The kinds of subjects that OCEAN will explore

The Great Whale Comeback
This episode will feature the near-extinction and remarkable increase of great whales in much of the world. In the North Atlantic the Gray Whale was hunted to extinction and the Right Whale’s hold on existence remains tenuous. But Humpbacks, Finbacks, Minkes and others have increased impressively. In the Pacific the Blue Whale is also on an impressive recovery streak, Sperm Whales are common in some places, and Gray Whales allow tourists to pet them.

Have Your Shrimp and Eat Them
What’s a shrimp lover to do? Shrimp farming destroys wetlands and mangroves and creates pollution. Wild shrimp catches typically include about ten pounds of unwanted sealife — it’s thrown overboard dead — for every pound of shrimp kept.  But there are new ways to go, and a revolution may soon take hold.

Fish and Rocket Science, or What Went Right?
The news on fisheries management can seem relentlessly bad: fish populations spiraling down, or failing to recover even when we thought we’d put the right measures in place. Meanwhile fishing communities literally all over the world are seeing their livelihoods shattered. But some management is in fact succeeding remarkably well — these successes are fishing’s best-kept secret

Sharks in the Soup
They kill ten people a year. People kill 50 million sharks — mainly so their fins can be sent to China to thicken soup. In some places where these top-shelf predators are becoming vanishingly rare, they’re taking parts of the ecosystem down with them. Yet in many parts of the world — including China — sharks are beginning to get the respect they deserve.

Sacred Seas
When religions begin to view exploitation of nature as a matter of moral and spiritual concern, they can succeed better than all the legal mandates churned out in some distant capitol. This episode takes us to the fishing communities on the islands of Zanzibar off East Africa, where a crisis of overexploitation was looming in the mid-1990s. It has now been averted, and inspiration for the remarkable turnaround was found in the pages of the Koran.

The Gladiators:  Swordfish and White Marlin
Once both depleted, Atlantic Swordfish are recovering but White Marlin are still in trouble. These fabulous and charismatic fish offer a surprising, counterintuitive lesson about how to protect threatened species.

Dolphins:  The Real Price of a Tuna Sandwich
We thought the buyer’s dilemma over canned tuna was solved after tuna companies and the U.S. Congress went “dolphin-safe” nearly 20 years ago. But today dolphin populations aren’t recovering, and the tuna sandwich is still implicated; so ethical and informed consumers still face the same dilemma they always have. There are, however, emerging solutions for finding more sustainably caught canned tuna. 

Return of the Ocean Dinosaur
Imagine a headline saying: “Dinosaurs Returning to a Beach Near You.”  Well, it’s happening. Earth’s last warm-blooded monster reptile, the skin-covered, 1000-pound, Leatherback Turtle, is the closest thing we have to a last-living dinosaur — and in many places it’s staging a spectacular comeback.