Over 300 endangered turtles hatch in Singapore

Yahoo –AFP, 28 September 2018

Hawksbill turtles are considered critically endangered

More than 300 hawksbill turtles have hatched on beaches in Singapore this month and been released into the sea, authorities said Friday, in a boost for the critically endangered creatures.

They hatched on three beaches across the tropical Southeast Asian country, according to the National Parks Board, which oversees parks and nature reserves.

Over 100 turtles hatched on Sentosa Island, a popular tourist destination, according to the organisation that manages the island. After their nest was discovered in July, a barrier was erected around the site to protect it from monitor lizards and crabs

It was the fourth time since 1996 that eggs of the critically endangered turtles have hatched on Sentosa.

The other turtle nests were discovered at a beach on the east coast and on Satumu island south of the Singapore mainland, the parks board said. A total of 321 turtles hatched over a 10-day period from September 15.

Hawksbills get their names from their narrow pointed beaks and are found throughout the world's tropical oceans, mainly around coral reefs.

They are threatened by damage to their natural habitats from pollution and coastal developments, and are also targeted by poachers.

Their body parts are used to make turtle soup and their shells are crushed into powder for use in jelly dessert. The Hawksbill shell is also used to make products like combs and ornamental hairpins.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the turtles as critically endangered.

Arctic beluga whale 'swimming strongly' in Thames estuary

Yahoo – AFP, Robin MILLARD, September 26, 2018

A beluga whale in the river Thames, close to Gravesend. (AFP Photo/
Daniel LEAL-OLIVAS)

Gravesend (United Kingdom) (AFP) - A beluga whale spotted in the River Thames estuary outside London --- far from its natural Arctic habitat -- is "swimming strongly and feeding normally", Britain's main animal protection charity said on Wednesday.

"At the moment, there are no major concerns for the welfare of the animal," the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said in a statement, adding that the whale appeared "able to move fast in the water and dive".

"Following our request to the London Coastguard, we are pleased that local boats have moved away. Whales have acute hearing and become stressed very easily," the group said.

The extremely rare sighting triggered wonder and excitement on Tuesday and the whale was spotted again in the same area on Wednesday.

Rob Lott, a marine mammal scientist at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation wildlife charity, said the cetacean was being monitored.

"The longer it stays in the Thames estuary then it will become more of a concern," he told BBC radio.

A beluga whale breaches in the River Thames close to Gravesend, east of 

London on September 26, 2018 (AFP Photo/Daniel LEAL-OLIVAS)

"Hopefully instinct will soon kick in and the beluga will leave the estuary and go out into the North Sea and then head north where it should be," the scientist explained.

The sight of a beluga whale so far south -- 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) from even Iceland -- is exceptional.

"Beluga whales are a species of the icy Arctic -- finding one in the tepid Thames is an astonishingly rare event," said Rod Downie, polar chief adviser at WWF, the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Lucy Babey, head of science and conservation at the marine conservation charity Orca, said it was the most southerly recording of a beluga in Britain, according to the BBC.

The previous reported sightings of beluga whales in UK waters were in 2015, when two were spotted off the northeast coast of England and one in Northern Ireland.

Rescue teams are on standby in case the whale gets into trouble.

"It's very unusual and it's not a very good place," Julia Cable, spokeswoman for British Divers Marine Life Rescue, which saves marine animals in distress, told AFP.

The Thames remains a busy waterway and the whale is currently between two major container docks, Tilbury and the new London Gateway port.

"We wouldn't go anywhere near it in a boat. We could just do more harm than good," said Cable.

A beluga whale surfaces in the river Thames estuary near Gravesend.

(AFP Photo/Daniel LEAL-OLIVAS)

Feeding around barges

The beluga was first sighted on Tuesday near the southern, Kent side of the river, downstream of Gravesend.

It was feeding around moored barges and did not move more than 200 metres during the day.

An AFP photographer saw the whale surfacing in the same area on Wednesday.

Belugas typically live for 40 to 60 years. Highly sociable, they typically form pods and are often seen in river estuaries in the summer.

The beluga's appearance brings back memories of the famous 2006 Thames whale.

A female northern bottlenose whale was discovered swimming in the river in central London, going past the Houses of Parliament.

On its second day in the city, as it lost strength, rescuers intervened and lifted it onto a barge by crane. It died, after suffering from convulsions, near Gravesend as the barge rushed towards the open sea.

