Articles by Andrew Sharpless

Japanese dolphin hunt underway

Last week, I told you about the annual dolphin hunt in Japan. It's now underway, which may explain why videos like this one are getting hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube:

Man-made reef of tires deemed failure

Off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale lies a 36-acre pile of tires -- 2 million of them to be exact. Could it be the final resting place of the infamous Firestone recall of 2000? Not exactly. The area is actually Osbourne Reef -- a man-made reef that's been around since the '70s. At first glance, it looks more like a sea of tires than a marine habitat. But upon closer inspection ... yup, still a sea of tires.

Tailless dolphin considered for prosthetic

Four months ago, a fisherman found a baby bottlenose dolphin tangled in the buoy line of a crab trap near Cape Canaveral. "Winter" is just one of hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds caught accidentally by fishermen each year. The good news is, unlike most bycatch victims, instead of losing her life, Winter only lost her tail.

After being nursed back to health by more than 150 marine biologists and volunteers working around the clock, Winter has shown great improvement. She swims and plays at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. But Winter isn't out of the woods just yet; experts think she needs ... a prosthetic tail.

Small fish used to detect toxins

Evildoers beware -- a new soldier's been drafted into the war on terror. If our color-coded charts and duct tape sent chills up your spine, wait until you get a load of our bluegills.

San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using bluegills -- aka sunfish or bream -- to safeguard their drinking water. These fish are highly attuned to chemical disturbances in their environment, and could be able to detect chemical warfare before traditional detection means. When the fish are exposed to toxins, they flex their gills in the same way a human would cough.

Sadly, there are plenty of toxins that could make these freshwater fish "flex their gills," and Osama didn't put them there.