Marine protection group removes two tons of ghost nets from Greek seabed

An initiative called Healthy Seas announced it had completed a three-day sea cleaning operation in northern Greece on Monday during which divers collected two tons of so-called ghost nets - fishing nets that have been left or lost in the ocean by fishermen.
The cleaning work, conducted by four Dutch and six Greek divers, focused on the sea area near Stratoni, a small fishing town in the region of Halkidiki.
The nearby, coastal area of Stratoni is the home of a unique colony of the two seahorse species found in the Mediterranean - hippocampus hippocampus and hippocampus guttulatus, Healthy Seas said in a press release.

These species are characterized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as "near threatened" and are vulnerable to entanglement in nets, and to habitat loss, it added.
"We spotted an impressive list of species including the...