October 28, 2010 - Distinguishable from its ocean-going cousin by a long, pointed snout, the Ganges dolphin is one of only four freshwater species in the world. Unchecked levels of agricultural, industrial and domestic waste have poured into the holy river over the past decades, threatening the dolphins and other creatures that call the river home. But along a northern stretch of the Ganges, a Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) project is leveraging the religious importance of the river for Hindus to teach villagers the virtues of conservation and protection of its sacred water. Local fishermen no longer hunt the dolphins for fear of reprisal from village leaders who have signed up to the WWF project, while a WWF campaign promoting natural fertilizers has dramatically reduced chemical pollution into the river. More...

October 7, 2010 - The high tech Ady Gil was a boat used by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to harass Japanese whalers in the seas surrounding Antarctica.  The stealth-fighteresque craft had its bow sheared off in a collision with a Japanese whaling vessel earlier this year.

Now Peter Bethune, one-time skipper of the Ady Gil, says that Paul Watson, founder and "Admiral" of the Sea Shepherds, ordered him to scuttle the damaged boat for publicity purposes. Bethune maintains that the damage to the Ady Gil could have been repaired but that Watson ordered him to sink it to, "garner sympathy with the public and to create better TV... Paul Watson was my admiral. He gave me an order and I carried it out... I was ashamed of it at the time and I'm ashamed of it now."

Sea Shepherd actions are shown on the Animal Planet show Whale Wars and have included scuttling and disabling whaling vessels at harbor, intervening in Canadian seal hunts, ramming other vessels, trying to temporarily blind or disorient whalers with a laser device, throwing bottles of foul-smelling butyric acid onto vessels at sea, boarding of whaling vessels while at sea, and seizure and destruction of drift nets at sea. Sea Shepherd claims that their aggressive actions are necessary as the international community has shown itself unwilling or unable to stop species-endangering whaling and fishing practices. Some governments and organizations have referred to them as terrorists.

Here's more from Guardian UK.

October 2, 2010 - Loggerhead nesting season started this year, as usual, in May. Across the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, female sea turtles began plodding out of the water and up the beach, each burying a clutch of a hundred or more leathery eggs beneath the sand. The hatchlings from this season’s first nests, however, were on schedule to scramble into the Gulf of Mexico only a few months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, at what looked to be the height of one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history. By June, the sargassum in that part of the gulf was heavily oiled. Soon, it appeared to be largely gone: incinerated in controlled burns, maybe, or hauled up by skimmer boats. And so state and federal wildlife agencies came up with a radical plan. Sea-turtle eggs laid on beaches in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle would be dug up during their very last days of incubation, packed into Styrofoam coolers and shipped to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center on the opposite coast of Florida. There, after hatching, the baby turtles would be released into the oil-free Atlantic.

Here's the full story from Jon Mooalem NY Times.

October 1, 2010 - Esperanto was invented as an easy to learn language that people from different countries would use to communicate with each other. Humans are still working on that. Meanwhile, new research has revealed that when Bottlenose and Guyana dolphins come together they change the way they communicate and begin using an intermediate language. Here's more.