For smokers, the world has always been one big ashtray, with cigarettes flicked away pretty much anywhere. That’s especially true now, since smokers are increasingly forbidden to light up in restaurants, office buildings and even new no-smoking condos. In the great river of litter human beings create each year, so tiny a thing as a …
Oceans
How Whale Songs Rocket to Number One
There’s no accounting for musical taste — particularly when the kind of music you’re talking about doesn’t even originate in your own species. Bird songs may be lovely, but whale songs? Say what you will about the combination of whoops, clicks groans and faintly flatulent rumbles that whales use to communicate and woo, the odds are …
Beware the Fukushima Sushi
Few American consumers would mourn the loss of the anchovy. If it weren’t for pizza or Caesar salads, there might be no use for the little salty fish at all. But few people want to see the ocean’s anchovy stocks wiped out by radiation either. That’s just the scenario that seemed to be developing, however, when reports coming out of Japan …
How to Clean Up the Sardine Apocalypse: Call in the Foodies
Not so long ago, I was sitting at King’s Harbor in Redondo Beach, which is about a ten minute drive from where I grew up in LA. I was drinking a glass of wine at a restaurant on the marina, watching people on their liveaboard boats at sunset, and thinking how great it must be one of them, perpetually barefoot, with a dog that has …
Why the Albatross Is Our Albatross
An irresistible press release popped up in my inbox this morning. Last month, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist spotted this Laysan albatross on the world’s most remote coral atoll, smack in the middle of the Pacific near Hawaii. The bird was first tagged by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 1956, when she was estimated …
EU Discusses Fishing Quotas
Europe’s fishing quotas are designed to protect European waters from over-fishing. They are imperfect instruments, however, and one of their unintended consequences is that they often force fishermen to dump huge amounts of dead, excess fish back into the ocean.
Guam Now One of the Shark-Friendliest Places on Earth
If you’re a shark, the Pacific Islands are not a bad place to be these days. Yesterday, the Senate of Guam followed Hawaii’s lead and became the third region to move to ban the sale, possession and distribution of shark products in the U.S. territory. Hawaii was the first U.S. state to make the move last year, followed by the …
Oceans: Coral Reefs Facing a Triple Threat
I was traveling yesterday, speaking on a panel about electric cars at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, so I didn’t get a chance to cover yesterday’s news closely. But I wanted to note an alarming report published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) on the risks facing coral reefs.
The short version: coral reefs are in big …
Are Humans Increasingly to Blame for Whales Strandings?
As authorities scrambled to pick up the pieces after a deadly earthquake hit the southern New Zealand town of Christchurch on Tuesday, government workers further south had just finished handling an altogether different kind of natural disaster. Over the weekend, more than 100 pilot whales were found on a remote beach on Stewart Island …
Why the World’s Fisheries Are Going Bankrupt
I’m in DC for the AAAS annual meeting, and while this gathering of the world’s smartest people (and the journalists who write about them) is big news in the science world, the real action is a few blocks away at the Capitol. There Democrats and Republicans are in a knife fight over the budget—and just as much, who can sound tougher …