Indian Ocean News

How had we missed this until now? An undersea mountain as tall as three Eiffel Towers. DDT contamination spread across an area of the seabed as large as San Francisco.…

Foreign tuna fishing companies, mostly from Asia, have been exploiting Madagascar’s waters since the 1950s. The bloc that is now the European Union joined the hunt in 1986 and didn’t…

The organization responsible for managing tuna fishing quotas in the Indian Ocean failed to make headway on saving the sector’s most imperiled species, yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), at the body’s…

Machine learning can help conservationists monitor climate impacts across large swaths of marine ecosystems over extended periods of time, a task never possible before. The Delta Maps machine learning tool…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has welcomed a recent decision by fisheries regulators to curtail the use of controversial fish-aggregating devices, or FADs, which critics blame for a steep decline…

All three commercially important tuna species in the Indian Ocean are at risk. On Feb. 5, countries hammered out an agreement in Mombasa, Kenya, on one the prickliest issues for…

Damselfish can be fastidious farmers. They prune and cultivate small patches of algae, often no more than half a square meter (5 square feet) in area, ensuring they have a…

More than half of known species of coral reef sharks and rays are threatened with extinction, according to new research that underscores the urgent need for improved regional fisheries and…

Not quite aquatic but not fully terrestrial, mangrove forests are uniquely adapted to inhabit the interface between land and sea in the warmer parts of the world. Compared to the…

In September, scientists boarded submersibles and dived into the waters surrounding the Maldives, a nation of islands peppered across the Indian Ocean. Very little is known about the Maldivian sea…

Unstudied at sea until recently, this huge, fast-moving ocean current may hold a key to resolving climate change uncertainties. But doing remote research in southern oceans poses financial, data gathering, and unexpected challenges.

A new analysis of satellite data finds the Western Indian Ocean region lost around 4% its mangrove forests over the past quarter-century. In a report that discusses the state of…

In 2021, faced with an economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the island nation of Maldives considered lifting a ban on shark fishing that had been in place since 2010.…

MARERENI, Kenya — One day in April, at a few minutes past six in the morning, the sun’s golden rays lit up the sea on Kenya’s coast. A few early-rising…

ANTANANARIVO — During the current shrimping season, 39 trawlers will catch just over 4,000 metric tons of shrimp in Madagascar's waters. But one company, with a five-year exploitation right, didn’t…

Out in the azure waters and colorful corals of the Maldives, a resplendent, rainbow-hued fish has become the first to be named and described by a Maldivian researcher. New to…

With hooks, nets and lines, industrial fishing vessels stream into the waters around the Seychelles every year, looking for a fish known as “blue gold”: tuna. The most sought-after tuna…

Cyclone Batsirai rammed into Madagascar’s coast on Feb. 5, bringing further devastation to a country already reeling from the effects of another tropical storm, Ana, that struck on Jan. 22. Batsirai,…

Escalating ocean temperatures stemming from climate change are devastating the world’s tropical coral reefs. In response to the stress, corals, which are animals, sometimes unceremoniously jettison the algae that live…

Ten countries in the western Indian Ocean are banding together to create a network of marine conservation areas under the banner of the Great Blue Wall. The idea is to…

In the 1970s, coral reefs in the Western Indian Ocean were relatively untouched by people. Today, these same reefs are at a tipping point with more than 69 million people…

Tiger sharks sometimes swim thousands of kilometers—far enough to move among oceans. Their flexible diets and adaptable behaviors set them up to be successful jet-setters, zipping around the world and…

From above, the Lhaviyani atoll in the Maldives forms a rough oval, encircling a turquoise stretch of the Indian Ocean speckled with islands. But on the ground, populations of insects,…

Nestled on the ocean floor in Southeast Asia are five sensor-filled boxes that will reveal the future of coral reefs. For the past year, from their secret location, the Bluboxx…

Scientists have completed the first-ever global, high-resolution map of the world’s shallow tropical coral reefs. The map is part of the Allen Coral Atlas, an open-access, user-friendly coral reef monitoring…

An assessment in 2019 by shark experts identified the little-known family of wedgefishes as among the most threatened marine fish families worldwide. This prompted researchers to roll out a first-of-its-kind…

JAKARTA — Indonesia is expanding its longline fishing fleet in the high seas as part of its plan for a world-leading sustainable tuna fishery by 2025. The Indonesian fisheries ministry…

Sit on a beach and watch the waves. If powered by a storm, the waves may chew away at the beach, depositing sediment in an underwater sand bar that actually…

Tuna-fishing nations hammered out a temporary plan to stop overfishing of Indian Ocean yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) at a June meeting, but fatal weaknesses may sink it, experts say. The…

It started in October 2017. A swarm of microscopic algae called Karenia brevis amassed in the waters off Florida’s southwest coast, turning the ocean a rust-red hue. The algae, which…