Green sea turtle hatchlings must make a perilous journey from nest to ocean. While scrambling across the sand and into the water, the tiny turtles must contend with countless dangers—from birds and crabs to fish and sharks. Only about one in 1,000 hatchlings completes this trek and survives to breeding age. While visiting Heron Island, Australia, in January 2020, I set out to shoot photos on the beach and stumbled upon this scene. What captured my attention was this little hatchling struggling to navigate through sandy footprints that onlookers had left in its path. It was a perfect example o ..read more

Scores of tropical fish, a substantial shark population, and colorful corals draw thousands of tourists to Mexico’s Cabo Pulmo National Park each month. That is, except from March through August 2020, when restrictions aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19 barred people from visiting the protected area in the Gulf of California. As it did around the world, the sudden shortfall in tourism dollars hit the local economy hard. But COVID-19 lockdowns also presented scientists with a unique opportunity: a chance to study the effects of ecotourism on the park’s wildlife. The research shows that ev ..read more

The sun sits low in the sky as David Borbón walks from one young mangrove to another, treading carefully so as not to disturb their roots. A golden glow lights the plants as he delicately checks for flowers and new growth, removing strands of dried algae and seagrass that accumulate on the saplings with the coming and going of tides. Every so often, he lets out a joyful cry upon finding a new propagule—a small, green bean–shaped seedling—growing on a tree he has planted: “My grandchild!” He takes out his phone to capture a picture of the new family member. It has taken him over a decade to get ..read more

This story was originally published by Grist, in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. “We’ve got ourselves a little monster out there,” anchorman Jim Cantore warned, facing the camera in the Weather Channel’s newsroom on a sultry August weekend in 1992. At first, few in Florida were paying attention. “It’s very hard to get people to believe that there’s some danger from some element of nature that they haven’t experienced before,” a reporter told Cantore as the channel played footage of tranquil beaches an ..read more

The underwater microphone first picked up the distinctive ping around 4:00 a.m. In the water off Hawai‘i, there it was: the unknown whale’s signature call. Jennifer McCullough, a biologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), checks her monitors. From her station on the research ship’s lower deck, her instruments are telling her the sounds are coming from only 200 meters away. She radios up to the bridge, guiding the crew to keep the whales in front of the ship. For 18 years, scientists have been sporadically recording the sounds of this mystery animal. With a bi ..read more

A century ago, as many as two million African penguins flourished on the rocky shores of what we now call South Africa and Namibia. There, the chilly Atlantic Ocean encounters the warm Indian Ocean, causing an explosion of nutrient-rich water and the proliferation of small oily fish like sardines and anchovies—the birds’ favorite prey. Today, the situation is dramatically different. The currents are still flowing and the nutrients are still abundant, but the fish schools have crashed, as have African penguins, which today number just 20,000. Without some sort of intervention, scientists projec ..read more

The ocean has a way of upending expectations. Four-story-high rogue waves peak and collapse without warning. Light bends across the surface to conjure chimeric cities that hover at the horizon. And watery wastelands reveal themselves to be anything but. So was the case for the scientists aboard the USS Jasper in the summer of 1942. Bobbing in choppy seas off the coast of San Diego, California, acoustic physicist Carl F. Eyring and his colleagues, who had been tasked with studying a sonar device the navy could use to detect German submarines, were sending sound waves into the deep. But as the e ..read more

When the woes of the world become too much, people often turn to books. They help us understand but also provide solace, distraction, or even humor in tough times. Books for children are no different. Their themes can seem simple, but they have layers of nuance and sophistication and offer multiple entry points for talking about tough topics. This fall’s coastal-themed crop of books for young readers is full of adventure—expeditions to the Arctic and a search for the world’s biggest eye, for instance—as well as journeys much closer to home, journeys of understanding and empathy, and those that ..read more

Early one morning in July 2022, I was searching for the famous kangaroos of Lucky Bay, in Western Australia’s Cape Le Grand National Park, when I noticed a pied oystercatcher a little farther up the beach. The small black-and-white bird was foraging in the sand, ready to snatch a meal with its long red beak. Pied oystercatchers are found throughout the Australian coast and are often spotted hammering at mollusks and crustaceans to feed themselves or their young. I was visiting in winter, and the pre-sunrise air was chilly. A layer of mist rolled along the beach, giving the appearance of a sno ..read more

In November 1981, a fleet of briefcase-toting lobbyists, scientists, and political negotiators gathered in sunny Tenerife, Spain, to decide the fate of Atlantic bluefin tuna. Representing more than a dozen countries, including Canada, the United States, Spain, and Italy, the besuited men knew crisis loomed. Since the early 1970s, rising global demand for bluefin flesh had spurred fishing fleets—hailing from ports on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean—to kill untold thousands of the wide-ranging predator every year. Under this heavy fishing pressure, primarily driven by the Japanese appetite for ..read more