In the Sept. 9 Democratic Primary, vote to re-elect Rep. Tina Spears

NEWS FROM THE RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN FOR TINA SPEARS AUGUST 2026 Common Sense. Common Good. Conserving the Ocean State. As your Representative, I’ve worked to protect our coastline, forests, parks, and clean water through smart investments and commonsense policies, ensuring Rhode Island remains a place future generations are proud to call home.   Promises made. Promises kept. Delivered $53 million to protect forests, parks, farmland, clean water, and our coastline. ​Protected public shoreline access and the Charlestown Breachway ​Invested in healthy forests, wildlife habitat, and climate resilience. ​Passed landmark protections against PFAs (“forever chemicals”) to protect drinking water and public health. ​Reduced harmful toxins by banning dangerous rodenticides that threaten wildlife. ​Advanced conservation efforts to preserve open space, forests, and farmland. ​Led the effort to establish a Bottle Bill implementation study to develop solutions that reduce litter, increase recycling, and keep bottles and cans out of our waterways and neighborhoods.   What’s next I will continue supporting practical environmental solutions that protect our communities, strengthen resilience, and preserve the character of Southern Rhode Island. Get your yard sign! Contact Tina at tina@tinaspearsri.com or call Kathleen 401 439 4469 to get yours! If you'd like to donate to Tina's re-eelction campaign, please make personal checks payable to: The Friends of Tina Spears 82 Hillside Drive Charlestown, RI 02813   Or click HERE to contribute online or scan the QR code Want to volunteer on Tina's re-election campaign? Contact us here. We have lots of fun and we'll keep Tina in the State House! Get our latest updates! Add your email... Subscribe State law prohibits the acceptance of any corporate or business checks. Only individuals and RI registered PACs may contribute. RI law requires contributors to note place of employment. Contributions are limited to $2,000 per person per calendar year, and are not tax-deductible. Visit our social accounts tinaspearsri.com

NOAA’s New Priorities Put Profits Ahead of Marine Protections

Kill whales, fish more

By Johnny Sturgeon

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

In the Western Pacific, protections for endangered leatherback turtles face elimination. In Alaskan waters, Steller sea lion sanctuaries could soon shrink. And in the North Atlantic, gear designed to save right whales from fatal entanglements might be permanently scrapped.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sent letters to the nation’s regional fisheries councils last month, directing all of them to dismantle restrictions in favor of more permissive, economically advantageous fishing procedures. 

The “regional priorities” are an effort by the Department of Commerce to fulfill President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.

At stake are reassessments of marine protected areas (MPAs), the removal of species from conservation lists, changes to gear types and a wide array of expansions to commercial fishing operations.

“These letters reflect the administration’s view that fish are just commodities, science doesn’t matter, and short-term economic gains (and political points) matter more than sustaining ocean ecosystems,” said Andrea Treece, the senior attorney in the Oceans Program at Earthjustice, in an email to Inside Climate News. “They’re totally missing any sense of stewardship toward the ocean that supports all of us and belongs to all of us.”

Seaweeds are not plants – and six other surprising facts about aquatic flora

Crucial to life on earth

Alexander Bowles, University of Oxford

Hidden beneath the water’s surface is a botanical world that is among nature’s most innovative and ecologically important.

As I highlighted in a recent paper, an extraordinary range of adaptations have evolved in aquatic plants for life beneath the water’s surface. Some flower underwater, others capture animals in ingenious traps. Here are seven facts that show how these remarkable organisms challenge our assumptions about what plants are and how they survive.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories. This article is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

1. Plants can’t stop returning to water

When we think of plants, we often picture life on land: forests, grasslands and meadows. Yet throughout their evolutionary history, plants have repeatedly returned to the water, where they first evolved. Around 500 million years ago, plants moved from water onto land. Since then, many have moved back. Scientists estimate that the aquatic lifestyle has evolved independently more than 100 times across different plant groups.

Water lilies float their leaves on the surface, duckweeds drift freely and seagrasses live entirely submerged in the ocean. Some of these groups made their return over 100 million years ago. The repeated evolution of aquatic plants is one of nature’s most striking examples of convergent evolution.

How we got to have clam cakes and stuffies

Stanford Scientists Solve a 252-Million-Year-Old Mass Extinction Mystery

By Stanford University

Representative samples of the modern fauna
(left three samples) and the Paleozoic fauna
(right four samples). Credit: Sarah Leibovitz

The shells scattered along modern beaches are clues to an ancient catastrophe. Clams and snails are common today partly because their distant relatives survived the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history, while many of their former rivals nearly vanished.

A new Stanford-led study helps explain why.

About 252 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic extinction event eliminated 96% of marine species and 70% of land animals. Known as the “Great Dying,” it was far more destructive than the later disaster that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.

Why Some Ocean Animals Vanished

Yet the crisis was not equally deadly for every branch of animal life. Some groups that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years suffered catastrophic losses, while others endured and eventually took their place.

Brachiopods were among the biggest casualties. These shelled animals resemble clams but belong to a completely different evolutionary group. Before the extinction, they were among the most abundant creatures on the seafloor. Crinoids, or sea lilies, and several other mostly stationary bottom dwellers also declined sharply.

