When Kathleen Reed descended for her usual weekly dive off the coast of Nanaimo, B.C., last Saturday she was shocked by how many dead sea cucumbers she saw. Experts and harvesters fear that sea cucumbers are being hit by an illness similar to sea star wasting disease.
Despite extensive and expensive work last summer to prevent further oil leaks from the Second World War shipwreck El Grillo, in Seyðisfjörður, oil is still leaking into the sea. It is thought the wreck still contains some 10-15 tonnes of oil.
District of West Vancouver staff say they cleaned up 40 litres of fat from Ambleside Beach. Vancouver Coastal Health and the province are investigating.
Rare footage shot by a researcher expedition in Norway shows a polar bear hunting and catching a swimming adult reindeer. The video, captured by Mateusz Gruszka, a cook for an expedition of Polish researchers in August 2021 on the Svalbard archipelago, shows the bear catching the reindeer and drowning it before dragging it ashore.
Recent research has found that coccolithophore blooms are occupying increasingly more space in the Barents Sea. Between 1998 and 2016, coccolithophore summer blooms have expanded poleward and their surface area in the Barents Sea has doubled.
The Tsunami Warning Center recorded waves of less than 1 foot above normal as a result of the earthquake.
"While on a field trip for work, we stopped at the beach and you can notice hundreds of dead clams and star fish littering the beach."
Several people have fallen ill with food poisoning after eating shellfish in B.C. in the last 10 days, and health officials are warning that warm ocean waters might be to blame.
The most common pod of southern resident killer whales who migrate to the Salish Sea during the summer have not been seen for than 100 days, marking a highly unusual absence from their historic summer hunting ground, according to researchers.
The female aroused interest among local residents. Specialists suggested that scars on its body could mean that it was attacked by an orca; the walrus hauled out a few days after a group of walruses had been trapped by orcas. After treatment, the walrus left the shore.
On July 14, a rare 100-pound opah fish was found on the Oregon coast. The 3.5 foot 100 pound fish washed up at Sunset Beach, and was reported to the Seaside Aquarium.
"The first wave of dead mussels washed ashore on July 14th, possibly earlier but this was the first report we received. I took the pictures included in my LEO observation on July 16th, and the temperatures were only just then beginning to climb into the upper 70s and lower 80s."
Caulerpa brachypus, which can spread rapidly and create dense mats, was found in July in Blind Bay and Tryphena Harbour. This was the first time the pest species had been detected in New Zealand.
Researchers on an expedition 300 kilometers west of Vancouver Island stumbled upon a group of 25-30 endangered sei whales.
Kwigillingok, a community on the Bering Sea coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, is used to some flooding during high tides. But in recent years, that flooding has grown more severe, reaching a new threshold last week.
A record-shattering heat wave June 26-28 coincided with some of the year's lowest tides on Puget Sound. The combination was lethal for millions of mussels, clams, oysters, sand dollars, barnacles, sea stars, moon snails, and other tideland creatures exposed to three afternoons of intense heat.
Officials are still examining the substance in a lab to determine what it is, but DEC suspects it’s black tar or asphalt.
Westfall thanked his training with the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association to help him maximize his odds for survival.
The black substance was staining the feet of people at the beach, prompting one local resident to alert state officials.
However, if ingested by oysters and other shellfish, the sudden burst of a ciliate form of zooplankton — or animal plankton — called Mesodinium rubrum could turn their meat pink.
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