January 25, 2008
This week in ocean news
BY: Andy Sharpless
….new protections that required longline tuna fishing fleets to use bird-scaring lines, or tori lines, went into effect. In addition, international measures asked longliners to fish at night, when few birds are active, and to sink baited hooks out of reach…
…an open fish farm that cultivates kahala, also known as Hawaiian yellowtail or amberjack, planned to double its capacity….
…a 14-man British and Irish rowing crew crossed the Atlantic in 33 days, seven hours and 30 minutes, a full two days faster than the previous record….
…a female leatherback turtle crossed the Pacific while tagged, resulting in the longest recorded migration journey in the ocean. She covered 12,744 miles before the signal was lost after 647 days…
…scientists recorded, for the first time, a giant internal ocean wave breaking underwater near Hawaii. The researchers used instruments strung along 900 miles to capture the data…
…two men in Florida were sentenced to jail after fishing for manatees and then posting a video of the expedition on MySpace…
…the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed killing up to 30 sea lions per year because the animals had eaten four percent of salmon arriving at the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River…
…owners of a marine shipping company hoped a giant kite attached to a cargo ship would help cut fuel costs by 20 percent…
…scientists found that Northern Hemisphere pollution affected weather patterns in the Southern Hemisphere…
…the California attorney general asked a federal judge to nullify President Bush’s exemption of the U.S. Navy to rulings preventing it from testing sonar near marine mammals…
…and fifteen pilot whales died after stranding on a New Zealand beach. Scientists don’t know what causes whales to strand, but some believe disorientation in their sonar sounding systems is the cause.