China’s shadowy maritime militia is worryingly active

In December over 1,000 Chinese fishing boats lined up to form an L shape in the seas north of Taiwan. Over the next few months they coalesced again on four more occasions. Our animated maps visualise the unprecedented activity https://t.co/rWSIFrx6LL pic.twitter.com/90Nb3pPOCF

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 26, 2026

In December over 1,000 Chinese fishing boats lined up to form an L shape in the seas north of Taiwan. Over the next few months they coalesced again on four more occasions. Our animated maps visualise the unprecedented activity

Source: Starboard Maritime Intelligence

From The Economist by 

Big new formations north of Taiwan suggest officials are testing out its capabilities

The bays of the Zhoushan archipelago are crammed with blue-hulled fishing boats, laid up after a busy season scouring the East China Sea for crabs and croaker.
Some of the boats, though, have been doing more than just fishing.
In December over 1,000 vessels from Zhoushan and other parts of China’s eastern seaboard did something unprecedented.
They lined up to form an L shape in the seas north of Taiwan, held the formation for more than 12 hours, then dispersed.
Over the next few months Chinese fishing boats coalesced again in the East China Sea, on four more occasions.
Chinese state-run media claim all this is normal commercial activity.
Something fishier is surely going on.
China is unusual in having three separate maritime forces at its disposal.
The first two are the navy and the coastguard.
But since as far back as the 1950s, China’s leaders have also commandeered part of the country’s fishing fleet as a paramilitary “maritime militia”.
This shadowy force is made up of a mixture of normal fishing boats and larger, steel-hulled ones which appear to be purpose-built for aggressive manoeuvres.
It is notorious for its activities in the South China Sea, where militia boats are often sent to disputed reefs and islets to secure China’s sovereignty claims, sometimes violently.
Fishing boats in the East China Sea had largely stuck to trawling.
That may be changing.
The recent formations there were far larger than anything seen before, even in the South China Sea, so it seems likely they brought together many ordinary fishing boats alongside formal militiamen.
They were packed densely enough that some cargo ships appeared to change course to go around them.
The manoeuvres suggest Chinese officials are testing out their capabilities—and some fear that could give China an edge in a conflict over Taiwan.

 

 Fishing boats set sail in August 2025 from the bays of the Zhoushan archipelago, south of Shanghai.

Fishing ban lifted in China and 2,500 boats just stormed out of Zhoushan like a seafood army
Image: Getty Images

 

NEW:

🇨🇳 Fishing ban lifted in China and 2,500 boats just stormed out of Zhoushan like a seafood army

The great crab haul begins… pic.twitter.com/Biv27E54Rq

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) August 7, 2025

 

No official numbers are published on the size of China’s maritime militia.
State news outlets sometimes deny that it even exists.
But an article published in 2014 in a Chinese defence journal praised the force as “irreplaceable” thanks to its “wide distribution, disguised identities and familiarity with maritime conditions”.
Unlike its navy, China’s militia gives officials plausible deniability for ambiguous “grey zone” activities: they can claim, for instance, that violent spats with other countries’ ships were caused by “patriotic fishermen” acting independently.

For decades the maritime militia had a reputation as a ragtag bunch, with antiquated weapons and poor discipline.
The average fisherman has only a limited education and greying hair (only 5% are below the age of 30, according to a survey in 2024; fishing is tough and few Chinese youths want to do it).
That means training them to use the latest communications technologies can be a challenge.
Motivation can also be a problem because compensation is reportedly low.
That is partly because the militia is meant to act out of patriotic duty rather than for personal gain, says Collin Koh of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Local governments and military authorities also sometimes squabble over who should foot the bill.
But since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China has been trying to build what it calls a “new-style” maritime militia—one that is better equipped, trained and organised.
How much is being spent on this militia is hard to say.
Provinces and cities contribute towards a variety of schemes, and state-owned firms are encouraged to chip in.
Some fishing boats can get daily subsidies of over 24,000 yuan ($3,500) to loiter in disputed areas, more than enough to cover their costs and allowing owners to profit without doing any fishing.
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Modernisation has gone furthest in the South China Sea, a vast body of water which China claims almost in its entirety (six other countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, have competing claims over the region, which is rich in fish stocks and energy resources).
Some locals have become full-time militiamen, crewing large steel-hulled vessels equipped with big water cannons.
They swarm around the shoals and reefs that China claims while surveilling and harassing foreign vessels.
Militia activities are inherently hard to track, but appear to have been steadily increasing in the South China Sea.
The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, a programme at CSIS, an American think-tank, uses satellite images to check for telltale signs such as vessels loitering without deploying fishing gear, or tying themselves together to form a floating barrier.
Last year it counted an average of 241 Chinese vessels that it believes were militia sailing in disputed areas of the region every day.
That was the highest number since CSIS started monitoring in 2021.

 

Militia vessels have long swarmed Whitsun Reef, part of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. 

The boats often tie themselves together, as in this image from April. 

Image: Satellite image ©2026 Vantor

China has disputes in the East China Sea too, with Japan and South Korea in addition to Taiwan.
But militiamen have historically been much less aggressive in the region, instead focusing on civilian matters like emergency relief after typhoons.
The East China Sea is less than one quarter the size of the South China Sea, and China’s claims there are over specific areas such as the uninhabited Senkaku islands (known as the Diaoyu in Chinese, and which Japan controls) rather than over the entire body of water.
Its coastguard should, therefore, be able to patrol and handle confrontations with other countries’ vessels without relying on civilian boats.
All of this adds to the mystery surrounding the recent formations.
Five took place in less than six months, according to IngeniSPACE, a research company tracking their movements.

