Residents of Stewart Island, New Zealand have pleaded for politicians to halt shark cage diving in their waters. The residents and paua divers have expressed fears that the cage diving is attracting great white sharks to the area and putting them at risk, saying they live in fear of a fatal shark attack.
The researchers found that lookdown fish camouflage themselves through a complex manipulation of polarized light after it strikes the fish's skin. In laboratory studies, they showed that this kind of camouflage outperforms by up to 80 per cent the "mirror" strategy that was previously thought to be state-of-the-art in fish camouflage.
The open ocean represents a challenging environment for camouflage,There are no objects to hide behind in three-dimensional space, so organisms have to find a way to blend in to the water itself.
In 2006, a postgraduate program in maritime archaeology was established at the University of Southern Denmark. Based in Esbjerg, on the west coast of the Jutland Peninsula in southwestern Denmark, it is a one-of-a-kind university program in this centuries-old seafaring nation. The program is designed for students who want to pursue a professional career in maritime archaeology and heritage management.
Behavioural innovation is thought to play an important role in enabling animals to cope with environmental change. Research on animal innovation has focused on terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates, but few animals face environmental variation as extreme as those living in littoral zones, where physical and social conditions change dramatically from moment to moment.
Last July, David Trotter, a shipwreck hunter who had spent 30 years searching for a century-old ship, and a team of divers finally located the missing vessel: a 436-foot steamship named Hydrus, which sunk during the Great Lakes Storm of 1913.
The ship, carrying a load of iron ore, was headed for the shelter of the St. Clair River off of Lake Huron when a terrible blizzard struck the region. During the storm, which struck in early November, more than 19 ships were lost and 250 sailors died, reported Garret Ellison for The Grand Rapids Press.
Ocean acidification affects biological processes in a wide range of marine taxa.
A new study, published in Research and Reports in Biodiversity Studies, notes that in the tropics, coral reefs face a host of interconnected problems (bleaching, corrosion, disease, spreading seaweed, invasive species) that are all caused by rising CO2 levels.
incompetent or complicit Egyptian security was probably involved in the Oct. 31 crash of a Russian passenger jet in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Tuesday.
As authorities investigate whether a bomb could have been smuggled aboard Metrojet Flight 9268, CNN has seen private security personnel in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, using handheld bomb detectors that British officials and security experts say just don't work.
In a study published recently, scientists from UH Mānoa and the University of Tokyo revealed that two species of deep-sea sharks, sixgill and prickly sharks, are positively buoyant – they have to work harder to swim downward than up, and they can glide uphill for minutes at a time without using their tails.
For the first time, Canadian researchers have tracked an adult female eel from Nova Scotia to the northern edge of the Sargasso Sea with a satellite tracker, a 45-day journey of 2,400 kilometres. For a century, scientists have been baffled as to how baby eels appear in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda when adults have only been found in faraway places like Canada's St. Lawrence River.
An international scientific expedition in Mexico's Gulf of California has spotted up to 25 critically endangered vaquita marina, the world's smallest porpoise. The sightings occurred during the first 20 days of the Vaquita Expedition 2015, which commenced on September 26th. However, scientists caution that some individuals may have been counted more than once.
Currently known only from whaling and stranding specimens primarily from the western Pacific and eastern Indian Oceans, there exist no confirmed field observations or ecological/behavioural data.
The tiny Pacific nation of Palau has approved the establishment of a marine sanctuary twice the size of Mexico. Conservationists said the 500,000 sq. km sanctuary would be the world’s sixth-largest fully protected area. The move follows a series of announcements on new marine parks, by Chile, New Zealand and the UK, to protect vast swaths of oceans from overfishing.
