By Amanda Zhou 10 June 2024 (The Seattle Times) – About half of the water near the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest coast experienced low-oxygen conditions in 2021, according to a new study. And those hypoxic conditions, which are expected to become common with global warming, threaten the food web, the study found. The study […]
By Amanda Lee Myers 8 July 2023 (USA TODAY) – Jalapeño the sea lion turned up on a crowded California beach in a daze, experiencing seizures and heavily pregnant. Instead of giving birth in a remote location like sea lions prefer, Jalapeño had her pup on Southern California’s Hermosa Beach on a busy Saturday, surrounded by throngs […]
By Richard Burkard 17 April 2023 (Knewz) – It sounds like a B-grade movie title: The approach of the 10-million pound blob. Yet it’s real, and it’s forcing swimmers and owners of beachfront property in Florida to take action. Knewz noted in late March that a giant mass of sargassum seaweed was spotted from space. It […]
By Jim Waymer 12 April 2023 (Florida Today) – We’re already in the weeds. All that stringy stuff that washed up on Brevard County beaches this past week is just the beginning of what scientists predict will grow into the largest-ever bloom of Sargassum seaweed ever recorded. Sargassum, which the Caribbean Sea delivers seasonally to the Gulf Stream […]
By Dinah Voyles Pulver 14 March 2023 (USA TODAY) – Beachgoers in Florida and the Caribbean could be greeted by heavy blankets of smelly seaweed in the weeks ahead as a 5,000-mile swath of sargassum drifts westward and piles onto white sandy beaches. Sargassum, a naturally occurring type of macroalgae, has grown at an alarming rate this winter. The […]
By Christopher Flavelle 1 January 2023 MASHPEE, Massachusetts (The New York Times) – Ashley K. Fisher walked to the edge of the boat, pulled on a pair of thick black waders, and jumped into the river to search for the dead. She soon found them: the encrusted remains of ribbed mussels, choked in gray-black goo […]
By Julia Janicki, Gloria Dickie, Simon Scarr and Jitesh Chowdhury 6 December 2022 (Reuters) – As a boy in the 1960s, David Wagner would run around his family’s Missouri farm with a glass jar clutched in his hand, scooping flickering fireflies out of the sky. “We could fill it up and put it by our […]
By George Monbiot 9 December 2022 (The Guardian) – There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a […]
By Dylan Abad 14 November 2022 TAMPA, Florida (WFLA) – Aerial photos revealed massive plumes of red tide stretching along much of southwest Florida’s coast days after Tropical Storm Nicole passed over the state. Photos released by Calusa Waterkeeper showed a deep reddish-brown discoloration of the water near Naples and Sanibel due to the presence […]
By Alyssa Goard 28 August 2022 (Bay City News) – Environmental nonprofit San Francisco Baykeeper is reporting that an algae bloom is happening across the San Francisco Bay, something they believe is unprecedented in the history of the bay. Additionally, in the past week Baykeeper said it’s received an increasing number of reports of dead […]