10pm December 25th 2025
Nagasaki Shanghai Zhoushan East China Sea

TAIWAN SOUTH KOREA

JejuJAPANOkinawa (Japan) CHINA

Chinese vessels, last known position

• The first assembled over 1,000 ships into two parallel formations, stretching 450km, around Christmas Day.
• During the next formation, in January, some boats stayed in place for over 30 hours.
  Days earlier China had conducted large-scale war games around Taiwan.
• In late March a new formation appeared 100km to the east and closer to Jeju, a South Korean island.
• Boats congregated for the latest formation, in April, on the same meridian, shortly before the start of China’s annual summer fishing ban.

Co-ordinating so many ships to stay in place for so long is a technical challenge, but more importantly a political one, says Gregory Poling of CSIS.
Some countries struggle to make their fishermen broadcast their locations consistently (many prefer to keep their choicest fishing grounds a secret).
China has shown “a degree of political control that no other country on earth can claim” over its civilian fleet, notes Mr Poling.

What could such control be used for?

 

In a conflict over Taiwan, the militia might help the navy with reconnaissance or logistics.
Militia boats have also been accused of cutting undersea-communications cables.
If China launched an amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a callous commander might use swarms of fishing boats to overwhelm the enemy with potential targets.
A very large number of fishing boats could play a more important role if China tried to impose a full blockade of the island, or a more calibrated “quarantine” (blocking only some goods).
They could help disrupt the flow of shipping to and from its ports.
The fishermen of Zhoushan, at least, have no love lost with Taiwan.
In 1950 Zhoushan was one of the last regions of China held by the Kuomintang after their defeat by the Communist Party.
Thousands of local men were press-ganged to replenish its army, and forced to go to Taiwan.
Some locals are still bitter.
More prosaically, one grizzled captain says a conflict would be a disaster for business.
He would help only if the authorities demanded it.
One younger man, though, is confident that local fishermen would play their part.
“We Chinese are like scattered sand that would unite if the time came,” he said.
“We’d all become militia.”

Map the travels of Homer's Odysseus

 

The Odyssey, traditionally attributed to Homer and composed around the 8th–7th century B.C., recounts the ten-year journey of Odysseus (also known as Ulysses), king of Ithaca, as he attempts to return home after the Trojan War. 

Although set in the Mediterranean world, this epic blends myths, memories, and geography in a way that defies literal cartography. 

Since antiquity, readers have attempted to locate Odysseus’s wanderings—from the land of the Cyclopes to the island of Circe—on a real-world map, but the poem functions less as a travelogue than as a narrative about human resilience, identity, and the testing of heroic virtue. 

Efforts to anchor these events in real places reflect a broader desire to reconcile mythical narrative with new historical and geographical research on the ancient Greek world.

 

 

Map created by Simeon Netchev

to illustrate the narrative flow of Homer's Odyssey 

 

 
Attempts to map the *Odyssey* gained momentum in the early modern era, notably with Abraham Ortelius’s 1597 map, the first known cartographic representation of Odysseus’s journey. 

“Ulyssis Errores,” by Abraham Ortelius, in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, c. 1608.

 

 
Real geography, both transposed and not, is colored red on Gladstone’s map. “Map of the World According to Homer,” by W.E. Gladstone, in Studies on Homer and Homerica Age, Vol. 3 (1858). 

Over the centuries, scholars, statesmen, and philologists—including figures such as British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone—have proposed competing interpretations, but no consensus has emerged, thus revealing the poem’s fundamentally symbolic geography. 

 

Modern studies, such as classicist Peter T. Struck’s analysis (2000) from the University of Pennsylvania, highlight how the epic’s spatial logic serves its narrative themes rather than a strict topography. 

This map draws on these ideas, illustrating not a definitive itinerary, but the enduring fascination with situating Homer’s imaginary world within the broader Mediterranean region.

 

 

illustrateur ; Théo Schmied (1901-1985), graveur Provenance
BnF, département Réserve des livres rares, VELINS-1248

  

Links :

• Lapham : The geography of the Odyssey
• Cartonumerique : Le voyage d'Ulysse. Comment cartographier un mythe ?
• Peter Struck’s Odyssey 
• The Odyssey interactive map / Journey / Odysseus journey / Open Culture
• The Conversation : Can we map The Odyssey? How ancient geographers and modern researchers have traced Odysseus’s travel 
• Britannica : Geography of Homer’s Odyssey: Mapping Odysseus’s Epic Voyage

Orcas filmed making sunfish explode

Orcas have been seen smashing into sharp-tail sunfish so hard that the fish bursts into thousands of fragments, perhaps as a form of play as well as food processing 

 Footage shows orcas using an undocumented, clever hunting strategy: Off the coast of Baja California, a group of orcas has developed a highly coordinated technique for hunting ocean sunfish, the world's largest bony fish.

Rather than biting through their thick skin, the orcas ram into them at high speeds, fragmenting the carcass into edible pieces.

Scientists believe the behavior may be culturally transmitted. 

 

From NewScientist by Christa Lesté-Lasserre

An orca ramming a sunfish (left) and breaking it into many small pieces (right)
Kathryn Ayres

Extraordinary underwater videos have captured orcas making sunfish explode by ramming them at high speed. 

The behaviour may help juvenile orcas feed by breaking the prey into many small pieces, but it also appears that the orcas may enjoy playing with their food.

“It’s a hunting tactic, but that involves a play game in the process,” says Erick Higuera, an independent marine biologist in Mexico. 

“There’s ‘high-octane’ adrenaline and a lot of other hormones rushing through their bodies, so, of course, there’s got to be some sort of excitement.”

Sharp-tail sunfish (Masturus lanceolatus) are among the largest bony fish, weighing up to 2000 kilograms. Higuera had already seen groups of orcas (Orcinus orca) attacking sunfish in the Gulf of California, ripping off parts of their flesh and tossing them around to each other in a playful manner. 