France reverses car tyre sea sanctuary -- an environmental flop

Yahoo – AFP, Vincent-Xavier MORVAN, September 23, 2018

Ten thousand tyres are set to be lifted out of the sea by the divers and boat crew
over the next few weeks, with the remaining 12,500 extracted in the second
quarter of 2019 (AFP Photo/VALERY HACHE)

Vallauris (France) (AFP) - What seemed a like a crazy idea turned out to be just that: a 1980s experiment that saw 25,000 car tyres dumped into the crystal-clear waters of the Mediterranean to create a sanctuary for sealife off the French coast is being cleaned up after it was found to be polluting.

Since the start of last week, divers and a specially equipped boat with lifting gear have been fishing out hundreds of the old loops of rubber about 500 metres (1,600 feet) from an exclusive coastline between the towns of Cannes and Antibes.

The original vision, backed by local French authorities at the time and fishermen, was that the tyres would become populated by coral and other sea creatures in a conservation area where fishing was off limits.

In France, the idea of a "tyre reef" was tried only here, but a local academic working on the clean-up operation said authorities in other countries, particularly the United States, had tried the same failed idea.

"We hoped (back in the 1980s) that we could restore aquatic life there, but it didn't work," the deputy mayor of Antibes, Eric Duplay told AFP. "It turns out that the tyre reef was not a prolific place for biomass."

Denis Genovese, the head of an association of local fishermen, confirmed that most Mediterranean lifeforms had shunned the idea of living inside mad-made products manufactured out of rubber, resins, oil and other chemicals.

Divers and a specially equipped boat with lifting gear have been fishing out hundreds

 of the old rubber tyres 500 metres (1,600 feet) from an exclusive coastline between

the French resorts of Cannes and Antibes (AFP Photo/VALERY HACHE)

Leaking toxic chemicals

Sedentary creatures such as the local scorpion fish didn't use them, Genovese said, while "grouper fish, conger eels and sea bream swim around them, but no species really got used to it".

Worse, a study in 2005 by researchers at the University of Nice showed that the tyres were leaking toxic chemicals into the environment, including heavy metals, which are a threat to human life.

Authorities were also worried that the tyres could degrade further, nearly 40 years after they sank to the seabed, and break up into smaller pieces which would be a risk for nearby seagrass meadows.

In 2015, a first mission to remove 2,500 tyres was undertaken to show that they could be extracted safely, with the work underway at the moment a second and more important phase of the clean-up operation.

Around 10,000 are set to be lifted by the divers and boat crew over the next few weeks, with the remaining 12,500 extracted in the second quarter of 2019.

Regeneration hopes

AFP hopped aboard the vessel last week to watch the progress in action as dozens of a tyres were hauled from the sea, with the luxury holiday villas of the French Riviera visible on the coastline behind.

Local French authorities and fishermen hoped back in the 1980s that the tyres 

would become populated by coral and other sea creatures in a conservation area 

where fishing was off limits (AFP Photo/VALERY HACHE)

The Saudi royal family own a huge villa on a small stretch of beach opposite the site, which was the focus of a scandal in 2015 when King Salman tried to privatise the sand for his holiday and caused an uproar among locals.

The fine white sand is a problem for the clean-up team of divers, which struggle with low visibility as they find the tyres and thread them on to wire cables which are then lifted to the surface.

"In the morning, it's easy, the water's clear," crew member Morgan Postic on board the Ocea vessel said. "But as we stir it all up down at the bottom, you can't see anything and it gets much more complicated."

The tyres will be sent to the nearby city of Nice and then to recycling centres where they will be broken up into granules that can be used in construction projects.

"After that we'll leave the seabed to restore itself naturally and we'll continue to monitor with censors," said marine scientist Patrice Francour from the University of Nice, who is working on the issue.

Francour said the clean-up would end France's one and only experiment with a "tyre reef", but that other countries still had to deal with the legacy of the failed idea, notably the United States.

A million euros has been provided by the French state to finance the French clean-up, while French tyre company Michelin has contributed 200,000 euros (235,000 dollars).

Ocean Cleanup move to the Pacific, ‘a milestone’ says Dutch inventor

DutchNews, September 17, 2018

Photo: The Ocean Cleanup

Pacific Ocean trials of a young Dutch inventor’s system to clear plastic waste from the seas started this weekend, 240 nautical miles offshore from San Fransisco. 

The system, devised by 24-year-old Boyan Slat while he was a student at Delft University, consists of a 600 metre-long floating curved boom which collects and holds waste until it can be collected. 

The boom has a three metre skirt attached underneath it to catch waste floating just below the surface. 

The start of the full sea trial follows hundreds of scale-model tests, a series of prototypes, research expeditions and trials involving a shorter boom in the North Sea. 

If the two-week trial is successful, the boom will be towed towards what has become know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 1,200 nautical miles offshore to start the clean up. 

‘Today’s launch is an important milestone, but the real celebration will come once the first plastic returns to shore. For 60 years, mankind has been putting plastic into the oceans; from that day onwards, we’re taking it back out again,’ Slat said in a statement on Saturday. 

