The small Pacific Island nation of Kiribati has become a global conservation leader by establishing the world’s largest marine protected area – a California-sized ocean wilderness of pristine coral reefs and rich fish populations threatened by over-fishing and climate change.

A Canada-U.S. research team has found that commercial fisheries play an unexpected role in the decline of water quality in coastal waters. In the latest issue of Nature Geoscience, Roxane Maranger and Nina Caraco explain that the collapse of the fisheries from decades of over fishing has played a significant role in disturbing the balance between nitrogen entering and leaving costal water systems.

One of the most significant questions facing marine ecologists today, is just how much of an impact global variations in the environment are having on the dispersal of larval and juvenile marine species from open oceans to coral reefs.

In an article published in the January 16 issue of PLoS ONE, Joan B. Company and colleagues at the Institut de Ciencies del Mar (CSIC) in Spain describe a mechanism of interaction across ecosystems showing how a climate-driven phenomenon originated in shelf environments controls the biological processes of a deep-sea living resource.

Coral reefs in the Caribbean have suffered significant changes due to the proximal effects of a growing human population, reports a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B.

The January 2008 issue of BioScience includes a special section entitled “Managing for Resilience in Coastal Marine Ecosystems.”

The loss of deep-sea species poses a severe threat to the future of the oceans, suggests a new report publishing early online on December 27th and in the January 8th issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.

A Smithsonian scientist and colleague report that a potentially harmful, invasive crab species that has spread to several countries is now established and reproducing in Panama. The researchers report that Harris mud crabs are reproducing in the small, man-made lake designated to become the third set of locks in Panama’s new $5 billion canal expansion project.

Did the great flood of Noah’s generation really occur thousands of years ago" Was the Roman city of Caesarea destroyed by an ancient tsunami" Will pollution levels in our deep seas remain forever a mystery"

A team of coral researchers has taken a major stride towards revealing the workings of the mysterious ‘engine’ that drives Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and corals the world over.

Corals in the central and western Pacific ocean are dying faster than previously thought, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have found. Nearly 600 square miles of reef have disappeared per year since the late 1960s, twice the rate of rainforest loss.

In a setback for efforts to protect endangered coral reefs from oil spills, researchers in Israel report that oil dispersants — the best tool for treating oil spills in tropical areas —are significantly more toxic to coral than the oil they are used to clean up.