Although contrastive move analysis of article abstracts has been a highlight, few studies focus on abstracts of natural sci-ence articles. To compensate for this gap, this study, based on IMRD model, focuses on aquatic biology abstracts and contrasts those by native English speakers and those by Chinese authors. Combining quantitative and qualitative studies, it reveals their dif-ferences and similarities in terms of the frequency of different moves, sentence length and move length significance. Such similari-ties and differences can be explained by the face culture of China, the different language proficiency and the common convention of academic abstract.