Crowdfunding

Slat raised the first $2m to to fund his ambitious plan via crowdfunding in 2014. Today the OceanCleanup has a staff of 70 and counts Dutch marine services group Boskalis and Denmark’s shipping giant Maersk among its backers. 

If the current trial is successful, and if the funding is available, The Ocean Cleanup aims to scale up to a fleet of approximately 60 systems focused on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch over the next two years. 

‘The system is designed to be propelled by wind and waves, allowing it to passively catch and concentrate plastic debris in front of it,’  the organisation says. ‘Moving slightly faster than the plastic, the system will act like a giant Pac-Man, skimming the surface of the ocean.’ 

The Ocean Cleanup projects that the full fleet can remove half of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within five years’ time.

Japan mulls next steps after whaling defeat in Brazil

Yahoo – AFP, September 14, 2018

"Japan was expecting something positive happens at this meeting," said
Joji Morishita, who chaired the meeting of the deeply divided 89-member
body and now reverts to being Japan's commissioner (AFP Photo/Jure MAKOVEC)

Florianopolis (Brazil) (AFP) - The International Whaling Commission's rejection Friday of Japan's proposal to resume commercial whaling "is not the end of the story," Tokyo's whaling commissioner said at the end of a divisive meeting in Brazil.

"Japan was expecting something positive happens at this meeting," said Joji Morishita, who chaired the meeting of the deeply divided 89-member body and now reverts to being Japan's commissioner.

"But that's not the end of the story. That's the beginning of the story of the next steps," Morishita told AFP.

Anti-whaling nations led by Australia, the European Union and the United States, defeated Japan's "Way Forward" proposal -- to return to whaling for profit -- in a 41 to 27 vote.

The vote was followed by threats of a withdrawal by Japan and left the 72-year old organization at a crossroads.

Morishita said that despite a "very strong sense of dialogue," the differences between pro- and anti-whaling nations were "very clear"

"I don't like to look at this as being failure or success, or the end. This is always the beginning of something new, and that's very important for the parties involved."

Morishita had told the close of the meeting that member countries should ask themselves what kind of an organization they wanted it to be.

It "needs to address conservation issues, climate change, pollution and all that stuff....and there are needs for management too," he told AFP.

"So how do you address this? Through the IWC or through a different organization or a combination of different organizations?"

"I think that's what we would now like to look at," he said, "not just concentrating whether IWC can survive or continue, or fail doing a job. To look at the larger world."

Pro-whaling states say the IWC's mandate is both to conserve and manage -- meaning to sustainably hunt -- recovering whale stocks, but that the emphasis within the organization has leant too far towards conservation, leaving them without a voice.

The large Japanese delegation here would "assess the result of this meeting very carefully back in Japan," said Morishita.

While Japan would maintain its commitment to international cooperation "as a whole" he said, "but how they like to do this from here is something they will discuss back home."

Asked if that would involve Japan inviting like-minded states to join them in a new pro-whaling organization, Morishita said: "I simply don't know. I have no basis to answer this question."

And asked if the world had seen the last of Japan at the biennial IWC meetings, he said: "I have no comment to make on that."

3 'hardcore' fish species discovered on Pacific floor

MSN – AFP, 14 September 2018

A rendering of the bone structure of a 'hardcore' Atacama snailfish (AFP)

Scientists have discovered three new species of "hardcore" fish living in one of the deepest parts of the ocean, the see-through, scale-free creatures perfectly adapted to conditions that would instantly kill most life on Earth.

An international team of researchers used state-of-the-art underwater cameras to find the new fish at the bottom of the Atacama Trench in the eastern Pacific Ocean at a depth of 7,500 metres (24,600 feet) -- and were surprised at their abundance in such an inhospitable environment.

"These things are right on the limit of what all fish can take so you might expect at that depth you'd maybe be lucky to see one or two eking out an existence," Alan Jamieson, senior lecturer in marine ecology at Newcastle University told AFP on Friday.

"But there's a whole heap of them sitting there."

Temporarily named the pink, blue and purple Atacama snailfish, the previously unknown creatures are 20-25 centimetres (8-10 inches) long, translucent and have no scales.

They appear to be uniquely adapted to conditions four-and-a-half miles beneath the ocean surface, where the days are permanently pitch black and water temperatures barely top two degrees Celsius (36 Farenheit).

At such depths, the pressure is so great that larger animals would be crushed under their own mass.

"It's the equivalent of having an 800-kilogramme weight placed on your little finger," Jamieson said.

Gel-like

Researchers believe the fish may have evolved to live on the sea floor to avoid larger prey.

