By DAVID JOLLY and ANDREA ZARATE7 May 2012 Late last year, fishermen began finding dead dolphins, hundreds of them, washed up on Peru’s northern coast. Now, seabirds have begun dying, too, and the government has yet to conclusively pinpoint a cause. Officials insist that the two die-offs are unrelated. The dolphins are succumbing to a […]
By Julia Whitty7 May 2012 Something awful is happening in the waters off Peru’s northern coast, where some 3,000 dolphins have died and washed ashore since January. This rates as one of the worst, if not the worst, Unusual Mortality Event (UME) ever recorded. (I’ve been writing about the UME with marine mammals in the […]
By Marilia Brocchetto, CNN30 April 2012 (CNN) – Authorities in Peru are investigating the death of over 538 pelicans, along with other birds, on the northern coast of the country, the Peruvian ministry of production said Sunday. The new environmental investigation comes on the heels of an incident earlier in April when 877 dolphins washed […]
Watch Gulf Still Grapples With Massive BP Oil Leak 2 Years Later on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour. [Sorry for the ad.] 20 April 2012 (PBS) – Two years after the largest oil leak in U.S. history, the Gulf of Mexico region still struggles with its impact. Jeffrey Brown, David Valentine of the University […]
Corvallis, Oregon, 10 April 2012 (SPX) – A task force that conducted one of the most comprehensive analyses of global “forage fish” populations issued its report this week, which strongly recommends implementing more conservative catch limits for these crucial prey species. The Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force [summary pdf, full pdf] calls for the harvest […]
By JEFF BARNARD8 April 2012 TULELAKE, California – Dave Mauser walked the edge of a mudflat, peering underneath the dried brown rushes where one coot after another had gone to hide and then die. “Now the coots are getting the worst of it,” said Mauser, head biologist on the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, the […]
17 February 2012 (bigpondnews.com) – The Rena oil spill clean-up has reached another milestone with the last group of birds being released into the wild. Seven little blue penguins oiled after the container ship Rena crashed into Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga, have been released near Motiti Island, Maritime New Zealand says. Hundreds of birds have […]
By Steve Connor, Vancouver 18 February 2012 The indiscriminate slaughter of vast numbers of turtles, sharks, albatrosses, and other endangered marine animals that get unintentionally caught by fishermen as “by-catch” could be prevented by a radical proposal of mobile marine reserves, scientists said yesterday. Protected areas of the ocean where commercial fishing is banned would […]
By Arlene Paredes8 February 2012 The ill-fated MV Rena, which brought to New Zealand its worst maritime disaster, has so far cost $130 million, and $28 million of this amount has come from taxpayers, the Bay of Plenty Times reported. However, another episode of bad weather has disrupted the operations to fully assess the damage […]
By CAIN BURDEAU, The Associated Press7 February 2012 NEW ORLEANS – A scientific report [Recommendations for Anticipating Sea-Level Rise Impacts on Louisiana Coastal Resources during Project Planning and Design, pdf] issued by Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration predicts that the Louisiana coast could see about 3 feet of sea level rise along the already low and […]