They found that several species of oil-eating bacteria were thriving in the cold waters of the submerged plume, degrading the oil "faster than expected." And the evidence so far shows that oxygen consumption levels are low, with no sign of developing dead zones.

I make my way to the back of the boat unaware of just how covered I am. To be honest, I look a little like one of those poor pelicans we've all been seeing for days now. The oil is so thick and sticky, almost like a cake batter. It does not wipe off. You have to scrape it off, in layers until you finally get close to the skin. Then you pour on some Dawn dishwashing soap and scrub. I think to myself: No fish, no bird, no turtle would ever be able to clean this off of themselves. If any animal, any were to end up in this same puddle there is almost no way they could escape.

while trying to get video of a wild octopus, it suddenly dashes towards me and rips my shiny new camera from out of my hands, then swims off, all while the camera is recording! he swam away very quickly like a naughty shoplifter. after a 5 minute chase, I placed my speargun underneath him and he quickly and curiously grabbed hold of the gun as well, giving me enough time to reach in and grab the camera from out of his mouth. I didn't feel threatened at all during the whole ordeal. he seemed to be fixated on the shiny metallic blue digital camera. the only confusing behavior was how he dashed off with it like a thief haha. cheeky octopus.

Marine biologist Dr Jon Copley said: "Seeing the world's deepest black-smoker vents looming out of the darkness was awe-inspiring."

He added: "Super-heated water was gushing out of their two-storey-high mineral spires, more than three miles beneath the waves."

Expedition leader Doug Connelly said: "We hope our discovery will yield new insights into biogeochemically important elements in one of the most extreme naturally occurring environments on our planet."

What looks like one long body in this video is actually a free-swimming colony of clones — many genetically identical bodies that are all attached. But each body in the group isn't just like its neighbor. They each do a specific job for the colony. Some individuals will swim, some will catch food, and some will reproduce.

The robotic fish will patrol the harbor of Gijon, in northern Spain under a $3.6 million grant from the European Union. Hu said Gijon was chosen because port authorities there had expressed an interest in the technology.

The plan might seem "like something straight out of science fiction," said Rory Doyle, a researcher working on the project, but he explained that there was a very simple reason for choosing fishlike machines to monitor the harbor's environmental health.

"The design of fish which nature has produced is a very energy-efficient one," Doyle said. "The fish's efficiency is created by hundreds of millions of years' of evolution. Submarines come nowhere near it."

Information gathered from the robo-fish would be transmitted to the port's control center using a wireless Internet signal when the devices surfaced. The data gathered would be used to create a three-dimensional pollution map of the harbor's area.

During penis fencing, each flatworm tries to pierce the skin of the other using one of its penises. The first to succeed becomes the de facto male, delivering its sperm into the other, the de facto female. For the flatworms, this contest is serious business. Mating is a fight because the worm that assumes the female role then must expend considerable energy caring for the developing eggs.

"We were here a few weeks ago and there were a lot of jellyfish. We didn't even go in the water. It was horrible," one teen told CBS News correspondent Susan Koeppen.

And with thousands being stung by jellyfish this summer, lifeguards at Long Beach are armed with spray bottles filled with alcohol and water to take away the pain, says Koeppen.

"We didn't get these a lot years ago," says Chief Lifeguard Paul Gillespie, "but now they're, we're getting, the frequency of them a lot more. ... We've had some of them that were just (so) tremendous that we have to come and pick off the beach."

It's not just beaches seeing a problem, Koeppen points out. "During the recent New York City triathlon, thousands of competitors were stung by jellyfish in the Hudson River.

The loggerhead sea turtle is threatened worldwide and is under consideration for being reclassified as "endangered" due to diminishing populations in the Western Atlantic Ocean. We are very pleased with Dylan's progress," said Dr. Terry Norton, Director of Veterinary Services and Interim Director of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center. "She has come a long way in the last year and has been a great representative of sea turtle education and conservation, helping to spread the word about the plight of the sea turtle and the marine ecosystem. We are glad to see her depart for her real home at sea and are excited to watch her travels once she is released."

"The Georgia Sea Turtle Center is an exciting project initiated by the Jekyll Island Foundation and the Jekyll Island Authority. The Center reflects our commitment to conservation, preservation and education," said William Lattimore, Jr., Chairman of the Jekyll Island Foundation. "This is a very special event for the entire community. Dylan's release is indeed an appropriate finale for Sea Turtle Weekend, the anniversary celebration of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center."

After outgrowing her tank at the Tidelands Nature Center in Jekyll Island, a partnership was formed with the Georgia Aquarium, where Dylan was relocated in November 2005. She returned to Jekyll Island in May of 2007, arriving at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center shortly before its official public opening, becoming the second patient.

"The Georgia Aquarium's partnership with the Georgia Sea Turtle Center has been important and hugely successful," said Ray Davis, Senior Vice President of Zoological Operations at the Georgia Aquarium. "We loved having Dylan in Atlanta and were sad to see her go, but it is certainly important that she will be released and continues to educate and inspire the future stewards of our oceans."

The study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who journeyed off the coast of Indonesia found that wild octopuses are far from the shy, unromantic loners their captive brethren appear to be.

