncertainty than drilling for oil or gas, given the very limited practical, long-term experience of permanently keeping CO2 in the ground.”

Ocean acidification has been referred to as “climate change’s evil twin” because it intensifies many of the same issues associated with global warming and presents unique challenges. While climate change leads to rising ocean temperatures and altered weather patterns, ocean acidification directly threatens marine chemistry and biology.

The pace of acidification is alarming, estimated to be about 100 times faster than any natural changes over the past 650,000 years,