Haley McKey

After more than a decade of battling in the courts, Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental groups succeeded in getting the protections an imperiled shorebird called the red knot so desperately need.

They lie abandoned on the seafloor, crusted with barnacles and shrouded in algae. There are thousands of them up and down our coasts: lost, forgotten, or just left behind by fishermen. They’re called ghost traps, and as a recent National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration study found, they’re a serious threat to the very marine ecosystems our fishing economy relies on.

This month, the federal government designated critical habitat , including 84 percent of all known nesting areas, and protections for large areas of ocean habitat, for the loggerhead sea turtles found in the Northwest Atlantic.

Since the National Park Service put a new beach driving rule in place in 2012, sea turtles have made a record number of nests and both the number of visitors to the seashore and dollars spent on lodging during the summer nesting season have increased.

Royal Dutch Shell is in hot water for its shady actions in the Arctic Ocean. On April 3, the Coast Guard released a report on its investigation of the grounding of the Kulluk, Shell’s Arctic drill rig, on New Year’s Eve in 2012.