In the past few years, he had even witnessed them ramming the fish head-on or crushing them against the side of another orca.

Then, in July 2024, his colleague Katy Ayres at US non-profit organisation Beneath the Waves caught an explosive interaction on her GoPro camera while diving in the Gulf of California. 

An adult female orca held onto a dead sunfish while an adult male orca swam upside down towards it at full speed. 

The female released the sunfish at the last second, and the male hit it with so much force that the fish burst into a flurry of small fragments.

A year later, tourist Hector Franz shot a similar underwater scene in the same bay. 

This time, an adult female rammed right-side-up into a sharp-tail sunfish held in place by another adult female, popping it into pieces. 

Combined, the two events mark the first time scientists have seen such behaviour by orcas, say Higuera, Ayres and their colleagues.

Sunfish have “an incredibly dense, rubbery, collagenous” outer layer that’s harder to bite through, so bursting them open could be an effective way to feed on them, says Higuera.

“The explosive fragmentation seemed mostly to be of the stiff gelatinous capsule that makes up a high percentage – more than 80 per cent in large fish – of the body mass of the sunfish,” says John Davenport at University College Cork in Ireland. 

“I suspect that calves cannot achieve enough force to do this, as their mass is too low. But they can exploit a cloud of objects that contain tasty morsels.”

Earlier sightings without full footage indicated that the entire pod was involved in a strategic attack process leading up to the rammings, says Higuera. 

The findings point to advanced cooperative hunting skills and even planning – especially adapting their techniques for different kinds of prey, he says.

Higuera suspects that popping the sunfish offered a learning experience for the calves, while providing them with bite-sized snacks. 

Simultaneously, these events could also reinforce social bonds through “play” and social learning in this highly intelligent species, he adds.

Gordon Burghardt at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville says it is possible the orcas were having some fun in demolishing the fish, but play wouldn’t be the only goal, as there is clearly cooperative foraging going on as well.

“One of the fascinating things about play is that it can be a driver of behavioural innovation,” says Martina Francesconi at the University of Pisa, Italy. 

“It’s possible that a behaviour like this may have originated in a playful context and later acquired a feeding function, or vice versa. 

At this stage, we simply don’t know.”

Links :

• Frontiers in Ethology DOI: 10.3389/fetho.2026.1835536
• The Conversation : ‘Like someone whacking a piñata’: orcas explode sunfish by ramming them at high speed

Temporary navigation ban in the Arcachon Basin (33)

📷 #INCENDIE – Secteur #LePorge #LègeCapFerret (Gironde, 33)

⚠️ Interdiction temporaire de navigation dans le bassin d’Arcachon (33)

Pour assurer la sécurité maritime de l’opération d’évacuation par voie maritime des populations présentes sur la presqu’île de Lège Cap-Ferret,… pic.twitter.com/FArtOmWYka

— Préfecture maritime et commandement en chef ATLANT (@premar_ceclant) July 24, 2026

Smoke from the large Gironde wildfire is also visible from the #Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite yesterday, 23 July, streaming out over the Bay of Biscay.

AIS shaped bridge watching practices and collision avoidance: dangers of over reliance

 

The interference and spoofing of AIS navigation data has become a common problem and been particular prevalent in and around the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the war between US/Israel and Iran.

The past couple of weeks have seen the rise what is best described as AIS “trolling” with signals appearing with fictious names such as the supposedly US-flagged Jersey Devil 404, Opium Cargo, and Dead Wallet Crew. The tracks of many these vessels are erratic and clearly false.

courtesy of Pole Star Global 

 

From SeaNews by Nandika Chand

 

One should not rely only on AIS data displayed on the ECDIS to determine the risk of collision.
Always use radar and other available aids to get a complete picture to make safer decisions. 

Knowing where the vessels are is a critical need that is being met with the Automatic Identification System (AIS).
It provides visibility and voyage-related information, like the ship’s destination and draught.

In today’s modern shipping era, AIS has emerged as an essential tool for vessel tracking and identification.
It has become an indispensable tool and aid for maritime security and navigational safety.

AIS – according to AXSMarine, a maritime intelligence tracking platform - has evolved into a versatile data source that supports a wide range of operational and commercial decisions.
Fleet managers use AIS to monitor vessel positions and performance in real time.

Chartering teams track tonnage availability to assess supply and demand in specific regions.
Port authorities analyze inbound traffic to manage congestion and berth planning, and commodity traders use aggregated AIS flows to infer trade volumes and anticipate market shifts.

Moreover, insurers and compliance teams monitor behavior for risk assessment and sanctions screening.
AIS acts as the foundation layer that enables broader intelligence when combined with domain expertise and additional datasets.

AIS in maritime is a core layer of modern navigational safety infrastructure.
The system continuously transmits and receives position, identity, and movement data, and assists mariners in maintaining awareness under all weather and visibility conditions.

Indeed, AIS is a very useful aid.

Over-Reliance on AIS

But over-reliance on this tool endangers the vessel, the cargo, and the crew.
Decisions based solely on AIS without contextual validation may lead to incorrect conclusions.
Gaps and errors are inherent in the system.

Bruce Liu, Loss Prevention Executive at Gard, pointed out that for bridge teams, pilots, and VTS operators, where navigational safety is critical, the integration and display of AIS information on navigational displays, particularly radar, have made traffic information more readily accessible.

He said it has delivered significant safety benefits but has also increased the potential for over-reliance on AIS-derived information.

“In some cases, such over-reliance may contribute to incidents, particularly when it influences the assessment of navigational risks or the decisions taken on the bridge or in VTS services.

“I also observed that many accidents occurred when bridge teams relied primarily on AIS for collision avoidance, neglecting systematic visual and/or radar observations.”

