Judging by the density of the crabs and their tracks, the scientists estimate there may be 1.5 million crabs in the basin.

A female crab retrieved from the area was found to be carrying mature eggs and larvae.

“Our best guess is there was an event, or maybe more than one, where warmer water flushed up across the shelf and carried some of the larvae into the basin,” said project leader Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii.

Over 12,000 square km of species rich sandbank, an area almost double the size of Devon, has become Britain’s latest marine protected area to safeguard important sea life and habitats.  

The Dogger Bank is in the middle of the North Sea and crosses the offshore waters of the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.  The UK section has been submitted by the Government to the European Commission and now has candidate Special Area of Conservation (cSAC) status.

It will be the largest European Marine Site to be submitted by any Member State for protection and links up with the existing sites in Germany and the Netherlands.

Fatu, a female northern white rhinoceros who lives in a Kenyan conservation park, is one of just seven of her kind left in the world. But millions of her stem cells, stored in a freezer in California, might one day help boost her population’s ranks.

The northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) and another animal facing extinction, the drill monkey (Mandrillus leucophaeus), have become the first endangered animals to have their cells transformed into stem cells like those found in early embryos. These cells can be stored and multiplied in culture, and are theoretically capable of making any tissue in the body — including sperm cells that could be used in assisted captive breeding programmes. The work is published online today in Nature Methods¹.

Coral reef ecologists have laid a persistent and troubling puzzle to rest. The elkhorn coral, named for its resemblance to elk antlers and known for providing valuable marine habitat, was once the Caribbean’s most abundant reef builder. But the “redwood of the coral forest” has declined 90% over the past decade, in part due to highly contagious white pox disease, which causes large lesions that bare the coral’s white skeleton and kill its tissue. Now, after nearly a decade of data collection and analysis, researchers have fingered the cause of the affliction: human excrement. The finding represents the first example of human-to-invertebrate disease transmission and suggests a practical approach for halting the disease’s spread.

“This is a really important bit of work,” says coral researcher Thomas Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I would say they’ve now proven their case beyond any doubt.”

Nine years ago, a research team led by coral reef ecologists Kathryn Sutherland, now of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and James Porter of the University of Georgia, Athens, linked white pox to a bacterium called Serratia marcescens, which is found in the intestines of humans and a handful of other animals. In humans, Serratia can cause respiratory and urinary tract infections. But although Sutherland and her team strongly suspected human waste—stemming from septic tanks that leak sewage into the Florida Keys’s porous bedrock—was the culprit, they had no proof that the disease didn’t start with Key deer, cats, seagulls, or any of the Caribbean’s other Serratia-harboring wildlife. “There was considerable skepticism—it was too easy to blame other things,” Porter says.

The duo and colleagues spent years collecting Serratia samples from healthy and diseased corals, from humans via a wastewater treatment facility in Key West, and from other animals. To obtain each sample’s genetic fingerprint, they added an enzyme that breaks up the bacterium’s genome wherever a specific gene sequence is found.

Because every strain’s genome differs slightly, each one yields a unique pattern of breaks. Comparing the patterns among all their samples, the team found only two that matched each other exactly: the Serratia strain found in white pox-afflicted coral and the one drawn from human waste.

To dispel any remaining doubt, the researchers cultivated small fragments of healthy, Serratia-free coral in the lab, and then exposed these to the human-specific strain. Within as little as 4 days, the healthy coral showed signs of white pox infection, they report today in PLoS ONE.

In the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, where sea-based tourism and recreation pump billions into the economy each year, the discovery has significant implications, Porter says.

Sutherland and Porter hope their new evidence will encourage communities throughout the Caribbean to upgrade their waste management facilities, replacing septic tanks ill-suited for the region’s geography and geology with wastewater treatment plants. Key West has not seen a single new case of white pox since its transition to an advanced wastewater treatment facility in 2001, the researchers say.