Researchers were surprised to find that 'there's a whole heap of them (AFP)'

"The hardest structures in their bodies are the bones in their inner ear, which give them balance, and their teeth," said Thomas Linley, a Newcastle research associate who went on the expedition.

In fact, being made almost entirely of a gel-like substance, the fish would die without the crushing pressure holding them together.

"Their bodies are extremely fragile and melt rapidly when brought to the surface," Linley said.

Crushing pressure, little food

The Atacama Trench runs almost 6,000 kilometres along the west coast of South America and bottoms out at 8,000 metres.

Jamieson said the team's discovery should give hope to researchers working to uncover new species in some of the least-explored corners of our planet.

"The finding of new species is not limited to small stuff in the mud or tiny jellyfish, here there are three species of fish about 20-25 cm long," he said.

"The Atacama Trench is the same size as the Andes mountain range. If we can put a camera down and pick out three new species within a matter of days... these things are not rare -- they are just out of reach."

With over 300 known varieties of snailfish, Jamieson said it has adapted to a wide variety of conditions, some extremely tough to survive in.

"Most of them live at shallow levels -- we even get them up the Tyne River in Newcastle. They're an amazing family that has sort of evolved to fit every niche, every corner of the planet," he said.

He nevertheless admitted to being impressed with the newly discovered varieties and their ability to thrive in some of the harshest environments on Earth.

"The water temperatures in these trenches are always less than 2C -- that in itself is pretty hardcore, let alone slamming 800-bar pressure on it and hardly any food," he said.

The Ocean Cleanup project sails out to sweep Pacific plastic

Yahoo – AFP, September 9, 2018

Ocean Cleanup's System 001 is towed out of the San Francisco Bay in San
Francisco, California (AFP Photo/JOSH EDELSON)

San Francisco (AFP) - A supply ship towing a long floating boom designed to corral ocean plastic has set sail from San Francisco for a test run ahead of a trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The ambitious project by The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch non-profit group, hopes to clean up half of the infamous garbage patch within five years when all systems are deployed.

After five years of preparation and scale model tests, "this is what it's all about, this is the culmination of all the efforts," said an excited Boyan Slat, the 24-year-old Dutch CEO and founder of The Ocean Cleanup.

Under a cloudless sky the Maersk Launcher ship sailed on Saturday past the Golden Gate Bridge out into the Pacific sea accompanied by a flotilla of sailboats and kayaks.

The supply vessel was towing a 600 meter-long boom device dubbed System 001, designed to contain floating ocean plastic so it can be scooped up and recycled. The system includes a tapered three-meter skirt to catch plastic floating just below the surface.

The ship was heading to a spot 240 nautical miles off the California coastline for a two-week trial before sailing to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating trash pile twice the size of France that swirls in the ocean halfway between California and Hawaii.

"The main mission is to show that it works, and hopefully then in a few months from now, the first plastics will arrive back into port, which means that it becomes proven technology," Slat told AFP as he witnessed the launch.

"That means that we can then start scaling up to a whole fleet of maybe 60 of these cleanup systems," he said.

Laurent Lebreton, the project's lead oceanographer, said they believe the Pacific garbage patch contains some 80,000 metric tons of plastic waste.

"Plastic has started to accumulate in the ocean since... the 1950s," Lebreton told AFP.

He said that scientists first learned about the plastic concentrating in the Pacific garbage patch in the 1970s.

Land-based plastic comes mainly from rivers, Lebreton said. "But we also find a lot of fishing ropes, fishing nets," he said.

Related Articles:

Plan to clean the oceans of plastic soup starts North Sea trials

Ocean clean-up project launches first sea experiment in 2016

Delft student raises $2m through crowdfunding for plastic soup plan

An impression of how the system might look. Photo: Ocean Cleanup

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Meat and veg: Scientists say the bonnethead is the first species of shark found to be omnivorous

Meat and veg: Scientists say the bonnethead is the first species of shark found to be omnivorous pic.twitter.com/gzN4ScNTju

— AFP news agency (@AFP) September 5, 2018

Pope urges clean up of plastic waste from oceans

Yahoo – AFP, 1 September 2018

Pope Francis said access to water was a basic right

Pope Francis on Saturday issued a call to clear up oceans threatened by plastic waste and underscored the need to provide drinking water to all as a basic right.

"We cannot allow our seas and oceans to be littered by endless fields of floating plastic," the pontiff said in a message on the fourth World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.

"Sadly, all too many efforts fail due to the lack of effective regulation and means of control, particularly with regard to the protection of marine areas beyond national confines."

The pope also said that access "to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right" and deplored that for many it was "difficult if not impossible.

"Our world owes a great social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity," he said.