5:00AM Saturday May 10, 2008
By Geoff Cumming
Environmentalist Raewyn Peart loves darting like a guppy around our undersea realm, from fish of all shapes and sizes to colourful sponges, kelps and corals. She’s keen to pass on her love of snorkelling to her daughter and, in late summer, headed for Matai Bay in the Far North, [...]

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Police and fisheries officers today began dawn raids on houses and business premises in a massive poaching bust centred on a Wellington-based man trading as much as a tonne of illicit paua each week.

“He would typically pay his divers $17/kg for the paua meat and on-sell it for about $50/kg,” said Fisheries Ministry national investigations [...]

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RICHARD NEELY said he waved frantically to fellow crew members before he and his partner were left to drift in shark-inhabited waters on the Great Barrier Reef for 20 hours in a diving trip that went horribly wrong.

But crew members have contested his story, saying the boat remained at the dive site overnight so staff [...]

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Maldivian authorities are investigating how a Russian tourist died and 10 others were injured while scuba diving, the tourism minister said.
The 36-year-old Russian national was among a group of tourists including from Germany, Australia and Russia taken casualty on Thursday while diving around a reef, minister Mahamood Shougee told AFP by telephone.
“The family of the [...]

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Opinions are split between two major government departments over the impacts of seabed mining.

Crown Minerals and the Department of Conservation are at loggerheads over the environmental risk posed by prospecting for mineral sands.

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