The diving centres on the black list have not complied to standards EN 14467/ISO 24803 for Recreational Diving Services and will not be able to renew their license from the Ministry of Tourism and therefore will be operating illegally.

The auditing process to check that diving centres are meeting these standards began in May 2008 and by 31st March 2009 was completed in South Sinai and will continue to 31st July 2009 in the Hurghada area. Steps will then be put into action to close down illegal operations that fail to comply.

In the case of cod in the North Sea, eastern channel and Skagerrak...things took a turn for the worse in 2008, when a greater proportion of the stock was caught than in any year since 1999," the European Commission said in a statement.

"We are not that far away from a situation of complete collapse," said Jose Rodriguez, a marine biologist with the environmental group Oceana.

Conservation measures for desperately depleted cod have not delivered the promised revival of supplies – partly because of continued over-fishing exceeding agreed quota limits.

As many as 400 megalodon teeth were found at the sites, giving rise to this theory. The size of most of the teeth, about 0.6 to 2.8 inches, suggests that the majority had come from juveniles and embryonic sharks.

Juvenile teeth are different from the small teeth from adults or the dwarf species of the megalodon. In all, it is estimated that the teeth came from 21 juvenile megalodons and seven adults, possibly the mother sharks.

The discovery of the new deep-sea vent is remarkable because the area in which it was found has been intensively studied during previous research cruises. The vent with chimneys as high as one meter and fluids with temperatures up to 300 degrees Celsius was found at one thousand metres depth in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.