Ocean Conservation & Tidalpunk

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/51534042

Thousands of observations of marine wildlife have been recorded during the 2026 National BioBlitz, providing valuable data that will help scientists to monitor changes in biodiversity around the UK coastline.

The annual citizen science event, led by The Rock Pool Project, took place between 23 and 31 May 2026 and saw participants from Cornwall to Shetland explore rocky shores and record marine species using the iNaturalist app. In total, 3,781 observations of 544 species were submitted, creating a fascinating national snapshot of life in the intertidal zone.

cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/51240170

FULL ARTICLE: There’s some good news growing along the coasts of countries around the world.

Mangrove forests, the imperiled ecosystems championed for their ability to store carbon and protect land from storm-driven flooding, are bouncing back.

These woodlands that thrive at the soggy boundary between land and sea suffered alarming declines through much of the 20th century, chopped down chiefly to make way for fish ponds, rice paddies and other kinds of agriculture. But in the last decade, mangroves have been gaining ground, erasing nearly all of the losses since 1980, according to research recently published in Science.

“After decades of loss, we’re finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves,” said Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University and lead author of the study.

Zhang and colleagues used computer programs to comb through 40 years of satellite images from around the world. The distinctive way mangrove forests reflect light enabled them to train the computers to pick out this vegetation and track its ebb and flow over time.

The analysis revealed that in much of the world, years of loss began changing course in recent decades. Between the 1980s and 2010, global mangrove forests shrank from around 155,000 square kilometers to 152,000 square kilometers, a loss equal to half of Rhode Island. While that might not sound like a lot, mangroves often grow in relatively narrow coastal strips, so their coast-protecting benefits are outsized compared to their overall dimensions.

Since 2010, forests have rebounded to nearly 154,000 square kilometers, almost enough to recover from the losses dating back to the 80s.

“While some mangroves are still being lost, this could make them a rare conservation success story and an important source of optimism for climate action,” said Daniel Friess, a co-author who heads The Mangrove Lab at Tulane.

The greatest gains have come in southeast Asia, home to roughly a third of the world’s mangrove forests. The region gained more than 1,000 square kilometers of mangroves since 2010, the researchers found. Forests have begun bouncing back in other parts of Asia, South America and the Middle East as well.

While the reasons for the rebound vary from place to place, the researchers say many of the gains appear to be from forests colonizing terrain created by abandoned aquaculture ponds and from mudflats emerging along shorelines as sediment builds up. That is coupled with efforts to plant new mangrove forests, as governments and conservation groups have come to better appreciate their benefits.

In Indonesia, once a center for mangrove declines, the recent gains appear to be linked to increased awareness and restoration on the heels of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, coupled with increased legal protections and management, the authors reported.

It’s not all good news, however. Some regions continue to lose ground, notably in Africa. There, mangroves have declined in recent years in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the continent’s largest mangrove system, due at least in part to damage from oil pollution.

And some places that are making gains still haven’t recovered from previous losses. Myanmar has witnessed a 10% increase in mangrove forests since 2010. But that still leaves it with a net 29% decline since the 1980s.

The tree’s remarkable ability to quickly colonize land suggests that rather than pursuing tree-planting projects, conservation work might be better spent protecting existing forests and the earth-building dynamics that create mudflats, the authors noted. The trees can then spread on their own. Sometimes the most important thing humans can do for restoring nature is get out of the way.

Zhang, et. al. “Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades.” Science. June 4, 2026.

The bottom of the ocean has barely been explored, but every journey to the deep reveals wondrous new lifeforms. As underwater mining gains momentum, we risk destroying one of the Earth’s last great wildernesses

Wageningen scientists also emphasize that offshore wind development and marine conservation are not necessarily in conflict, but early ecological understanding is essential for sustainability.

“We have to incorporate as much of the genetic diversity in the species as possible to try to find the corals that will live through climate change,” she said.

But to do that, the Flondurans need to be put to the test in a natural environment. 

