Page 8 - Ocean Image News Today

In 2021, faced with an economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the island nation of Maldives considered lifting a ban on shark fishing that had been in place since 2010. A global outcry followed, and the government quickly abandoned the idea. The 2010 ban effectively turned Maldivian waters, a marine area the size of Portugal, […]

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 of the global ocean. At the close of negotiations on Aug. 26 in New York, however, delegates had failed to net consensus. Top sticking points […]

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 pathway, and that these species will face risks across 85% of their native ranges in the ocean. “It’s a pretty bleak picture,” Alex Pigot, study […]

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 in Sulawesi, Indonesia, shows they’re easy to hear too — for the right algorithm. The study, led by University College London and Zoological Society of […]

A hawksbill turtle’s protective shell is in some ways its greatest weakness. Exquisitely patterned and thick enough to sculpt, hawksbill shells are the most popular type of tortoiseshell, a material coveted for centuries to make all manner of objects, from jewelry and trinkets, to spectacle frames and an entire genre of Japanese handicrafts called bekko. […]

In the introduction to his new book, conservation biologist David Shiffman quotes Senegalese forestry engineer and conservationist Baba Dioum: “In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught,” Dioum says. If anything is clear from Why Sharks Matter: […]

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Bali lies at the heart of the Pacific Coral Triangle, an area of the ocean that supports the greatest diversity of coral species in the world. The reefs around the Indonesian island provide food and shelter to more than 800 species of fish and a cornucopia of other creatures, from anemones, urchins and sea slugs, […]

International delegates representing governments, businesses, academic and research institutions, civil society, youth leaders and philanthropic organizations announced major commitments worth more than $16 billion to protect ocean health at the seventh Our Ocean Conference in Koror, Palau, on April 13 and 14. A total of 410 commitments were made at the event, hosted jointly by […]

Biodiversity. When you hear this word, what do you picture? Iconic animals like African elephants, gray wolves and humpback whales? Or multicolored coral species that make up a reef system? Or bacteria and microbes that regulate nutrients in the soil, or oxygen-releasing phytoplankton that live in the ocean’s sunlit zones? While biodiversity does embrace all […]