Liu explained that AIS calculates collision risk using dynamic data from both the own vessel and the AIS target.
Radar plotting, by contrast, evaluates how a target moves relative to the own ship.

Collisions

Over-reliance on AIS leads to AIS-assisted collisions.

Liu said this is a recurring factor in marine casualties.
“It is crucial for mariners to recognize the limitations of AIS and to use it as a supplement, not a substitute, for fundamental navigational practices such as visual lookout and systematic radar observation or radar plotting.”

Moreover, jamming and spoofing in conflict regions – the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and Black Sea – can compromise AIS and safety equipment, potentially increasing risk in busy shipping lanes.

Liu highlighted a few incidents, including a bulk carrier’s collision with a fishing vessel in September 2020.
Investigation revealed that the bridge team on the bulk carrier primarily relied on AIS and ECDIS for lookout, while neglecting fundamental methods such as visual lookout and radar plotting.
No radar plotting was conducted for the fishing vessel involved in the collision, nor for its accompanying fishing vessels before the incident.

As for the fishing vessel, it failed to maintain the effective operation of its AIS equipment.
Its AIS signal was detected right before the collision, making early detection and tracking via the AIS system by other vessels and the VTS center impossible.

The investigation established that not every vessel has a working AIS, so it is important not to rely only on AIS for lookout.
Always use visual lookout and systematic radar observation in addition to AIS to ensure safe navigation.

In another similar incident (collision between a bulk carrier and two tankers) in July 2024 – the bulk carrier en route to Subic Bay, Philippines collided with a tanker at anchor carrying out STS operations with another tanker.
Damage was sustained by all three vessels.

Investigators found that no AIS feed was available from either tanker until about 1 min before the incident, when S2’s AIS signal first appeared on the bulk carrier’s radar and ECDIS displays.
The radar echoes of both tankers had been visible on the bulk carrier’s radar since 2250 LT.
But the OOW did not plot the targets on the radar and was primarily using the AIS data reflected on the ECDIS for determining risk of collision.

The expert stated that one should not rely only on AIS data displayed on the ECDIS to determine the risk of collision.
Always use radar and other available aids to get a complete picture to make safer decisions.

Human Dependence on Technology

Technology is meant to make things similar and complement the tasks carried out by humans, boost productivity, and augment human potential.

Liu pointed out that trust gradually shifts toward tools that provide fast, clear, and seemingly authoritative information.

AIS offers immediate identification and CPA/TCPA outputs, which can create a perception of reduced risk and reliability, particularly in busy or restricted waters.
And over time, this may unintentionally lead to a reduced emphasis on traditional cross‑checks, such as visual lookout and systematic radar observation.

Mariners should be aware of the limitations of gadgets and technology, especially AIS, which include refresh delays in data transmission, dependence on properly functioning sensors, and incomplete traffic coverage – not all vessels carry AIS, sensors may malfunction, and some vessels, such as navy ships.

 

Links :

• Gard : AIS-assisted collisions: The risks of over-reliance
• Safety4Sea : Gard warns AIS should support, not replace, traditional navigation practices 
• Maritime Executive : Collision Avoidance: AIS Versus ARPA
• MarineLink : Electronic Navigation & Dispute Resolution: Coming of Age 
• TechTimes : Hormuz Goes Dark: Ships Strip AIS Signals as Trump Claims Strait Guardianship

Trump administration allows killing of species threatened with extinction

Florida manateesin Three Sisters Springs in Crystal River, Florida.

From WP by Jake Spring

Regulatory changes to reinterpret the Endangered Species Act also demand that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service consider the economic toll of habitat protection.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could soon declare that pygmy rabbits or Florida manatees are threatened with extinction.

But under a policy change issued by the Trump administration on Friday, Americans could still kill, trap and harass them.

That action — paired with another issued Friday that requires regulators to consider the economic toll of habitat protection — is part of President Donald Trump’s broad attempt to reinterpret the 1973 Endangered Species Act in ways that weaken protections for imperiled plants and animals.

In March, the administration convened the so-called God squad in a 15-minute session that decided oil and gas companies no longer need to abide by Endangered Species Act protections in the Gulf of Mexico.

Last week, the administration repealed a decades-old rule so that habitat destruction will no longer be considered a “harm” to endangered species.

On Friday, the Fish and Wildlife Service rescinded what is known as the “blanket rule,” which was first instituted in 1975 and gave threatened species the same protections as endangered ones — broadly prohibiting illegally killing, trapping or harassing them.

The rollback would only apply to newly declared threatened species, such as the Florida manatee, whose case is still pending.

Species that previously received the label would continue to have greater protections under the Endangered Species Act.

Rescinding past protections or issuing new ones can now only be done for threatened species one at a time.

The agency issued the repeal alongside another rule on Friday that requires the agency to consider the economic harms of designating areas “critical habitat” to protect endangered species.

Previously, the agency had discretion on whether to weigh those concerns.

The Interior Department said in a statement that the latest changes were necessary to “advance President Donald J. Trump’s directives to strengthen American energy independence, improve regulatory predictability, and ensure federal actions align with the best reading of the law.”

“For too long, the Endangered Species Act has been weaponized to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in the statement.

Clay Samford, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, called the new rules “bad for imperiled wildlife and for wild lands.”

“It’s part of this administration’s push to reduce protections for public lands and wildlife that are enjoyed by all Americans, in favor of narrow business interests,” he said.

Samford said the rule to factor economics into critical habitat decisions could affect situations like that of Hawaii’s ‘I‘iwi bird. 

The brilliantly colored red birds, also known as scarlet honeycreepers, are listed as threatened, but cattle ranchers have fought back against land being listed as critical habitat for the species.

Samford said that under the new rule, officials would be required to consider the ranchers’ claims in their decisions, making it far more likely that the agency would exclude their land from protections.

Both regulations were similarly changed in the first Trump administration and then reinstated under President Joe Biden.

