… or at least that seems to be what Australia’s Opposition leader thinks would happen if he stopped the expansion of marine protected areas in Australian waters:
In a policy aimed at marginal Queensland seats, Mr Abbott said a Coalition government would ”immediately suspend the marine protection process which is threatening [...]
Theres a new paper out by Edgar et al in Ecological Applications that tracks the ecosystem effects of 14 MPA’s, and exploited companion sites, in southern Australia and Tanzania over a 16 year period.
The effects of the MPAs are interesting: biomass of large predators is on a steep increasing trend, while prey-species [...]
Here’s an audio segment from Radio New Zealand, where Kathryn Ryan interviews Ove on a range of topics from diving under the Antarctic ice, living 20m underwater for 10 days, coral bleaching and the fate of the Great Barrier Reef:
Hurricane season has started late this year. NOAA are issuing advisories on Hurricane Guillermo (Category 3) affecting the Pacific Baja Penninsula and heading towards Hawaii, and Tropical Storms Ana and Bill are heading straight towards the Dutch Antilles.
Dr Bernie Degnan and his team have been sequencing the genome of the simple sea sponge here at the University of Queensland and have made some pretty astonishing findings in regards to humans and stem cells:
CARLY LAIRD: For anyone who thought the cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, was a bit far fetched, think again. Bernie Degnan is a professor of marine biology at the University of Queensland. He says although sea sponges certainly can’t talk and don’t have their own apartments under the sea, they are indeed clever marine animals.
BERNIE DEGNAN: Sponges just by their natural biology do things that we only wish we can engineer in a biomedical laboratory.
A new Reef Site in Coral Reefs (Green and Cote 2009) describes the striking densities of non-native lionfish on coral reefs in the Bahamas. Lionfish (Pterois volitans), a predator from the central and western Pacific ocean, were first sighted in 1992 off Florida and have been spreading rapidly throughout the Caribbean (USGS Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database 2009). On deep offshore reefs off of North Carolina, they are now the second most abundant fish (Whitfield et al. 2007).
UPDATE: Camilo Mora, the lead author of the study, posted a comment about the test of expert opinions. “I would like to clarify that one of the tests we did in this paper was to compare the expert’s opinions with actual empirical data collected by one of us (i.t. Tony Pitcher). We found that [...]
TED, a nonprofit devoted to ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ hosts an annual conference bringing together ‘world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives’. I’ve watched quite a few incredible talks (Al Gore, Tierney Thys, & Jane Poynter to name but a few), but [...]
A study published in Nature Reports Climate Change on 11 June 2009 reports on the consequences of the emission targets being set by countries, including the US and Australia, in the lead-up to the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.
Joeri Rogelj and colleagues conclude, “National targets give virtually no chance of [...]
If we don’t know our history, then we can’t know our future. Historians arguing the relevance of their subject often repeat that mantra. But one group of researchers is showing how true it is. Members of the History of Marine Animals Project (HMAP) believe that scrutinizing the minutiae of historical documents is the key to protecting our oceans for generations to come.
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