My friends and family have noticed that in the past few months, especially since I started reading Taras Grescoe’s new book Bottomfeeder, I’ve become a sustainable seafood evangelist. (More on that book at a later date, it deserves its own post.) “Is that farmed salmon?” I’ll ask, or, eyeing some frozen shrimp, “Do you know where those come from?” In fact, I ought to tone it down a notch – otherwise I have a feeling people are going to stop inviting me out for meals.
I'm a little late on this one, but last Friday the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that as of August 25, 2008, 180,000 square miles of the Bering Sea (that's five times the area of California) will be off-limits to bottom trawling.
This morning the CBS Early Show featured our marine scientist Margot Stiles in a segment about this summer's preponderance of jellyfish. Why all the jellies? Suspected reasons include the overfishing and bycatch of their predators, such as the loggerhead sea turtle, tuna and swordfish, as well as pollution and global warming.
When I read the headline of yesterday's New York Times article, "Whales’ Lower-Pitch Sound Has Experts Guessing," I assumed the lede would be something like, "Whales' songs are deepening as they grow depressed about global warming." Just goes to show, I generally associate deeper-pitched sounds with sadness and mourning -- and I assign human characteristics to animals perhaps too zealously... As it turns out, the lower moans might portend good after all. The piece reports that the song of blue whales around the world has grown deeper -- and scientists speculate that it could be because their population is on the rise since commercial whaling bans began to take effect in the 1970s.
Ok, hold the New Jersey cracks: the Garden State might be in for a wild (and expensive) ride, thanks to climate change, a NJ paper reports.
Just in time for Discovery Channel's Shark Week, July 27 to Aug. 2, today we released a report revealing that as shark populations decline, the oceans suffer unpredictable and devastating consequences.
Good news for Pacific marine life, particularly sea turtles: the L.A. Times reports that the city council has voted to ban plastic carryout bags in the city's stores by 2010, unless the state imposes a 25-cent fee on those who request them.
I'm intrigued by an article yesterday in National Geographic News about the ways scientists are intervening to protect Pacific leatherback sea turtles in the face of global warming.
Well if this doesn't make you say, "aww," I dont know what will... According to a new study, female bottlenose dolphins whistle 10 times more often after they give birth so their little ones can recognize them in the crowd of adults, since dolphins are social creatures.
More than 400 penguins from Antarctica and Patagonia, most of them young, have been found dead on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro over the past two months.