The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a libertarian conservation think tank, praised the repeal of the blanket rule.

“For too long, the blanket rule treated threatened species the same as endangered ones, dulling incentives for recovery,” said Jonathan Wood, PERC’s vice president of law and policy. 

“By restoring a tailored approach, the Service can better reward progress and encourage proactive conservation.”

Outside groups generally petition the agency to consider individual species for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

A backlog of more than 500 species are awaiting evaluation for listing as threatened or endangered, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s website.

Other animals being considered for protection that could be affected by the rule change include plants like the purple-flowered Aztec Gilia and Clover’s cactus, both found only in New Mexico.

The number of listings of threatened and endangered species has slowed as the Trump administration cuts the number of personnel able to make those analyses.

The Fish and Wildlife Service lost about 18 percent of its staff in the first few months of the second Trump administration, as compared with the final year of the Biden administration, amid wider efforts to shrink the government, according to data obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group. 

That included 530 fewer staff biologists.

Fewer workers, along with new paperwork requirements to consider protections for species individually, is likely to add to the backlog, Samford said.

“It for no reason takes away a default protection system that has worked for 50 years and replaces it with a promise to do species-specific rules, when we know that this agency is overworked and understaffed and it can usually take a long time to do those rules,” Samford said.

Links :

• EarthJustice : With Two New Rulemakings, Trump Administration Attempts to Further Weaken Endangered Species Act
• PSB : U.S. cancels automatic protections for imperiled animals as critics warn of extinctions
• Time : Trump Administration Scales Back Endangered Species Protections—Again
• The Conversation : Why Trump’s move to gut the Endangered Species Act likely won’t hold up in court 
• Surfrider : Endangered Species Act Rollbacks: How Are Coasts And Wildlife At Risk?

How a 200-year-old whale could hold the clues to beating cancer

Fluke of a submerging bowhead whale, Canada, Nunavut, Bylot Island, Sirmilik National Park

From ArcticToday by Mary McAuliffe

 
The bowhead whale is, by every biological calculation, the perfect breeding ground for cancer.
It weighs over 80,000 kilograms and lives for more than 200 years — more cells, more divisions, more time for genetic damage to accumulate than almost any other creature on Earth.
Yet, it is one of the least cancer-prone animals alive.
Scientists can finally explain why.
Researchers at the University of Rochester identified a DNA-repair protein called CIRBP that operates at levels 100 times higher in bowhead cells than in any other mammal, including humans, according to their study published in Nature.

The bowhead whale is an Arctic specialist, spending its entire life in and around sea ice in the waters of northern Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Greenland.
Iñupiat hunters have long maintained that bowhead whales live two human lifetimes.
That claim had been met with skepticism by Western science until Victorian-era harpoon points were found embedded in the bodies of recently caught whales, a pattern that could not be explained unless those animals had survived encounters with 19th-century hunters and gone on to live another century.

Subsequent research confirmed a maximum lifespan of more than 200 years, making the bowhead the longest-lived mammal on Earth by a significant margin.

What the new research reveals is that the bowhead’s secret is not that it kills off damaged cells faster than other animals; it repairs them better.
Rather than relying on more tumor-suppressor genes to destroy cells that go wrong, the bowhead’s cells simply make far fewer errors in the first place, catching and correcting DNA breaks before they can accumulate into the kind of damage that causes cancer.
And in a finding with striking implications for human medicine, the key protein driving this repair mechanism also appears to work in human cells.
That raises the possibility that what keeps a whale healthy for two centuries could eventually help point researchers toward developing treatments for human cancer and age-related disease.

“By studying a mammal that is capable of maintaining its health and avoiding death from cancer for more than two centuries, we are offered a unique glimpse behind the curtain of a global evolutionary experiment,” the researchers wrote.
Key FindingsPeto’s Paradox, solved: Large, long-lived animals should get far more cancer than small ones, simply because they have more cells dividing over more years.
This mismatch between predicted and actual cancer rates is known as Peto’s Paradox.
The bowhead whale is the most extreme example, and this study offers the clearest answer yet to how evolution solved the problem: not by building more cancer defenses, but by building better DNA repair.
The CIRBP protein — present at 100 times normal levels: Researchers found that a cold-triggerable RNA-binding protein called CIRBP manifests at roughly 100 times higher concentrations in bowhead whale cells compared to other mammals.
This protein supercharges the repair of double-strand DNA breaks, one of the most dangerous forms of genetic damage and a primary driver of cancer when left unrepaired.
Repair, not destroy: Most cancer research focuses on tumor suppressor genes that trigger cell death when something goes wrong.
Bowhead cells take a different approach; they repair damaged DNA rather than eliminating the cell entirely.
The researchers describe this as a “repair-not-eliminate” strategy and suggest it may be the key to maintaining healthy tissue over an extraordinarily long lifespan.
It works in human cells too: In a critical finding for medical research, bowhead CIRBP was shown to improve DNA repair efficiency and reduce mutation rates in human cells in laboratory experiments.
This suggests the mechanism is not unique to whales.
Rather, the underlying biology is shared with humans, meaning it could in principle be harnessed therapeutically to slow aging and reduce cancer risk.
Indigenous knowledge confirmed (again): Iñupiat hunters have long maintained that bowhead whales live two human lifetimes.
That claim was validated when Victorian-era harpoon fragments dating from the 1800s were found embedded in whales caught in the late 20th century.
This research builds on that foundation, using genomic tools to explain the biology behind what Iñupiat communities observed generations ago.
Cold may be part of the answer: CIRBP stands for cold-inducible RNA-binding protein (it was originally identified as a protein activated by cold temperatures).
The fact that it is permanently elevated in bowhead cells may reflect the whale’s adaptation to life in near-freezing Arctic waters, with a cold-response mechanism that evolved to also serve as a powerful cancer defense.
A model species for aging science: The bowhead joins a small group of exceptionally long-lived animals, including the naked mole rat, that researchers are using to understand why some species age so slowly.
What makes the bowhead extraordinary is its combination of extreme size and extreme lifespan.
Most very large animals die relatively young; most very old animals are small.
The bowhead does both, making it uniquely valuable as a biological model.
For Arctic communities whose cultures and food systems have been intertwined with the bowhead whale for millennia, this research carries a particular resonance.
Iñupiat knowledge of whales’ longevity predates Western science by generations, and the biological mechanisms now being uncovered in laboratories are, in some sense, a translation of what hunters have already understood about these animals from direct observation over centuries.