This looks like the perfect challenge for ICE

“Weird Clams” Reveal a New Invasion Along the U.S. Northeast Coast

By University of Massachusetts Amherst

Empty Manila clam shells blanketing the
 intertidal zone in Boston Harbor’s Spectacle
Island. Credit: Aly Putnam

A stretch of Atlantic shoreline that had remained free of Manila clams now appears to support reproducing populations of the invasive shellfish.

Biologists led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, MIT Sea Grant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for Coastal Studies confirmed that Ruditapes philippinarum has established itself along the northwestern Atlantic coast. Published in Biological Invasions, the findings capture a rarely documented stage of biological invasion, when a species is first becoming established and beginning to spread through a new region.

Manila clams are native to waters extending from Russia’s Sakhalin Islands through Japan and southern China. Since at least the early 20th century, however, people have introduced them both intentionally and accidentally to the Pacific coast of North America and to Europe, allowing the species to spread across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

The clams are widely valued as food and support an industry worth about $7 billion annually. At the same time, dense populations can compete with native shellfish, hybridize with related species, and alter surrounding ecological communities.

Co-author Bastidas in Squantum, Massachusetts,
holding a native quahog clam. Mussels and Manila
clams are visible in the tray. Credit: Carolina Bastidas

Their arrival may also bring some benefits. Manila clams can provide abundant food for seabirds, crabs, raccoons, and other animals that prey on shellfish.

“Given that Manila clams are everywhere else in the northern hemisphere, it was only a matter of time before they showed up here, and we’ve been keeping an eye out for them,” says marine scientist Aly Putnam, who is a postdoctoral researcher at UMass Amherst and lecturer at Smith College, as well as the paper’s lead author.

A text message starts the search

The Northeastern U.S. had represented the last major gap in the Manila clam’s Northern Hemisphere range. Evidence that the species had reached this coastline emerged from something remarkably ordinary: a text message.

During the summer of 2025, Putnam was leading a small workshop on intertidal biodiversity at Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor when El Fernekees Hartshorn sent her a photograph of an unfamiliar clam. Fernekees Hartshorn, a recent University of Rhode Island graduate who had worked with Putnam on regional Rapid Assessment Surveys for marine invasive species, suggested that the shellfish might be a Manila clam. Fernekees Hartshorn is also a co-author of the paper.

What could possibly go wrong?

Trump’s Push for Deep-Sea Mining 

By Gina-Marie Cheeseman

Minerals like nickel and cobalt are in so many of the products we use, including the device you’re reading this on. That demand is exactly what The Metals Company (TMC) is banking on. In March 2026, TMC joined the U.S. Defense Industrial Base Consortium (the “DIBC”). 

This Pentagon-managed body steers non-dilutive federal funding to critical minerals suppliers, pitching its deep-sea nickel, cobalt, and manganese as a domestic supply the government should help pay to develop.

​The Metals Company has a problem. It cannot survive without governmental handouts. The company’s 2025 financial update reveals a net loss of roughly $319.8 million, $0.83 per share, on essentially no revenue. 

“If deep-sea mining is truly the next big thing its backers claim, why can’t The Metals Company attract investors — and why do they expect taxpayers to foot the bill? This isn’t about security; it’s about propping up a speculative industry that risks irreversible harm to the deep ocean for corporate profit,” said Jackie Dragon, Greenpeace USA Senior Oceans Campaigner

The push for deep-sea mining comes from the top. In April 2025, Trump signed an executive order to “accelerate the responsible development of seabed mineral resources.” In other words, he directed federal agencies to accelerate the development of deep-sea mining because the nation needs more critical minerals for its electronics. Trump’s proposed 2027 budget includes funding for critical minerals across the departments of Energy, Interior, Defense, and State.

New Disease Threats Follow Trump Administration’s Health Program Cuts

How Trump and Musk cuts have led to increased danger

By Stephanie Armour

As beachgoers flock to water during the busy July Fourth weekend, danger could be lurking in some areas.

Researchers this spring discovered flesh-eating bacteria in water in several coastal locations across New York’s Long Island, and town officials in the Hamptons vacation destination posted an alert about the findings. Eight people in Florida have been infected this year, and Mississippi health officials in June urged people to take precautions.

About 1 in 5 people infected by the bacteria die, sometimes within a day or two of becoming ill, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet. The bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, can enter open wounds and cause tissue death and systemic sepsis.

“Many people with Vibrio vulnificus infection can get seriously ill and need intensive care or limb amputation,” the CDC says.

The risk of such public threats is mounting because climate change is expanding the territory of certain pathogens, but researchers say there’s another concern. The Trump administration has cut investments in programs and agencies that prevent, track, and respond to health hazards the federal government is now confronting.

Consider the reemergence of screwworm, which can infest and kill livestock, in the U.S. in June. The U.S. Department of Agriculture lost 18% of its workforce in the first six months of 2025, according to a report from the USDA’s Office of Inspector General, and the agency’s winnowed-down inspection service is helping lead the response to the parasite.

Or malaria. A freeze on foreign aid disrupted international malaria prevention efforts, and new federal guidance in May warned that the U.S. is vulnerable to the reintroduction of the infectious disease.

And when it comes to Vibrio, the Trump administration began removing hundreds of deep-sea instruments that monitor ocean waters and yield data that helps predict conditions that can allow the bacteria to flourish. Researchers have used the data to study Vibrio, which can multiply rapidly when water temperatures and salinity increase.