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Hakai Magazine

hakaimagazine.com

Coastal science and culture. Marine ecology, fisheries, coastal communities. Nonprofit, well-edited, narrowly focused — and the better for it.

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Hakai Magazine

The Other Side of the World’s Largest Dam Removal

1. A reckoning It’s a blustery day in the autumn of 2023, and I’m standing in a roadside pullout in Northern California, looking at the past and future of the Klamath River. Immediately upstream I see Iron Gate Dam—17 stories ...

Hakai MagazineNov 12, 2024
Hakai Magazine

How to Produce Hydrogen Gas as Cleanly as Possible

As humanity works to slash greenhouse gas emissions and stem the pace of planetary warming, scientists, governments, and industry leaders are looking for low-carbon alternatives to fuel the future. Alongside renewables such as solar and wind energy, hydrogen gas is ...

Hakai MagazineNov 13, 2024
Hakai Magazine

Finding Food and Solace in the Intertidal

When I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, I had a friend whose family owned an unimproved lot on Dabob Bay, a bay off a fjord nestled deep in the southern Salish Sea, in Washington State. My group of friends, ...

Hakai MagazineNov 14, 2024
Hakai Magazine

Little Books with Big Subjects

One of the biggest mistakes novice children’s book writers make is to assume that a story must teach something. An overt message—share, don’t be a bully, eat your veggies—can make for a boring book. There can, of course, be a ...

Hakai MagazineNov 19, 2024
Hakai Magazine

For the Love of a Little Sea

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Centre.

Hakai MagazineNov 21, 2024
Hakai Magazine

One Great Shot: Bluebottle Beauty

Each summer, thousands of bluebottles (also known as Portuguese man-of-wars) wash up along the shores of Sydney, Australia. These remarkable relatives of jellyfish are actually colonial organisms: each is made up of four kinds of specialized, interdependent bodies called zooids. ...

Hakai MagazineNov 22, 2024
Hakai Magazine

The Secret Sex Lives of Deep, Dark Corals

The wooden fishing boat chugs across Comau Fjord, a finger of dark water wedged between the snowy peaks of Chilean Patagonia. A Chilean flag flaps in the wind above a hand-painted black cormorant on the bow. Inside the boat’s cabin, ...

Hakai MagazineNov 27, 2024
Hakai Magazine

For Killer Whales, Saddle Patches are Like Fingerprints

One of the killer whale’s most distinguishing features is its saddle patch: an area of gray or white coloration behind its dorsal fin. Each killer whale has a distinct saddle patch, just as humans have distinct fingerprints. Scientists and other ...

Hakai MagazineNov 29, 2024
Hakai Magazine

The Fleet-Winged Ghosts of Greenland

On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that demands exploring. After my husband ...

Hakai MagazineDec 3, 2024
Hakai Magazine

One Great Shot: Let Us Admire the Lettuce (Slug)

Though reminiscent of a discarded clump of salad greens, this is actually a lettuce sea slug. I spotted it 20 meters below the surface on a coral reef off Playa Kalki, an idyllic beach on the northwestern edge of Curaçao. ...

Hakai MagazineDec 4, 2024
Hakai Magazine

Conjuring the Lost Land Beneath the North Sea

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over ...

Hakai MagazineDec 5, 2024
Hakai Magazine

The Destructive Legacy of Failed Aquaculture

Aquaculture is big business in Canada. In 2023, open-net-pen salmon farming in British Columbia alone produced 50,000 tonnes of fish worth just over US $350-million. But on June 30, 2029, the federal government’s long-looming ban on open-net-pen salmon farming is ...

Hakai MagazineDec 6, 2024
Hakai Magazine

Caviar Pizzas, New Money, and the Death of an Ancient Fish

I am sitting at a slick Manhattan waterfront restaurant on the banks of the East River, New York City, trying to decide why I find the caviar pizza on the menu so disturbing. Jonathan Haffmans, the executive chef of Industry ...

Hakai MagazineDec 10, 2024
Hakai Magazine

To Speak the Language of the Land

Nearly 200 of us cram into Tarāwhai, a traditional wooden Māori meeting house, under the gaze of the ancestors and deities carved into the posts and walls. We’re here in the home of the Ngāti Tarāwhai tribe, in the middle ...

Hakai MagazineDec 12, 2024
Hakai Magazine

The Personal Toll of Canada’s Broken Fishing Promises

August 29, 2020, dawned clear over southwest Nova Scotia. In the cabin of his lobster boat, the Mystique Lady, Matthew Cope was chatting with the other members of his crew as they chugged out from shore. The vessel was bound ...

Hakai MagazineDec 17, 2024
Hakai Magazine

What’s Next for Deep-Sea Mining?

Earlier this year, Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer and environmental policy expert, took the helm of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) as secretary general. The ISA, an intergovernmental body that governs what happens on the seafloor in international waters, is ...

Hakai MagazineDec 18, 2024
Hakai Magazine

The Canoe in the Forest

When I first see the canoe, in May, it takes a moment to distinguish the long, shapely slab of cedar from the patch of earth that has spent more than a century trying to reclaim it. Covered in moss and ...

Hakai MagazineDec 19, 2024
Hakai Magazine

How, Exactly, Could Deep-Sea Mining Benefit All of Humanity?

When Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, took the floor at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1967 and began speaking at length on international law, the room was sparsely populated. Pardo was undeterred. The deep, dark ocean, ...

Hakai MagazineDec 20, 2024
Hakai Magazine

The First First Responders

When a ship wrecks on an unfamiliar coastline, an already desperate situation is all the more dire. Blinded by the night, and lost, the captain and crew of the Puritan, a four-masted lumber schooner en route from San Francisco, California, ...

Hakai MagazineDec 24, 2024
Hakai Magazine

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

We started Hakai Magazine over 10 years ago because the ocean and its coastlines needed a voice. No other outlet was exclusively covering issues at the interface of sea and land—or of the marine world in general. After all these ...

Hakai MagazineDec 27, 2024