Beyond the cultural dimension, the bowhead’s biology now stands as one of the most promising natural models for understanding how to slow aging and prevent cancer in humans.
The Arctic is not just a landscape being reshaped by climate change.
It is home to one of the most medically significant animals on Earth, and scientists are only just beginning to decipher what its genome has to say.

Read the full research here.

A volcano has erupted remnants of Earth's primordial magma ocean

 

Submarine reliefs produced by a survey off the coast of Mayotte in 2019, showing the new underwater volcano Fani Maoré

In May 2019, data from the Mayobs scientific expedition revealed that the volcano, located 50 kilometers from the island, stood just over 800 meters tall and was exhibiting intense activity at a depth of 3,500 meters. It is shown here circled in white on the eastern volcanic ridge.
MAYOBS – IPGP/CNRS/Ifremer/BRGM / Campagne MAYOBS2

From New Scientist by Christa Lesté-Lasserre

 
Earth was once covered by a global magma ocean, which later cooled and crystallised – now traces of this primordial event have been found in magma from a young volcano in the Indian Ocean

A rising underwater volcano off the coast of Madagascar has been spewing up chemical traces of material from a primordial magma ocean in the first 100 million years of Earth’s history.

Scientists generally suspect that Earth’s mantle – the thick layer of hot rock beneath the crust – has been steadily churning for more than 4 billion years, gradually erasing most chemical traces of the planet’s earliest history.

“This is going to change a lot of things [in earth science], because now we have proof that materials dating back 4.5 billion years – from the very beginning of Earth’s history – still exist in sufficient quantities to be sampled in a volcano,” says Catherine Chauvel at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

During the Hadean eon, a Mars-sized object collided with Earth, breaking off debris that scientists believe later formed the moon. 

 

visualization of Mayotte with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM nautical raster chart)

The impact heated the young planet so intensely that it became covered by a global magma ocean. 

Over the next few million years, the molten rock cooled and crystallised, and the earliest crust began to form above the mantle.

Some scientists suspected that traces of this primordial crystallisation survived in Earth’s mantle, but they lacked the analytical precision to prove it, says Chauvel.

In May 2018, an unusual swarm of earthquakes off the French island of Mayotte, between Madagascar and Mozambique, led scientists to discover a new volcano about 50 kilometres further east, named Fani Maoré. 

Eruptions over the following three years drained so much magma from underneath Mayotte that it sank about 20 centimetres.

Chauvel and her colleagues recovered volcanic rock samples from Fani Maoré and nearby Mayotte to compare the chemistry of the new volcano with that of the older volcanic system. 

They teamed up with Claudine Israel at the University of Cambridge to investigate further, using a newly developed ultra-precise technique to measure tiny differences in neodymium isotopes. 

Such isotopes preserve a chemical record of how Earth’s primordial magma ocean crystallised as the young planet cooled, says Israel.

This infographic (Julien Tredan-Turini. Courtesy of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie) illustrates the hypothesis of a magma chamber. 

The existence of a massive underground reservoir could explain the various phenomena observed in Mayotte.

The team found that, compared to Mayotte’s lava, the Fani Maoré lava had a slightly higher ratio of neodymium-142 to neodymium-144. 

That higher ratio probably reflects a pocket of ancient mantle that escaped billions of years of mixing and is still relatively rich in bridgmanite – a mineral thought to have been among the first to crystallise from Earth’s primordial magma ocean.

“It’s always exciting to find something you’ve been looking for – and that nobody else has found yet,” says Chauvel.

Map showing seismic activity hotspots since 2018 (red dots) along the Mayotte volcanic chain.
Lemoine et al. 2020; SHOM 2015; MAYOBS data from Feuillet et al. 2021. Comptes Rendus. Géoscience, Vol. 354 (2022), No. S2, pp. 105–136. doi: 10.5802/crgeos.191.

 

The findings suggest Earth’s mantle might never have become as thoroughly mixed as many geologists had assumed. 

That could help scientists reconstruct how Earth’s primordial magma ocean solidified, says Israel.

“For the first time, we’ve shown experimentally how the mantle crystallised from the magma ocean, and how that crystallisation created chemical heterogeneity from the very beginning,” she says.

The new findings provide plausible evidence that Earth’s mantle still preserves extremely ancient material, says Tim Johnson at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. 

“This seems to be an exciting advance,” he says.

“It takes an enormous amount of work to get a technique like that working properly, and it looks like they’ve succeeded,” says Bernard Bourdon at the CNRS in Lyon.

The study offers an unprecedented glimpse into a period of Earth’s history for which almost no direct evidence survives, he adds. 

“It’s a bit like discovering a sample of Earth’s core that somehow made it all the way to the surface,” says Bourdon.

For Richard Carlson at Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C., the precision alone is noteworthy. “Anyone who has experience with these measurements would recognise it as a major achievement,” he says.


Links :

• Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10719-w

The awesome of ocean waves

The awesome of ocean waves. pic.twitter.com/AGdMInP19O

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) July 7, 2026

Octopus and glass squids

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The line nobody owns

From Substack by Dr. John E. Nyberg

 
There are two international date lines.
They disagree by over two thousand kilometers.
Neither is enforceable, and no one has the standing to reconcile them.

