Sea turtles win in court: on August 28, 2026, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a federal rule requiring turtle excluder devices on Louisiana skimmer trawl shrimp vessels 40 feet and longer, rejecting a challenge from the Louisiana Shrimp Association. The shrimpers' case rested on Louisiana's own 55-year,…
Sea turtles win in court: on August 28, 2026, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a federal rule requiring turtle excluder devices on Louisiana skimmer trawl shrimp vessels 40 feet and longer, rejecting a challenge from the Louisiana Shrimp Association. The shrimpers' case rested on Louisiana's own 55-year,…
Shedd Aquarium beluga deaths: three whales are dead in eight days, and one of them had nothing to do with the rescue that was supposed to save them. Peekachu, a 23-year-old female recently transferred from the now-closed Marineland Canada, died on August 25. One week later, on September 2, two…
Ghost sharks. Zombie worms. Twenty species new to science, sitting on a stretch of ocean floor that had never been mapped or seen by anyone until this year. Trinidad and Tobago is 93 percent deep ocean, and for the entire history of the nation, that deep sea sat unexplored. It's…
He started diving with his dad at four years old, decades before he'd ever set foot at Loggerhead Marinelife Center. Andy DeHart's father was a former Navy diver, and that early exposure to the water hooked him on marine biology for good. By 15 he was already working in aquariums,…
For decades, marine biologists called it the "lost years": the stretch of a baby sea turtle's life, from the moment it crawls into the surf after hatching to the moment it resurfaces years later as a juvenile near shore, that nobody could actually observe. The working theory was that hatchlings…
Trinidad and Tobago's deep-sea expedition is the headline story on this episode of Ocean Decoded Live, and host Andrew Lewin breaks down what a mostly Trinbagonian science team found during the first-ever locally led deep-sea survey in the country's history. Led by marine biologist Dr. Diva Amon, the team mapped…
Trinidad and Tobago's deep-sea expedition is the headline story on this episode of Ocean Decoded Live, and host Andrew Lewin breaks down what a mostly Trinbagonian science team found during the first-ever locally led deep-sea survey in the country's history. Led by marine biologist Dr. Diva Amon, the team mapped…
Record ocean heat just broke a seasonal record it shouldn't have broken. Between August 22 and 24, 2026, the world's oceans hit an average surface temperature of 21.10°C (69.98°F), beating the previous record set in March 2024. That timing is what makes it different: ocean temperatures normally peak in March…
Today's episode covers three very different corners of the ocean world: a heat record that just broke months ahead of schedule, a career profile of the man now running one of Florida's best-known sea turtle hospitals, and a decade-long tracking study that overturns a textbook assumption about where baby sea…
At five or six years old, at a book fair, one book stopped Carlee Jackson-Bohannon cold: a shark book, cover alone enough to hook her on how many different species of sharks exist, in how many shapes and colours. That single moment set the course for a career. She went…
Two hundred baby great white sharks are born every year in a stretch of water most people know only as a beach vacation backdrop. For 50 years, the Hamptons area gave the world the Jaws-fueled shark panic; the real story underneath is the opposite of a monster movie. Off Hampton…
Coral reefs are already in crisis, hit by climate change, pollution, and coastal development. While they fight to survive, a parallel threat is stripping them from the inside: the illegal trade in live coral for the aquarium hobbyist market has never been bigger. More than 1,300 documented smuggling cases have…
Issah Seidu spent years building a research career around dragonflies, damselflies, elephants, and crocodiles, with several published papers to his name in that field. In this Ocean People Profile from Ocean Decoded Live, host Andrew Lewin explains what pulled him away from that work and into sharks: a visit to…
Wounded corals heal faster when a tiny, easy-to-overlook fish is living inside them. That's the headline finding from a new study out of the University of Georgia: the yellowtail dascyllus damselfish (Dascyllus flavicaudus), a small reef fish that spends its entire life inside a single coral colony, appears to actively…
Today's episode covers three very different corners of the ocean world: a true-crime story hiding inside a conservation story, a profile of a scientist who built her own path into a field that didn't make room for her, and a hidden-in-plain-sight discovery just off one of America's most famous beach…
The Ocean Cleanup was supposed to be one of the great ocean conservation success stories: in 2013, an 18-year-old named Boyan Slat founded the project on a promise that a passive, current-powered barrier, no boats, no fuel, could remove 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within five years. He…
