SEVENSEAS Travel Magazine — No. 137 October 2026

05

Twenty taxonomists identified 57 species and five genera they consider new to science from the 2025 Falkor (too) expedition, Ocean Census and Schmidt Ocean Institute report. All await formal description, and only about a tenth of the copepod samples have been examined.

06

Researchers have tagged the same male whale shark, Milo, five times since 2017, a record the Guy Harvey Foundation puts at more than 34,000 miles over 3,400 days. It is a record of duration rather than distance, since the institute’s tiger shark Andy covered more ground.

07

Curtin University researchers detected sperm whale DNA in ambergris held by the Western Australian Museum, pairing it with chemical tests for ambrein. Some samples held little or none, and the team says more work is needed to show how reliably DNA survives.

08

Rob Moir of the Ocean River Institute follows warm Atlantic water from a 2011 surprise on the New England shelf, first noticed by three lobstermen, to Svalbard’s fjords and the opening of both Arctic sea routes.

09

Conservation groups froze a surfboard in ice during Climate Week NYC to gather signatures for Domain 1, the Antarctic Peninsula protected area that has failed to win consensus at CCAMLR since Argentina and Chile tabled it in 2018.

10

Plastic Pollution Coalition, an advocacy group, traces decades of industry-funded lessons in US schools, from a 1994 executive calling one video propaganda to today’s sponsored PlastiVan visits. The report asks school boards to bar sponsored materials and require funding disclosure.

11

The Palawan municipality has adopted Green Fins diving and snorkelling standards by resolution, not ordinance. The Reef-World Foundation reports a 47 per cent drop in operator threat scores, a measure of practice rather than of reef condition.

12

Alexa Charouhis, 17, was in the hall on 24 September when member states approved the first UN declaration on sea-level rise. She writes about what it meant for Miami, and for the mangroves her generation is already planting.

13

In a national survey analysed by the CDC, 36.8 per cent of Black adults in the US said they could not swim. Houston actress DeDe Hardeman, who certified as a freediver and scuba diver in 2024, on cost, hair and fear of the water.