Thursday 10/19/21, and Days 2 and 3, Friday and Saturday: We left Buenos Aires late in the day and steamed southeast downriver overnight. It took hours for us to reach the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. This is the world’s widest rivermouth, more than 100 miles across. I woke numerous times during the [...]
A female albatross who is at least sixty-years old has just hatched a new chick at her nest at Midway Atoll in the central Pacific. This bird, named Wisdom, breaks records for wild bird longevity and parentage. Conventional wisdom on albatross longevity is that, with luck, they can live up to 50 years, perhaps longer. [...]
If something can be neither fish nor fowl, for seabirds this is neither feast nor famine: scientists are discovering more species eating more—plastic. An article in the Ottawa Citizen reports that in the Canadian Arctic, startled scientists “are pulling remarkable amounts of trash from birds in some of the remotest spots on Earth.” Pacific albatrosses [...]
The following op-ed by Carl Safina appeared on CNN.com July 28, 2010 Editor’s note: Carl Safina writes about how the ocean is changing and what it means for wildlife and for people. A MacArthur fellow, Pew fellow and Guggenheim fellow, he is adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and president of Blue Ocean Institute. His [...]
Guest blog by Stephen Dishart, Executive Director, Blue Ocean Institute To view Carl’s TEDx Oil Spill lecture click here. Safina points to gross negligence as the cause of the spill With a remarkable agenda of speakers, the hottest topic on the planet and a crowd of environmental experts and others eager for the latest word [...]
Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery. By the second week of June, oil began hitting the beaches of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle At Dauphin Island, Alabama, beachgoers tried to enjoy the sun and water while workers “cleaned” the beach with shovels. Look at the incredible amount of [...]
On a tiny dot of an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a Laysan albatross lands and greets her chick. She has flown thousands of miles, while the patient chick has waited up to two weeks for one of its parents to return with a meal. Now it is famished and it greets [...]
Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery In Casey Keiff’s very fast, overpowered outboard we blast through a sliver of the astonishingly vast and intricate wetlands of Louisiana. The skeletons of oak forests stand starkly on marsh islands now subsiding as oil and gas has been pumped from under [...]
Getting hooked and drowned on fishing gear has been the greatest causes of death for adult albatrosses for several decades. The main problem is lines dozens of miles long with thousands of baited hooks, called long-lines. For a decade, conservation groups including Blue Ocean Institute and Birdlife International’s Global Seabird Program and others have worked [...]
For about a decade I studied Common and Roseate Terns nesting on Long Island, and followed them as they were foraging at sea. I was studying their relationships with the fish they ate, including where and how they found fish in the ocean. During that time we also studied their breeding success, survival, and growth in [...]
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