Speak Up for Blue Podcast Network

In 2023, a marine heat wave settled over Palmyra Atoll, a remote ring of coral islands about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, and stayed for more than half a year. Some of the reef's most vibrant corals turned white. Joe Pollock of The Nature Conservancy, who monitors the reef, admitted he didn't know if it would come back. Three years later, he put his face in the water and found the reef floor covered in baby corals. In this episode, I break down why Palmyra recovered when so many reefs struggle.

Shipping traffic is climbing, especially across a warming Arctic, and every new vessel brings more collision risk and underwater noise for whales. Emily Charry Tissier, ecologist and CEO of Whale Seeker, joins Andrew to explain how quality data can turn that pressure into realistic choices for shipping companies, governments and the people buying the goods on board. Emily started Whale Seeker in 2018 after a WWF Arctic project showed her how unreliable marine mammal data could be. She calls qua

Quick test: name one marine protected area in your country. If you came up blank, you're in good company. When an aquarium in Durban, South Africa surveyed its visitors, fewer than one in five could name a single MPA. Andrew Lewin explains why that silence is one of the biggest threats MPAs face, because a place nobody can name is a place nobody defends when it gets weakened, shrunk or quietly reopened. This episode follows South Africa's long road from protecting 0.4% of its mainland ocean to

Most people can't name a single marine protected area in their own country. Dr. Judy Mann-Lang found that out the hard way when she asked aquarium visitors to name one and they named the aquarium. With South Africa's new MPAs stalled on a minister's desk and oil and gas lobbyists in the room, she realized the ocean needed public support that didn't yet exist. That gap became MPA Day. Judy spent 30 years at uShaka Sea World in Durban, moving from education to CEO to conservation strategist, then

Sharks and rays are landed every day along the coast from Mauritania to Angola, yet for decades almost nothing was known about them. Researchers working in the region have often been the only people in their country doing this work, isolated by distance, language and a lack of funding. That changed this year with the public launch of the West and Central African Elasmobranch Coalition. Andrew and Dr. David Ebert welcome back Ghofrane Labyedh and Ana Lucia Furtado Soares, two of the people leadi

You bought the fish with the green check mark. Investigators with The Outlaw Ocean Project then checked the supply chains behind hundreds of seafood companies making sustainability claims, and more than half had a documented crime or concern somewhere upstream. In the final episode of our fish feed series, Andrew Lewin looks at what sustainable seafood labels cover and where their audits stop. Follow fishmeal from Western Sahara to ASC-certified sea bass farms in Türkiye that supply UK supermar

In a single day in March 2024, Gambian navy officers arrested eight industrial trawlers. Seven were fishing in waters reserved for local canoes, four were using illegal nets, and every one had switched off its tracking beacon. That one patrol shows a problem playing out across the global ocean. About three in four industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, and many of the boats supplying the fishmeal that feeds farmed fish are among the hardest to see. In this episode of How to Protec

On a May morning in 2017, the people of Gunjur in The Gambia woke to find their lagoon had turned red, with dead fish on the surface. Investigators traced the pollution to a fishmeal plant up the road. In this episode, Andrew Lewin follows the feed from West African beaches to farmed salmon fillets in Europe and North America, building on The Outlaw Ocean Project's five-year investigation into the fishmeal industry. Small, oily fish like sardinella and bonga are everyday protein in Senegal and

Does the ocean remember? Can we suppose the ocean records memory in the continuity of the marine life reliant on it for sustenance, in the energy it stores from the sun, in the voyages and explorations it has supported through time? The ocean stores energy and sustenance as both remembered and generated knowledge to come, and in its wisdom holds the opportunities for sustainability and for our survival. WORLD OCEAN RADIO World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available

The family behind the world's largest salmon farming company built a global industry. Now one of its members is asking how it can be sustainable to grind up fish from poorer countries, ship them across the world, and feed them to salmon sold to wealthier shoppers. In episode 2048, Andrew Lewin follows farmed fish from your plate back to the fishmeal boat to answer him. More than half the seafood eaten worldwide now comes from farms, and most of it is fed. Andrew breaks down what fishmeal and fi