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A Pit Full of Pitiful Pangolins

It was my first trip to Sumatra. I received a call from a friend on Saturday, April 25th, that there had been a large pangolin-related seizure and that there would be a good chance for me to do some research. So I set all previous obligations aside and hopped onto a plane. By Monday, I was able to attend an unusual press conference held at the scene of the crime.

The storage facility was an existing seafood warehouse in Medan that looked to be about 15,000 sq ft. Upon arrival, we were greeted by a few people who were with Wildlife Conservation Society’s Wildlife Crime Unit. I noticed much press milling about and quite a few officials in police or forestry department uniforms.…

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Join Sylvia Earle 1,000 ft deep on World Oceans Day

What’s it like to be with Sylvia Earle at the bottom of the sea? Find out in Beyond Blue, a new short film created by Kip Evans, Mission Blue’s director of expeditions and photography. National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence Dr. Sylvia Earle, called a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, first Hero for the Planet by Time Magazine and 2014 Woman of the Year by Glamour, spoke with Evans in this exclusive interview 1,000 feet below the waves at Cocos Island, Costa Rica – a Mission Blue Hope Spot – in Undersea Hunter’s DeepSee submersible during Mission Blue’s recent expedition to the island in partnership with Fusion. Watch it here:

Mission Blue: Beyond Blue from Kip Evans on Vimeo.…

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Swimming with Giants

Weighing in close to 45,000 pounds and nearing 40 feet in length, the whale shark (Rhincodon typus) is the world’s largest living fish species. These enormous filter feeders grow to be so large on a diet of tiny plankton – microscopic plants and animals that float in the water column. Slowly moving through the water like living submarines, whale sharks gulp down vast quantities of these tiny critters and congregate in areas of high plankton concentrations. It’s this quest for food that brings whale sharks to the coast of Isla Mujeres, Mexico each summer. These gentle giants gather by the dozens or even hundreds from June through September, slurping down fish eggs and enchanting tourists.
Ecotourism groups like A Cotton Photo lead trips out to snorkel alongside whale sharks, enabling seasoned divers and ocean newbies alike to experience the grace and enormity of these beautiful creatures.…

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Former Maldives President Remains Political Prisoner

By Brett Garling. Originally published on The Inertia on May 14, 2015.

Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives, is an international champion of climate change action. Unfortunately, he is also a political prisoner, having been found guilty in a sham terrorism trial, and is set to serve a 13 year prison sentence. He is 47 right now and will be 60 when he gets out. Not only were the charges bogus, but the trial was essentially stillborn: the court scheduled a hearing within two hours of his arrest and prevented the defense team from appearing in court because they were required to register two days in advance… a classic catch-22.
Tourism is integral to the Maldives. Indeed, it is the island nation’s largest industry and attracts many water sport lovers and especially surfers who laud the atoll as one of the global prime destinations to catch serious waves.…

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Dive Deep into the Blue Mind Summit May 11th in DC

Mission Blue had the pleasure of catching up with Dr. Wallace J Nichols, water scientist, conservationist, best-selling author and leader of the Blue Mind movement. With the 5th annual Blue Mind Summit coming up this month in Washington DC and the release of his best-selling book, Blue Mind, in paperback, we had a lot to discuss. Read on to learn more about Nichols’ remarkable Blue Mind movement and the growing understanding of how water helps us in more ways than you might imagine.
So tell us more about the Blue Mind Summit. What’s happening this year?
This year it’s in Washington DC and the theme is “Urban Blue”. Most people in the world live in big coastal towns or cities and thus interact, or have the great opportunity to interact, with the urban blue.…

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Healthy Oceans Require Healthy Policy

Our country has been making serious strides in rebuilding some of our most threatened fish species, but key members of Congress are now threatening to undo that progress and take us in the other direction. Luckily, we all have the opportunity to fight back.
Over the last several decades, our understanding of the ocean has deepened tremendously, although sometimes we have had to learn the hard way that the ocean is not inexhaustible. Decades of intense overfishing have led to severe declines in populations of fish, including Atlantic cod, Gulf of Mexico red snapper, and many Pacific coast rockfishes. Thankfully, we have learned a fair amount about how to restore the health of the ocean, and some of that knowledge has been reflected in updates to our nation’s primary fishing law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, originally passed in 1976.…

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Protect Costa Rica’s Hammerhead Sharks from Poachers

By Shari Sant Plummer with contributions by Courtney Mattison (Originally published on National Geographic Ocean Views)

Three hundred forty two miles west of mainland Costa Rica lies an oceanic island so spectacular Jacques Cousteau called it the “most beautiful island in the world.” Cascading waterfalls cut through lush foliage, the symphony of a thousand seabirds echoes in your ears, and the surrounding deep waters host a diversity of wildlife found almost nowhere else on the planet. Isla del Coco’s extreme wild beauty appears Jurassic – and was in fact used in the movie of the same name. It seems as though you’ve gone back in time, to a time before humans.

Our ship, the Argo, was greeted by spinner dolphins who leapt and twirled at her bow as we entered the boundaries of Cocos Island Marine Park.…

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Reality Check: Five Years After Deepwater Horizon

By Courtney Mattison & Rachel Devorah
It’s a heartbreaking yet familiar scene. Oil disasters of catastrophic proportions, seeping and sludging all over marine and coastal habitats; hundreds of dead seabirds and dolphins; sick residents and failing coastal economies. The same irrevocable accidents continue to occur. It’s easy to see history repeating itself, posing the inevitable question: will we ever learn from our mistakes?
As the five-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster approaches on April 20, the effects of this devastating accident are still raw throughout the Gulf of Mexico. The 2010 catastrophe spewed approximately 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in America’s worst environmental crisis to date and the second largest oil disaster in world history next to the 1991 Gulf War spill, during which Iraqi forces intentionally released 252-336 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf.…

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Northern California National Marine Sanctuaries Double in Size

Mission Blue commends the tremendous efforts of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, which recently announced greatly expanded reach for ocean conservation in the coastal waters surrounding San Francisco, the home of Mission Blue headquarters. This near doubling in geographic protection comes at a time when the Obama administrator is pursuing a more aggressive ocean conservation agenda, most notably with massive tracts ocean set aside in the US Pacific to be off-limits to fishing, energy extraction and other activities.
Mission Blue and Dr. Sylvia Earle look forward to working with the National Marine Sanctuaries and NOAA in calling public attention to the positive impact the federal government is making on increasing the geographic area of Marine Protected Areas within US jurisdiction.…

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Sea Lion Pups Starving Along California Coast

By Courtney Mattison
Sea lion pups are starving and washing up on California beaches for the third consecutive year. Every winter since January 2013, throngs of sickly young sea lions have stranded themselves on beaches and in seaside backyards and parking lots in California coastal communities, often weighing less than half of their ideal body weight. “They’re extremely emaciated, basically starving to death,” says veterinarian Shawn Johnson of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito.
Over 2,000 emaciated, dehydrated and diseased sea lion pups have washed up on California’s shores from San Diego to San Francisco since the beginning of 2015. For the two-month period of January and February this year, California sea lion strandings were almost 20 times the average stranding rate.[i]…

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