Last year, 35 Flonduran babies were outplanted off the coast of Miami near Key Biscayne, where many of them still seem to be doing well, Baker said.

The paper is open access

the Ocean Census—a project that has set out to accelerate the discovery of sea life—announced that it has found 1,121 previously unknown ocean species since last April.

Though it may seem that Earth is already largely explored, the vast majority of animal species on Earth—perhaps as many as 90 percent of them—remain undescribed. “This is really a planetary blindspot,”

Note: Not too sure where this 90% estimation comes from, because I didn't find a reference in the linked article. I wouldn't be surprised if they sort of rounded the numbers from a 2011 paper titled:

How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?

In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description

WARREN: [...] Given a year with some positive news, I hope that can be an incentive to keep going—like, don’t stop, don’t fall back thinking we fixed everything.

The term El Niño is part of a broader phenomenon called El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s a recurring climate pattern involving changes in sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern tropical Pacific.

The phenomenon has three phases: the warm phase is El Niño, the cool phase is La Niña, and between the two lies a neutral or transitional phase, when neither dominates clearly. The changes occur in the tropical region of the Pacific Ocean, within 700 miles of the equator.

Previously, whale sharks had only been tagged by using a pole spear. The tag would last no longer than six months. But over the next 10 years, from 2015-25, the data from the new tags revealed previously unmapped movements of the whale sharks and helped highlight seamounts that are used as foraging sites and whale shark highways, which needed to be protected.

The team’s data are now being used by the Indonesian government to help establish a whale shark-based marine protected area in Saleh Bay this year. “The zoning considers critical habitats, including no-take zones that cover key whale shark areas [like] nursery or juvenile habitats as well as mangroves, which support prey availability, such as shrimp and [plankton],” says Putra, who is the focal species conservation senior manager at Konservasi Indonesia.

Per acre, these coastal plants can store up to 20x more carbon than forests on land. In fact, 93% of all the world's CO2 is stored in the ocean with the help of marine vegetation, algae, and coral, and losing just 1% of this ecosystem was equivalent to releasing the emissions of 97 million cars.

By continued extraction of fish out of our oceans, you are essentially deforesting our oceans. By not only removing the fish, but the act of removal, the methods of removal, are devastating to habitats, to ecosystems. And it's even more so there, because it's out of sight, out of mind.

Trawling was, by far, the most destructive form of fishing. The largest trawl nets are so big, they could swallow whole cathedrals, or up to 13 jumbo jet planes. The nets drag heavy weights at the bottom, scarring the seafloor that was once abundant with life, leaving nothing but a barren wasteland behind. This was just like bulldozing pristine Amazonian rainforest, except it was much, much worse.

Every year, approximately 25 million acres of forest are lost. This was equivalent to losing about 27 soccer fields per minute. However, bottom trawling wipes out an estimated 3.9 billion acres every year. This was equivalent to losing 4316 soccer fields every single minute. Tallied up across the year, this was equivalent to wiping out the land area of Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, Iran, Thailand, and Australia combined.

Where are the big environment groups? Why aren't they all over this like a rash? It's so obvious, it's just shouting in our faces: it is the fishing industry that is destroying the fish and the rest of the life in the seas. How much more obvious does it need to be? And yet, for the most part, they are silent; they're not speaking out against it; they are deliberately not engaging with the most important issue of all.

Bottom trawlers drag giant nets across the ocean floor, releasing stored CO2 and killing up to 75 percent of the marine life unintentionally caught up in the process.

A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the University of Queensland in Australia found that more than 70 percent of marine protected areas worldwide are contaminated by untreated, or poorly treated, wastewater.

According to the study, published this month in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management, more than 90 percent of coastal protected areas in the Coral Triangle are affected by high levels of sewage pollution—up to 10 times highter than in nearby unprotected waters.

The study

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic.

Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C.

A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.

A decade ago, southern sea ice suddenly and dramatically declined. Scientists say the culprit was a "very violent release" of deep, pent-up heat.

The paper