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February 28, 2008

The Oceana Scanner

This week in ocean news,

…for the first time, researchers mapped 17 different human activities onto the world’s oceans, including pollution, invasive species introduction, and fishing. They found that 40 percent of the oceans were heavily affected by human impacts, and that essentially no waters were still pristine…

…anti-whaling activists planted tracking devices on Japanese whaling ships as part of a campaign to disrupt the annual hunt, and the Australian customs ship that had been monitoring the hunt returned to port with photographs and video to use for future legal action

…a study showed that commercial fishing forced fish to evolve into meeker, less active creatures that carry fewer eggs. Bolder and more adventuresome fish were more likely to be caught by gillnets…

…the butterflyfish, a common resident of coral reefs, was in danger of extinction because it could only eat one species of coral, Acropora hyacinthus, which itself is highly vulnerable…

…researchers concluded that “reefs without people” were healthier than corals near fishing grounds…

…a new United Nations report entitled “In Dead Water” warned that oceans are at grave risk from climate change in addition to pollution and overfishing….

…several weeks after they washed up on the Florida shore during a red tide bloom, nine sea turtles were released back into the sea

whale sharks were tagged off the coast of Kenya for the first time. After six months, the tags will pop off and transmit data back to the lab…

a dolphin died during Navy sonar testing off the coast of California. While excess fluid was found in the dolphin’s ears, the cause of death was unknown…

…and mosquito fish demonstrated that they could count to four.