On May 22, 2017, the people of Gunjur in The Gambia woke up to a red lagoon. Dead fish floated on the surface of the Bolong Fenyo, the centrepiece of a nature reserve the community had protected for nearly a decade. Investigators traced the pollutio…
Mowi is the largest farmed salmon company in the world. Its name comes from Thor Mowinckel, who co-founded the company in Norway in the late 1960s. Frederik W. Mowinckel, a relative from that same family, has become one of the industry’s sharpest cr…
When Andrew Lewin studied marine biology at the University of Guelph in the late 1990s, his aquaculture professor made a prediction: one day, fish farms would supply half the world's seafood. That day has arrived. In 2022, aquaculture overtook wild …
Walk up to almost any seafood counter and you'll find some version of the same promise. A big sign says the store supports sustainable fishing. Right under it, on ice, there may be a fish that every independent seafood guide tells you to avoid. Tha…
About 100 kilometres off Cornwall, Haig Fras rises from the seabed as a granite reef covered in jewel anemones and cup corals. It had been a protected area for years, and heavy fishing gear could still legally drag across it. In March 2024, England …
Picture a shrimp trawl moving slowly along the bottom of a warm, shallow bay. Shrimp pour into the net. Then a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the smallest and most endangered sea turtle on Earth, gets swept in with them. It hits a metal grid, slides down…
On July 2, 1992, Canada closed the northern cod fishery overnight. About 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador lost their jobs in a single day. It was the largest single layoff in Canadian history, and it happened because too many fish were tak…
How to Choose Sustainable Seafood Without a PhD Buying seafood the right way takes effort. Grocery stores hang signs promising sustainable practices, sometimes directly above products every major seafood guide says to avoid. In the United States, “…
Look around the room you’re in. Your phone, your shoes, your coffee maker. Most of it crossed an ocean on a container ship to reach you. Global shipping feels like the least changeable thing on the planet, too big and too far from anything in your c…
In 2014, a huge patch of unusually warm water settled off the west coast of North America. Scientists nicknamed it the blob. Over the next two years, it rearranged the coastal ocean so thoroughly that humpback whales ended up feeding in the same nar…
Next time you are at the sink, fill your hands with cold water, hold your breath, and press your face into it. Within seconds your heart slows. Blood shifts away from your arms and legs toward your heart and brain, and your body quietly starts ratio…
Picture a blue whale, 30 metres long and 200 metres down, closing in on a swarm of krill so thick it looks like a cloud. The whale beats its tail, picks up speed, and opens its mouth. In about the time it takes you to read a text message, it swallow…
The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived, and every time it feeds, it pulls off one of the most extreme physical feats on the planet. It speeds up, throws open its mouth, swallows a volume of water and krill that can rival its own bo…
In 1988, someone found a small striped mussel in Lake St. Clair, the little lake between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. It was about the size of a fingernail, and nobody had seen one in North America before. Within a few years there were billions of the…
You rinse your yogurt tub. You check the little number on the bottom. You put it in the blue bin and hope for the best. A lot of it never gets recycled. And one of the biggest legal wins against plastic in Canada started with people doing something…
Picture a quiet lake in a boreal forest in northwestern Ontario. No cottages on the shore, no factories upstream. In 2001, a team of government scientists started adding a tiny amount of the synthetic estrogen used in birth control pills to that lak…
This summer, people are boarding whale watching boats around New York and seeing humpback whales feeding in sight of the Manhattan skyline. Gotham Whale, a Staten Island citizen science nonprofit, has now identified 500 individual humpbacks in New Y…
More than 2,000 episodes ago, the very first guest on How to Protect the Ocean was Dr. Judith Weis, talking about her book Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know. This week she's back for her fourth appearance, with a fully updated second edi…
This week on How to Protect the Ocean, we followed California's marine protected area review from the history of the network to how public process builds support. Along the way, the call to action was simple: submit a public comment, or show up to a…
Earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management received about 65,000 submissions on a proposal to explore deep-sea mining near the Northern Mariana Islands. Most opposed it. In March 2026, the area under consideration grew from 35.5 millio…
California finished building its statewide network of marine protected areas in 2012. Two years later, the Pacific handed it the hardest test it could. A marine heatwave known as The Blob moved in along the coast in 2014 and, combined with El Niño c…
In 1999, California passed a law ordering the state to fix its patchwork of ocean parks. Nobody did much with it for two years. When the state finally got the process moving, it took a decade, cost roughly $35 million, and at one point put more than…
California has a network of 124 marine protected areas. In October, the state's Fish and Game Commission takes up 15 proposals that could change it. The review behind those proposals was meant to be a chance to make the network stronger, fairer, and…
A boat's wake looks harmless right up until you watch it happen more than once. Watch one roll out from behind a passing boat and hit a marsh bank, and it looks like nothing much happened. Come back to that same bank a year later, and a chunk of it …