#coral-reef

#coral-reef

"The most successful wildlife trips follow animal patterns and seasonality," says Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialist Josh Geller of Embark Beyond.

Bebe, the white-winged parakeet, measures around six inches and has become an internet sensation after a video showed him exploring underwater in a custom-built submarine.

The South Florida Reef Tract, once decimated by dredging in the 1950s, has bounced back, a resilient sign of hope in these ecologically depressing times.

These reefs are living, breathing snapshots of a watery world that you can peek into: refreshing oases where the noise of the land falls away; in its place, an intricate and utterly at-ease slice of life that you're lucky enough to witness.

"Not only are acts like that illegal, but it's really harming a very important, like, a biodiversity hotspot that we have right out here," Brent Fish, an aquarist with Birch Aquarium, stated.

"Now we see women advancing into advanced scuba, Nitrox, and even marine research. Once they're invited in, they don't stop at entry level," says van Well.

"While whales and dolphins may temporarily move out of areas where there is significant naval sonar activity, the intensity of modern maritime conflict poses lethal risks."

When light shines through water, colors with longer wavelengths are absorbed by the water, with the longest wavelengths absorbed first. Blue and violet have the shortest wavelengths of visible light, so they are able to penetrate the deepest.

Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors.

'They bite things to investigate and end up exposed to substances', lead author Natascha Wosnick told Science News.

In February 2023, an article in the Mexican press announced the capture of a vessel some 195 nautical miles from the port of Lazaro Cardenas in the state of Michoacan. It had been carrying nearly 700 pounds of cocaine packaged in plastic-wrapped bricks, in addition to 1,650 liters of hydrocarbons in 33 plastic containers. Two Ecuadorian fishermen were among the five detainees, and their immigration records showed unusual activity.

If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested.

Off the deep waters of Kumejima, Japan, Steven Kovacs captured an image that would be awarded Best in Show for the 2025 Ocean Art Photography Contest. Traveling to the Okinawa prefecture in the hopes of encountering a scarcely documented species of larval goosefish, Kovacs spent nearly two weeks blackwater diving before photographing the rare moment. "Unfortunately, this beautiful little fish turned out to be incredibly uncooperative and difficult to photograph," Kovacs says.

The baby turtle was found stranded in New South Wales's Booderee national park last April, much further south than the usual hatching grounds. After days of feeding on squid, sardines and marine vitamins, BB, whose sex cannot be determined until it is fully mature, revived. Through winter, BB remained in heated rehabilitation pools to thermoregulate while offshore waters remained too cold.

After four shark attacks in New South Wales in less than 48 hours, authorities on Tuesday urged beachgoers just go to a local pool instead. Sydneysiders have heard similar warnings before in the past, they've been issued for beaches polluted with faecal matter after heavy rains. The city's unique, outdated sewage management system has been linked to debris balls which have been washing up with increased frequency on Sydney beaches, including again last week at Malabar.

Biodiversity loss is continuing at an unprecedented rate, with species becoming extinct at between 100 and 1,000 times the average pre-human, or 'background', rate. Human activities are the main cause. Although there are hundreds of local, regional and international initiatives to conserve and sustainably use species and ecosystems, many conservation scientists worry that measures such as interventions to conserve individual species or incentives to create protected areas are not supported by strong evidence from research.