The Scanner: Bluefin Win Edition - Oceana USA
Home / Blog / The Scanner: Bluefin Win Edition

March 5, 2010

The Scanner: Bluefin Win Edition

Happy Friday, ocean lovers! Lots of juicy ocean news to review this week.

And don’t forget, you can get pithy ocean updates all week long by following us on Twitter and Facebook. Without further ado:

…The big ocean story of this week was a positive one: the U.S. backed the bluefin tuna trade ban at the upcoming CITES meeting. The Washington Post published a great slideshow of bluefin photos and the New York Times ran an editorial urging the U.S. to convince the EU and others to follow their lead.

…Chile’s fishing industry, which produces 4 percent of the world’s annual catch of seafood, was hit hard by the recent earthquake. Meanwhile, the country’s salmon farms, which are located hundreds of miles south of the quake’s epicenter, suffered minimal damage, but have been affected by the slowdown in transportation.

…Turns out the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has a cousin in the Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the North American coast, roughly in the latitudes between Cuba and Virginia. Researchers from Woods Hole found more than 520,000 bits of trash per square mile in some areas.

…Scientists think they have discovered hydrothermal vents off Antarctica. This was the first time anyone had looked for the vents in the remote region. Said one of the researchers: “Most of the deep ocean is like a desert, but these vents are oases of life and weirdness.”

…The Karen Beasley Sea Turte Rescue and Rehabilitation Center (remember them?) has filed a lawsuit against the state of North Carolina to require tougher restrictions on gillnets, which can catch and drown sea turtles.

…Clever cephalopods never cease to amaze. For the first time in the Atlantic, a Caribbean octopus has been spotted mimicking the shape, color and swimming style of a flounder, most likely to avoid predators.

…Smithsonian Mag’s Bob Reiss wrote about his travels to the northernmost city in the U.S., Barrow, Alaska — ground zero for climate change science — where he got the lowdown from natives and scientists about the warming Arctic.