A ship lies thirteen miles off Kiritimati, in the Line Islands of Kiribati.
Close enough that the crew can see land.

What day is it aboard?

Ashore, it is Monday.
Kiribati moved itself onto that side of the calendar in 1995, and that was its sovereign right.

Open a navigation text, however, and you find a different answer.
The nautical date line, the one ships were formally told to keep, sits on the 180th meridian: more than two thousand kilometers west of where Kiribati has put the political one.
By that reckoning, the water beneath the hull is still on Sunday.

Now go up to the bridge and ask the master.
He will tell you it is Monday, because he set the clocks and it is his call.

Three answers.
All three defensible.
And no authority on Earth manages it completely.

Two lines, and neither of them holds

The line you know is the zigzag, the one on every world map, jogging east around Kiribati and west around Samoa.
It has no world-wide legal standing at all.
No treaty defines it.
No organization maintains it.
It is a cartographic convention, a curve that chart and mapmakers draw by incorporating the time-zone decisions each Pacific state has made for itself.
When a country changes its mind, the line is redrawn.
That is the entire mechanism.
Cartographers do not fully agree on its precise course, and there is nobody to ask.

The second line is one most people have never heard of.
In June 1917 the Anglo-French Conference on Time-keeping at Sea met in London.
The British Admiralty and the French Navy established a nautical date line, with an idealized system of time zones for use at sea.
The major fleets adopted the recommendation between 1920 and 1925.

Their decision was a recommendation.
Two navies in a room, not a treaty.
Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, one of the standard references still issued to navigators today, describes the result plainly: a date line “fixed by informal agreement” is the driest possible way of admitting that no one signed anything binding.
States adopted it for their own fleets, which makes it national regulation rather than international law.
And in practice, nautical time is now used chiefly for radio coordination.
What time it is aboard a ship, for watches, for meals, for the clocks the crew actually live by, is set by the master, who advances them when he judges it convenient, and on short passages frequently does not bother at all.

So the nautical date line was never repealed.
It still appears in the reference works.
It still disagrees violently with the line on the map.
And it is honored mainly in the breach.

That is not a footnote to my argument.
That is my argument.

A standard nobody can enforce, reconcile, or retire

Look at what we actually have.

A maritime standard, established by international agreement, adopted by the world’s navies, still on the books after a century, which has drifted thousands of kilometers out of alignment with the boundary everyone else uses, and which has quietly stopped being observed.

Nobody enforces it.
Nobody has reconciled it with the political line.
And nobody has the standing to formally retire it either, because no body owns it.

A hundred years is a long time for an international standard to sit in that condition.
The reason it has been possible is not that the problem was solved.
It is that a workaround was found.

The workaround is UTC and it is not a solution

Here is the objection any maritime lawyer will raise, and it is a fair one: none of this is a problem, because everything with real legal weight is timestamped in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Zulu time has no date line, no zigzag and no ambiguity.
Log entries, position reports, distress traffic, contract timestamps put them all in UTC and the problem evaporates.

That is true.
It also explains why a century has passed without anyone fixing this.
We did not resolve the date line.
We routed around it.

But a workaround is not a custodian, and UTC does not touch what still depends on the line.

The depiction itself.
The date line appears on charts, in atlases, in reference works and in national statutes, and no authority stands behind any of it.
Cartographers reconcile it by watching the news.

Sovereign changes, made without notice.
In 1994 Kiribati deleted Saturday, 31 December from the calendar of its eastern islands, unifying a country that could otherwise conduct business with itself on only four days of the week.
In 2011 Samoa jumped westward to put its working week alongside Australia and New Zealand, and simply skipped 30 December, a date that legally does not exist there.
Tokelau followed.
Neither needed permission, because there was nobody to ask and no notice period to observe.
The world’s systems were patched afterwards.

Local dates in law and contract.
Statutes, charterparties and civil obligations run on calendar dates, not UTC timestamps.
A day that never happened is not a UTC problem.

Antarctica, where the line ceases to exist below roughly 60°S.
Stations keep whatever date their supply chain keeps.
McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott run on New Zealand time because the flights come out of Christchurch.
The one place on Earth where no state exercises sovereignty is the one place with no answer at all, which tells you exactly what has been holding this system together, and it is not law.
 

Who keeps the line now

The world’s operational date line, the one your phone, your airline and your bank actually consult, is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Time Zone Database.
It is a set of text files.
It is curated by a community on a public mailing list, led by volunteer coordinators.
It has no formal governance structure, no voting mechanism, no corporate sponsor and no guaranteed funding.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all depend on it.

This is not a criticism of that project, which has been maintained superbly for over forty years by people who have never received a fraction of what they are owed.
It is the point.

The tz database is a registry.
It records what sovereign states have already decided.
It has no standing to be consulted in advance, no power to request lead time, and no authority to decline an entry.
It is not a custodian.
It has simply been standing where a custodian ought to be, because nobody else was there.

The sovereignty objection, met directly

Propose that someone should own the date line and you will be told at once that this is an intolerable intrusion on sovereignty.
Samoa’s date is Samoa’s business.

It is.
Completely.
Any proposal that says otherwise deserves to fail.

But three things are being run together here and separating them dissolves the objection.

The date — which day it is in Apia.
Sovereign, full stop.
No international body should have any say in it whatsoever.

The line — the depicted boundary that results from summing all those sovereign choices.
Carried on charts.
Relied on in contracts.
Belonging to nobody.

The process — how a change is announced, how much warning the world gets, where the authoritative depiction lives, and what is to be done about a 1917 standard that no longer matches reality.
This does not exist at all.

