While rabbits continue to ravage Australia’s native landscapes, rabbit fish may help save large areas of the Great Barrier Reef from destruction.

Nowhere is the principle of "strength in numbers" more apparent than in the collective power of microbes: despite their simplicity, these one-cell organisms--which number about 5 million trillion trillion strong (no, that is not a typo) on Earth--affect virtually every ecological process, from the decay of organic material to the production of oxygen.

As spring arrives across the country, tourists returning to beaches will face the reality of "red tide" -- harmful blooms of algae that make water unfit for swimming and pose risks to humans and sea life.

Tiny organisms play a powerful role in removing nitrate, a form of nitrogen pollution caused by human activity, in streams, according to a study by a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and published in Nature.

Louisiana’s coastal fisheries produce approximately 25 percent of the total catch by weight in the lower 48 states. With such a substantial portion of the nation’s economy dependant on the state of these waters – particularly the Gulf of Mexico region – it comes as no surprise that these fisheries are heavily monitored and scrutinized by researchers across the globe.

Giant bluefin tuna are in trouble, primarily because the powerful muscles that propel their extensive ocean migrations come with an Achilles' heel: They're tasty.

Continued mismanagement could force some tuna populations to quickly go the way of cod, a highly threatened fishery that once helped shape economies of whole nations, leading scientists said in the symposium “Last Best Chance for Tuna: Learning from the Cod Collapse” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Boston on February 18.

Balancing short- and long-term fisheries benefits could have prevented the collapse of the cod populations in Atlantic Canada, and is the last best chance for tuna, says University of British Columbia fisheries economist Rashid Sumaila.

The world’s sharks are disappearing. These fearsome yet charismatic fish continue to fall victim to overfishing and many are now at risk of extinction as a result.

Putting theory into practice to manage complex and closely linked social and ecological systems along our coasts is a challenge, but one NOAA researcher Anne Guerry says can be addressed by a new approach to managing the value of our ocean resources.

More than 40 percent of the world’s oceans are heavily impacted by human activities, including overfishing and pollution, according to a new study that will appear in tomorrow’s peer-reviewed journal Science.

More than 40% of the world’s oceans are heavily affected by human activities, and few if any areas remain untouched, according to the first global-scale study of human influence on marine ecosystems.