The scientists watched the Abdopus aculeatus octopus, which are the size of an orange, for several weeks and published their findings recently in the journal Marine Biology.

They witnessed picky, macho males carefully select a mate, then guard their newly domesticated digs so jealously they would occasionally use their 8-to-10-inch tentacles to strangle a romantic rival.

The researchers also observed smaller "sneaker" male octopuses put on feminine airs, such as swimming girlishly near the bottom and keeping their male brown stripes hidden in order to win unsuspecting conquests.

"Sharks are going to arrive in Antarctica as long as the warming trend continues, a bit more slowly than crabs - crabs are going to get there first," said Professor Cheryl Wilga of the University of Rhode Island (URI), US. "But once they do get there they are capable of eating the organisms that live there."

Professor Wilga said the arrival of sharks and shell-crushing bony fishes would lead to dramatic changes in the number and proportions of species found there.

Shrimp, ribbon worms and brittle stars are likely to be the most vulnerable to population declines.

Dr Sven Thatje of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, UK, said animals living in shallow water in Antarctica were unique on Earth today because they evolved in a very cold environment over tens of millions of years.

In an analysis of scientific data going back to the 1960s and historical records over a thousand years, the researchers found that marine biodiversity -- the variety of ocean fish, shellfish, birds, plants and micro-organisms -- has declined dramatically, with 29 percent of species already in collapse.

Extending this pattern into the future, the scientists calculated that by 2048 all species would be in collapse, which the researchers defined as having catches decline 90 percent from the maximum catch.

This applies to all species, from mussels and clams to tuna and swordfish, said Boris Worm, lead author of the study, which was published in the current edition of the journal Science.

Ocean mammals, including seals, killer whales and dolphins, are also affected.

"Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging," Worm said in a statement. "In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems. I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are -- beyond anything we suspected."

"Six of our survey sites, which are areas the size of two football fields, had over 250 species of reef-building coral each - that's more than four times the number of coral species of the entire Caribbean Sea," he added.

The entire area covers 45 million acres off a peninsula in northwest New Guinea. Researchers have counted 1,200 species of fish there and 600 species of reef-building coral - the latter equal to 75 percent of the world's known total.

During two surveys earlier this year, Conservation International and Indonesian experts found at least 36 new species of fish, coral and mantis shrimp in the waters, which are peppered with 2,500 islands and submerged reefs. The area also includes the largest Pacific leatherback turtle nesting area in the world, and is visited by whales, orcas and several dolphin species.

Two of the new species are members of the epaulette shark family, which distinguishes itself by sometimes using its fins to scamper away. Their name comes from the fact that they have two large round spots near their heads that look like epaulettes, the shoulder ornaments on military uniforms.

The oxygen-starved "dead zone" along the Pacific Coast that is causing massive crab and fish die-offs is worse than initially thought, scientists said.

Weather, not pollution, appears to be the culprit, scientists said, and no relief is in sight. However, some said there is no immediate sign of long-term damage to the crab fishery in the dead zone, a 70-mile stretch of water along the Continental Shelf between Florence and Lincoln City.

Oregon State University scientists looking for weather changes that could reverse the situation aren't finding them. They say levels of dissolved oxygen critical to marine life are the lowest since the first dead zone was identified in 2002. It has returned every year.

Strong upwelling winds pushed a low-oxygen pool of deep water toward shore, suffocating marine life, said Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at OSU.

According to the Marine Conservation Society's latest annual survey, which covers more than a hundred miles of British coastline, there has been a 90 per cent increase in the density of litter over the past decade. More than a third of the rubbish found in the latest survey consisted of fragments of plastic, food wrappers, bottle lids and cotton buds.

And it's not just Britain. The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, there are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic floating on every square mile of the world's oceans.

The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week the Los Angeles Times carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan.

Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of crisp packets chucked in the sea can't be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what's known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

The Patch is not so much a city in the sea as a municipal dump on the sea.

Atmospheric scientists around the world agree that the additional carbon dioxide in the air and oceans has come from exponential growth in fossil fuel burning emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

Current carbon dioxide levels are higher than they have been for at least 650,000 years, according to ice core data from the Arctic and Antarctic.

Ocean acidity has already increased 30 percent since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, said Richard Feely, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

By the end of the 21st century that could go up to 150 percent, he said.

"This is not controversial," said Kleypas, referring to the current acidity levels. There's an overwhelming amount of data backing it up, she said.

Bush said he drew inspiration from a documentary on the island chain's biological resources shown at the White House in April by Jean-Michel Cousteau, the marine explorer and filmmaker whose father was the late Jacques Cousteau. Over dinner that night, Bush said he also got "a pretty good lecture about life" from marine biologist Sylvia Earle, an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.

The decision immediately sets aside 139,000 square miles of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and underwater peaks known as seamounts to be managed by federal and state agencies.

Conrad Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of it, said the new protected area would dwarf all others.

"It's the single-largest act of ocean conservation in history. It's a large milestone," Lautenbacher said. "It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific. It spawns a lot of the life that permeates the middle of the Pacific Ocean."