BANGKOK, 3 June 2018 (Reuters) – Some 80 pieces of plastic rubbish weighing 17 pounds were found in the stomach of a whale that died in Thailand after a five-day effort to save it, a marine official said on Sunday.The pilot whale was discovered on Monday in a canal in the southern province of Songkhla […]
By Daniel Hurst 30 May 2018 (The Guardian) – More than 120 pregnant whales were killed during Japan’s annual “research” hunt in the Southern Ocean last summer, a new report has revealed.Of the 333 minke whales caught during the controversial 12-week expedition, 181 were female — including 53 immature ones. Figures show that of the […]
By Jeanfreddy Gutiérrez Torres 21 May 2018 LAKE MARACAIBO, Venezuela (Mongabay) – The wildlife of Venezuela, one of 17 countries that account for 70 percent of the world’s biodiversity, has come under new pressure in addition to deforestation, toxic oil spills. and illegal trafficking: human starvation.The economic crisis that began in 2014 with the collapse […]
By Andrea Thompson 2 May 2018 (Scientific American) – April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late […]
13 March 2018 (World Animal Protection) – Ghost gear accounts for 10 percent of all the debris accumulating in our oceans and is a major threat to marine wildlife. Global estimates in 2009 found that at least 640,000 tons of ghost gear are added to our oceans every year. This number is likely now even […]
17 April 2018 (AFP) – Icelandic whaling company Hvalur said Tuesday it would resume its controversial hunt of endangered fin whales after a two-year suspension, sparking angry protests from animal rights activists. The only company in Iceland that hunts fin whales, Hvalur packed away its harpoons in 2016 because of commercial difficulties in Japan, its […]
11 April 2018 (University of Tasmania) – An international study in Nature Communications co-authored by researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) reveals that marine heatwaves have increased globally over the past century in number, length and intensity as a direct result of […]
By Amy B Wang 23 March 2018 (The Washington Post) – More than 150 short-finned pilot whales stranded themselves Thursday on the southwestern tip of Australia, stunning parks officials and prompting a massive rescue effort to save as many as possible. The mass beaching likely took place sometime Wednesday night to early Thursday morning, local […]
By David Cox 27 February 2018 (NBC News) – For the past two decades, scientists have been monitoring the effects of a warming Arctic on the world’s polar bears — and the bears’ future has looked increasingly bleak.The latest estimates suggest that Arctic sea ice is disappearing by 14 percent a decade, drastically limiting the […]
By Joanna Walters 26 February 2018 (The Guardian) – The dwindling North Atlantic right whale population is on track to finish its breeding season without any new births, prompting experts to warn again that without human intervention, the species will face extinction.Scientists observing the whale community off the US east coast have not recorded a […]
