Editor’s Note: Expedition Blue Planet, led by Jacques Cousteau’s granddaughter Alexandra Cousteau, is traveling 14,500 miles of road over 138 days to investigate and film some of North America’s most pressing water-use and management stories. Expedition members will file dispatchs from the field for Scientific American until the expedition concludes on November 12 in Washington, [...]

It has been a rough few decades for endangered yellow-eyed penguins (Megadyptes antipodes). The species can only be found along a small portion of the southeastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island, the nearby Auckland Islands, and the isles of Campbell, Stewart and Codfish. Their total population numbered nearly 7,000 birds just 30 years ago [...]

The appearance of a shark fin piercing the ocean surface is often seen as a sign of danger to humans. Even more dangerous to sharks is the sight of a shark fin floating in a bowl of soup. Around the world, sharks are in crisis. Many species have suffered population declines of 90 to 99 [...]

Endangered Hawaiian monk seals (Monachus schauinslandi) have a bad reputation among some local fishermen, who accuse the 200-kilogram mammals of eating the fish that the humans catch for their livelihoods. A new project aims to find out if that notoriety is deserved and the public—in particular, teens—has a chance to participate. The National Marine Fisheries [...]

The population of the world’s smallest and rarest dolphins has dropped by half in the past seven years to an estimated 55 individuals, according to research released March 13 by the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC), the University of Auckland and Oregon State University. The critically endangered Maui’s dolphins (Cephalorhynchus hectori maui), which can [...]

If you’ve ever watched shows like Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares, you’d know not to cross incendiary celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Well, maybe his shows don’t air in Taiwan, because a crew of Taiwanese shark-fin smugglers wasn’t too impressed by Ramsay’s reputation, holding the TV host at gunpoint and pouring gasoline over him during the [...]

South Africa will lift on Friday its nearly three-year-old ban on commercial abalone fishing, a move that a wildlife group says will send the highly valued and highly poached species spiraling toward extinction. Known in South African as perlemoen, abalone (specifically the Haliotis midae species) has long been a cash cow for the nation’s fishermen, [...]

No turtle protections, no shrimp. That’s the word from the U.S. Department of State, which ruled on Thursday to ban imports of wild-caught Mexican shrimp if they are collected in ways that threaten endangered sea turtles. The ban does not include aquacultural shrimp or those caught in shallow waters. Section 609 of U.S. Public Law [...]

Can’t the blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus) get some love? This ugly, gelatinous, inedible fish now risks extinction thanks to humans trawling marine murky depths for lobsters and crabs. Blobfish live at depths of 800 meters off the southeastern coast of Australia. The species has a very limited habitat, and can’t survive elsewhere. "The Australian and New [...]

Bluefin tuna fishing in the Atlantic will be reduced nearly 40 percent in 2010, but will that be enough to save this threatened species from extinction? Populations of one of the world’s most highly desired and valuable fish, Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), have dropped 97 percent since 1960. As the numbers have crashed, market [...]

Every time you open a can of tuna, an albatross dies. Okay, that’s not exactly true, but albatrosses and other seabirds are increasingly endangered by commercial tuna fishing, according to a new report from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and BirdLife International. The problem has gotten so bad that albatrosses are [...]

Today we’re returning to the deep to meet an octopus that, at first glance, hardly seems to earn that eight-limbed designation. Its very name sounds like an oxymoron—or a cautionary tale from a fishing accident. But the seven-armed octopus (Haliphron atlanticus) is a real, bonafide octopod—if a little misleading in its appellation. This deep-ocean octopus [...]

Moreton Bay is a small patch of ocean bounded by Queensland, Australia, on the west and on the east by Moreton Island and North Stradbroke Island. The bay is home, by various estimates, to between six hundred and eight hundred Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus). A study conducted in the late 1990s found that the [...]