Saving Seafood

What Scientists Found When a Deep Sea Mining Company Invited Them In

December 8, 2025 — Industrial mining of the seabed could reduce the abundance and diversity of tiny animals living in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, a new study found.

The study, published Friday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, was funded by The Metals Company, which is vying to become the first company to conduct commercial mining on the ocean floor.

Researchers from the Natural History Museum in London analyzed samples from the seafloor before and after a mining test and found that the number of worms, minute crustaceans and other small animals in the path of the mining vehicle fell 37 percent. The variety of the creatures also declined by 32 percent.

The data came from over 4,000 meters below the waves of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico that is targeted for seabed mining because it is rich with potato-sized nodules that contain nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese. The metals are used in renewable-energy technologies and also have military applications.

The Metals Company has spent some $250 million studying the environmental effects of seabed mining. The dozens of researchers involved had contracts that allowed them to independently analyze and publish their results. This emerging collection of work represents one of the largest and most comprehensive research efforts conducted in the Clarion-Clipper Zone to date.

More than a dozen countries, through state-owned entities or sponsored companies, hold United Nations permits to explore more than one million square kilometers of deep sea floor around the world. The agency’s International Seabed Authority has not yet approved commercial mining.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Scientists warn coral restoration can’t keep pace with global reef collapse

April 30, 2025 — Coral restoration won’t save reefs from global warming, according to a recent study – at least, not the way we’re doing it now.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Helsinki and published earlier this month in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds coral degradation is significantly outpacing restoration efforts. Its results indicate most unsuccessful projects fail due to prohibitive costs, lack of global coordination, location unsuitability, and bleaching events caused by rising water temperatures, during which coral becomes white due to stress.

Despite “public perception and scientific enthusiasm” for coral restoration, we can’t restore our way out of this one, the study finds.

“Scaling up restoration to any meaningful level going beyond the very local scale would be extremely challenging,” senior author Giovanni Strona, now a quantitative ecologist at the European Commission in Italy, told Mongabay.

Sebastian Ferse, a senior ecosystem scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay that its results suggest “reef restoration is prohibitively expensive, particularly when looking at the scale of the problem we are facing.”

“It is much more cost-efficient to prevent degradation of reefs in the first place than having to restore the damage afterwards,” Ferse said.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Aquaculture can feed the world, new report claims

August 31, 2017 — A new study by University of California, Santa Barbara marine scientists led by Professor Rebecca Gentry, along with researchers from the Nature Conservancy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), shows considerable potential for aquaculture to develop around the globe.

Fish farming is now the fastest-growing food sector in the world, and is frequently cited as having the potential to address future global food security issues. In their study, the researchers estimated that 15 billion metric tons (MT) of finfish could be grown globally per year, which is 100 times more than current world seafood consumption.

The results of their study, “Mapping the global potential for marine aquaculture,” published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on 14 August, demonstrates the oceans’ vast potential to support aquaculture, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and report co-author Peter Kareiva said.

“We need to find more protein for our growing population, and we have pretty much tapped out wild fish as protein sources,” he said. “This study shows that farming fish in the ocean could play a huge role in feeding people without degrading our ocean or overfishing wild species.”

Both fish and bivalve aquaculture have potential for expansion in what the researchers termed “hot spots” – particularly in warm, tropical regions.

Indonesia, for example, was found to have one of the highest production potentials for fish and bivalves. Developing just one percent of Indonesia’s suitable ocean area could produce more than 24 million MT of fish per year. If this was used entirely for domestic consumption, it would increase seafood consumption per capita six-fold.

Read the full story at Seafood Source