31 people licensed to cull lionfish 

Lionfish have decimated areas of the Caribbean and recently their numbers have been multiplying around Bermuda. A group of 31 volunteers has now been issued special licenses by the Ministry of the Environment and Sports to use scuba equipment to cull the invasive Lionfish which are threatening Bermuda's reef ecosystem and commercial fishing.   

Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) have reduced Green Island Bay’s coral cover by as much as 60% since 2007. The bay harbours one of the Philippines’ few remaining populations of dugong.

Greenpeace says its ship Esperanza found evidence of illegal tuna fishing in international waters between Papua New Guinea and the Federated States of Micronesia last week. The vessels were Philippine-registered.

According the latest report from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in 2007 researchers found 45,084 nests for the loggerhead turtles, down more than 4,600 nests from the year before.

"Data collected during the 2007 season indicate the lowest nesting levels in Florida" in the history of the monitoring program concluded the report. In 1998, the state reported 85,988 nests.

A cargo of juvenile sharks, four of them allegedly whale sharks, were intercepted in Pagbilao town, Quezon province, by a task force of provincial fishery officials and environmentalists. 

Glenn Forbes, Tanggol Kalikasan-Southern Tagalog program officer, said that a concerned citizen and a local government official from the coastal town of Calauag, Quezon province tipped them off by mobile phone that several baby whale sharks would be transported to Manila.

The New York Aquarium has lost a 43-year-old raggedtooth shark called Bertha Aquarium Director Jon Forrest Dohlin said Bertha “was a great animal and a symbol for the plight of all sharks in the wild.”  

The facility, which is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, says Bertha may have been the longest living raggedtooth shark in an aquarium.

Great white tracked

A young white shark returned to the wild by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in February, has travelled past the southern tip of Baja California and is heading toward waters off the Mexican mainland, according to data from an electronic tracking tag attached to the animal.