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Tracking whaling ships and whale sharks

Anti-whaling activists planted tracking devices on Japanese whaling ships as part of a campaign to disrupt the annual hunt, and the Australian customs ship that had been monitoring the hunt returned to port with photographs and video to use for future legal action ...

... a study showed that commercial fishing forced fish to evolve into meeker, less active creatures that carry fewer eggs. Bolder and more adventuresome fish were more likely to be caught by gillnets ...

... the butterflyfish, a common resident of coral reefs, was in danger of extinction because it could only eat one species of coral, Acropora hyacinthus, which is highly vulnerable ...

Friday music blogging: Medeski Martin & Wood

There are few bands with which I have a longer ongoing relationship than jazz-funk-improv trio Medeski Martin & Wood. I think I’m one of the few people that started listening […]

Large area proposed as critical habitat for Canada lynx

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed that 42,753 square miles of the northern U.S. be designated as critical habitat for the Canada lynx. The new area is more […]

When the world gives you an extra day, use it to celebrate amphibian conservation

Leaping long-toed salamanders, Batman! We need your help to save the nearly 2,000 amphibian species that are currently threatened with extinction. That’s one-third of all known species of frogs, toads, […]

‘Groin turns into no-go zone for luckless Italians’

Italy’s highest appeals court has ruled it is a criminal offence for Italian men to touch their genitals in public – a judgment that has far-reaching implications for superstitious males. […]

Air doing OK, say officials; water, perhaps not so much

Beijing officials were recently accused of falsifying statistics and manipulating data to make the city’s air pollution seems less of a problem in the run-up to the Summer Olympics. Unsurprisingly, […]

California must seek permission to implement ship-emissions rule, court says

A federal appeals court on Wednesday struck down a California rule aimed at reducing smog-causing emissions from ships in the Los Angeles area. The state had argued that it had […]

National parks chock full o’ chemicals, says study

Our prized natural places are hardly pristine, according to a six-year federal study. Researchers looked at the air, water, soil, lichen, conifer needles, and fish in 20 national parks and […]

Water, world

Nifty:

Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

Notable quotable

“Getting shot is just going to piss off a 500-pound grizzly bear.” — George Durkee, director of the Ranger Lodge of Fraternal Order of Police, on why it doesn’t make […]