A state may change its date.
It should not be able to change it by surprise, and it should not be drawing the line itself.
That is not a limit on sovereignty.
It is the same bargain every maritime state already accepts when it publishes a chart, files a notice to mariners, or registers a routing measure with the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

Who should hold it

There is no shortage of candidates, and each carries a liability worth stating plainly.

The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is a natural home.
The line is a charted feature, and charting standards is what the IHO does.
But its standard on the limits of oceans and seas, S-130, settles maritime limits.
It was never built to hold time.
Their current standard would either need to be adjusted, or a new IHO standard would need to be built.

The IMO has the only real regulatory power in this field and already administers routing measures that ships must obey.
But its remit is safety of navigation, and the date line might better be served by a standard that, once built, is recognized in IMO regulation.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) and the General Conference on Weights and Measures own time itself and have lately proved they can settle a contested question by voting to abolish the leap second.
But they do timescales, not geography, and the date line is a spatial object.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has a treaty basis and a long history with UTC.
It is itself mid-argument about the division of labor.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is fast, pragmatic, and already owns the date-format standard.
It has no authority over states whatsoever.

IANA is the incumbent, with neither mandate nor appetite.

Any of these would improve on nothing.
But none is quite right, because none is accountable to the people the line actually runs through.

A body where Kiribati has a permanent seat

The states the date line physically traverses are Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, a French overseas collectivity, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States.
Between them they hold very nearly every decision that has ever moved it.

They should have permanent seats.
Not as a courtesy, as a matter of standing.
They are not stakeholders in this question.
They are the primary parties, and the rest of us are downstream consumers of their decisions.

The design is not novel.
The Arctic Council seats Permanent Participants alongside its member states, on the principle that those with most at stake belong in the room regardless of their weight.
The Antarctic Treaty grants consultative status on the basis of substantial activity in the region rather than size.

A date-line body (which could be a working group of any of the above mentioned organizations) on that model would be small, cheap and technical.
It would maintain the authoritative depiction.
It would run a registry of sovereign date decisions with a published notification period.
It would reconcile the nautical and political lines or, at the very least, state plainly where they diverge, and formally retire what has died.
It would say something, at last, about Antarctica.

And it would be a body whose permanent seats are earned by standing in the line’s path, not by size or global reach, which is, I think, the most defensible allocation of authority in any international standards body I can name.

The day belongs to no one

The sea belongs to no one, and the same is true of the day.
Nobody owns Tuesday.

But belongs to no one and cared for by no one are not the same proposition, and the past century has quietly confused them.
A commons does not need an owner.
It needs a custodian, someone whose job is to write the thing down, keep it current, and tell the rest of us before it moves.

We never appointed one.
We found a workaround instead; the workaround held; the question was never forced.

Meanwhile the day still turns over somewhere out in the Pacific, at a place we have all agreed to imagine, on the authority of nobody in particular.
Thirteen miles off Kiritimati there are two published answers to what day it is, a hundred years of dust on one of them, and no one on Earth you can write to about it.

 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : The International Date Line Map you've seen is wrong /Lines of Longitude explained, with maps /How does a country go about changing its time zone /crossing the antimeridian (the 180th degree meridian) / Opinion: How the Prime Meridian changed the world

Four Chinese icebreaking research vessels set off on Arctic expedition

One of the vessels, Tansuo-3, is equipped with a moon pool, allowing it to deploy a crewed deep-sea submersible for scientific exploration of the Arctic seabed.

The Xue Long is the oldest of China’s oceangoing research icebreakers. Here at port in Shanghai.

Photo: Thomas Nilsen

From Arctic Today by Thomas Nilsen

China launched its 16th scientific expedition to the Arctic Ocean on 3 July, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources. This is the first time China sends four research ships on an Arctic expedition.

Three of the four vessels are icebreakers: Xuelong, Xuelong 2 and Jidi, whose names translate as Snow Dragon, Snow Dragon II and Polar.

Xuelong is well known in the European Arctic after taking part in numerous expeditions to the Barents Sea and the waters around Svalbard. Originally built as an Arctic cargo vessel at the Kherson shipyard in Ukraine, it was purchased by China in 1994 and later converted into a polar research vessel.

According to the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC), the expedition will continue until October.

“This expedition will focus on addressing global climate change and its impacts, conducting comprehensive surveys and monitoring in key Arctic Ocean areas, covering sea ice, hydrology, biology, ecology, and atmospheric environment,” PRIC said in a joint statement with the Ministry of Natural Resources.

 

 

It was only one-year ice and its thickness was thin in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic when the Barents Observer was sailing north of Svalbard in the last week of June on board the Helmer Hanssen, a Norwegian research vessel operated by UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. Photo: Thomas Nilsen

“It will also explore cutting-edge international Arctic issues such as the accretion mechanism of the Gakkel Ridge and the dynamic evolution of ocean crust, and collaborate with scientists from Russia, Germany, and other countries to provide scientific support for my country and the international community to better understand and protect the Arctic and carry out Arctic governance.”

The Gakkel Ridge, also known as the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge, is a 1,800-kilometre-long underwater mountain range and divergent plate boundary in the Arctic Ocean.

It stretches from north of Greenland to the Laptev Sea off the Siberian coast.

Tansuo-3 (“Exploration-3”) will work alongside the three icebreakers during the expedition’s deep-sea exploration programme.

Commissioned in December 2024, the multifunctional research vessel is designed to support full-ocean-depth scientific missions and carries the crewed deep-sea submersible Shenhai Yongshi (“Deep Sea Warrior”).

The submersible can be launched through the vessel’s moon pool, enabling scientific operations beneath Arctic sea ice in conditions where conventional deployment methods would be difficult or impossible.

The Tansuo-3 was also last summer sailing in Russian Arctic waters north of Siberia.