Paris claims ban breaches UK-EU trade deal but environmentalists say dispute is ‘hypocrisy’, given Macron’s rhetoric on saving oceans

France has been accused of hypocrisy by conservationists over a fresh post-Brexit dispute with the UK over fishing rights.

France launched an official protest after the UK banned bottom trawling from parts of its territorial waters last month, with the aim of protecting vulnerable habitats.

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Intense swells of cold water from the depths are killing sharks, rays and other creatures, researchers say

A climate-disrupted ocean is pushing sharks, rays and other species to flee ever-hotter water in the tropics, only for them to be killed by increasingly intense upswells of cold water from the depths, a study has found.

One of the authors of the paper described the “eerie” aftermath of a mass die-off of more than 260 marine organisms from 81 species in a singular event of extreme cold upswelling off the coast of South Africa in 2021.

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The percentage of reef areas experiencing bleaching-level heat stress is increasing by about 1% a week, scientists say

Global heating has pushed the world’s coral reefs to a fourth planet-wide mass bleaching event that is on track to be the most extensive on record, US government scientists have confirmed.

Some 54% of ocean waters containing coral reefs have experienced heat stress high enough to cause bleaching, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch said.

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Underwater mountains are biodiversity hotspots and researchers exploring the Salas y Gómez ridge off Chile have found 50 species probably new to science. How much more has yet to be discovered?

• Photographs by ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute

Squat lobsters , bright red sea toads and deep-sea dragon fish were among more than 160 species never previously seen in the region that were spotted on a recent expedition exploring an underwater mountain range off the coast of South America. Researchers from the California-based Schmidt Ocean Institute believe that at least 50 of those species are likely to be new to science.

A Chaunax ( member of the sea toad family) found to the south of Rapa Nui, near the western end of the Salas y Gómez ridge

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Heidi Ernst took up the sport 13 years ago. After 523 dives, disaster struck. But a prosthetic leg – and a sense of humor – has kept her swimming

Shark tattoos adorn each of Heidi Ernst’s calves. You can see them now as she sits at an Iowa clinic, gazing out the window. Around her neck are two silver necklaces: one clasps two dolphins, the other a shark. Her blue eyes twinkle like the ocean. The lines on her face reflect not her 74 years, but the fears she has faced.

“I’m so excited I can hardly talk,” she says to her neighbor, who drove her to this critical medical appointment in mid-September.

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The fate of the calf trapped in a British Columbia lagoon has gripped the public. Can Brave Little Hunter be reunited with her pod?

In the early 1960s, Canada’s fisheries ministry installed a .50-calibre machine gun on an island in British Columbia. The weapon, typically used against armoured vehicles and low-flying aircraft, was mounted with the sole purpose of killing orcas. The high-powered gun was never used, but the message was clear: the whales, derisively called “blackfish”, were the enemy.

Now, six decades later and less than 100 miles away from where the gun was mounted, that same ministry has joined residents of a remote community in a frantic attempt to rescue a stranded orca calf.

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The ocean’s depths are not some remote alien realm, but are in fact intimately entangled with every other part of the planet. We should treat them that way. By James Bradley

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Marine biologist Helen Scales had seen octopuses before – but she had never had a meeting quite like this one

• Invertebrate of the year 2024: all hail Earth’s spineless heroes
• Nominate your UK invertebrate species of the year

If I could relive any wildlife encounter, it would be the time last summer when I played peekaboo with an octopus. Usually, when I find myself in the rare company of an underwater celebrity, such as a beautiful, eight-armed cephalopod, only a few fleeting moments pass before I unintentionally scare it away. But this octopus wasn’t going anywhere.

I was floating in knee-high water, heading back to shore after a long free-dive off the coast of Brittany, when I saw the octopus right in front of me. It was a common octopus ( Octopus vulgaris ), a species that has recently been showing up in large numbers along north-east Atlantic coasts . Octopus booms have happened before, most likely linked to warm currents bringing streams of paralarvae, the mini-octopuses that drift for a time before settling on to the seabed. In 1899, fishers in Cornwall and Devon moaned about a plague of octopuses climbing into their crab pots and munching all the bait. In the last few years, octopuses off Brittany have been doing the same thing.

Helen Scales is a marine biologist and writer

Welcome to the Guardian’s invertebrate of the year competition ! Every day between April 2-12 we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here . And at midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate . The winner will be announced on Monday 15 April.

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Highly diverse and charismatic, these creatures deserve recognition as a sixth great extinction dawns

We are prone to obsessing over ourselves and over animals like us. But most of the life on Earth is not like us at all. Barely 5% of all known living creatures are animals with backbones. The rest – at least 1.3 million species, and many more still to be discovered – are spineless.

All hail the invertebrates, animals of wondrous diversity, unique niches and innovative and interesting ways of making a living on this planet. They include insects (at least a million), arachnids, snails, crustaceans, corals, jellyfish, sponges and echinoderms.

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