Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG). But it faces domestic gas shortages by the 2030s as old gasfields run dry.

Gas exports from the east coast only began in 2015. Since then, exports have ballooned and domestic gas prices have increased dramatically. Price spikes have driven some manufacturers to the wall. Governments have had to intervene to prevent shortages.

The issue is that gas companies can get much higher prices exporting gas than selling it domestically. And some exporters have started buying gas from the domestic market instead of developing their own resources.

To fix this problem, the federal government plans to require gas companies to reserve gas for the domestic market. When first announced in December, the gas industry was broadly supportive. No longer. The backlash began after the detailed design was released in May. Growing dissent from industry now threatens to derail the plan.

As proposed, the government’s scheme does need some tweaks. But the core mechanics are sound and the key criticism is misplaced. It’s time for the government to explain it better.

What’s the policy meant to do?

The gas reservation policy is designed to force exporters to supply the equivalent of 20% of their exports to the domestic market. The government’s goal is to keep prices down and avoid looming shortages, especially in New South Wales and Victoria.

When the plan was announced, Australia’s oil and gas lobby group backed it. But the Australian Energy Producers group now calls the plan “fundamentally unworkable”.

Gas producer Senex called it “perverse in the extreme”, Beach Energy said the government was “trying to shut us down”, and Santos said it would “kill an industry”. Queensland treasurer David Janetzki said the plan would “undermine the foundations of our economy”.

What happened?

The major bone of contention is how much gas exporters would have to push into the domestic market.

East coast LNG exports are forecast to be about 1,400 petajoules (PJ) next year.

Reserving 20% of that as the government wants would be 280PJ – the equivalent of about 73 large LNG carriers.

But domestic demand is now falling. East coast demand is forecast to be only 441PJ next year, which should be met by existing supply. Adding 280PJ would be a huge oversupply.

For a domestic gas producer to make money, it needs to sell gas at about A$11–12 per gigajoule.

The industry is worried boosting supply could drive prices below the cost of production, potentially driving domestic-only producers broke.

If that happened, supply would fall and prices would rise. This would make matters worse long-term.

This concern is reasonable but overstated

Dire warnings of an oversupply are overstated. The reservation policy has been deliberately designed to manage this risk.

The 20% figure isn’t fixed. Rather, it’s an upper limit on how much gas will be reserved. Most years, the scheme will reserve much less.

Each year, the minister responsible will decide how much gas to reserve, based on two things. One, whether the domestic market faces a shortage. And two, whether forcing a domestic oversupply will keep a lid on prices.

While the final legislation is yet to be released and much could change, if the scheme applied in 2027, here’s how the current design might work.

Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts suggest the east coast will effectively face zero shortfalls until 2030, leaving no gap to fill in 2027. The government has suggested requiring delivery of 5% more gas than forecast requirements so domestic prices drop.

That would translate to an extra 22PJ in 2027, representing about 2% of exports – not 20%. The remaining gas would accrue as an obligation the minister can call on in future years.

The final figure might be smaller still. About 70% of this gas would have to be sold through long-term contracts, leaving 30% able to be offered to short-term trading markets. If exporters can prove this gas has no buyers, they can seek permission to export it. Any reserved gas approved for export remains as an future obligation able to be called on.

All up, this means the policy could require just 16PJ of gas to be delivered domestically in 2027. This scenario would hardly tank the market.

Little time to get it right

The 20% reservation figure is the biggest concern for industry. But it’s not the only one.

Gas companies are worried about too much ministerial discretion, the ability to set obligations across multi-year periods, and potentially massive accruals of “undelivered gas”. These issues are legitimate and need to be resolved.

Under the government’s model, the minister would have substantial discretion to set the annual volumes required. This leaves exporters with no certainty about how much they will be required to deliver each year. To solve this, gas volumes should be set in five-year blocks according to a predictable formula based on supply and demand.

Fixing these issues will be crucial to win over a sceptical industry. But the government wants the scheme to begin on July 1 next year. That doesn’t leave much time to get it right. Legislation would have to be introduced in the September sitting of parliament for the laws to be passed before Christmas.

None of these issues is a reason to back away. Over time, Australia will need to wean itself off gas, which is a potent fossil fuel. But for as long as we still need it, consumers in a gas-rich country should have access to gas at a reasonable price.

Hamish McKenzie, Deputy Program Director, Energy and Climate Change, Grattan Institute, Grattan Institute and Alison Reeve, Program Director, Energy and Climate Change, Grattan Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the Kimberley, Martuwarra – also called the Fitzroy River – is far more than a waterway.

It is one of Australia’s largest and most intact river systems. It flows about 730 kilometres from the central Kimberley to King Sound in the north of Western Australia.

Martuwarra supports plants, animals, wetlands, floodplains and communities across a catchment of about 94,000 square kilometres. For Traditional Custodians, Martuwarra is living water. It is Cultural identity connected by Country, kin, knowledge and responsibility.

Many species and ecological communities hold deep cultural, spiritual and livelihood importance for Indigenous peoples. Sometimes known as Totems, these Culturally significant entities are not always animals. They may also be plants, landscapes, waters or other parts of the living world that make up Country.

Their meaning depends on Country, culture, family, community and the Knowledge systems to which they belong. But they are rarely acknowledged in national policy, planning or conservation management systems. And this is what environmental management can miss when it sees nature only through categories such as species, habitats, resources or water allocations.

Making cultural values visible

Martuwarra is one of the case studies in our project, Recognising Culturally Significant Entities. Led by Aboriginal researchers and guided by Traditional Custodians, the project makes Indigenous cultural values more visible in environmental management.

Australia has systems for identifying threatened species and ecological communities. These are based on their extinction risk using evidence-based criteria. These are important, but they do not always capture why a species, place or ecosystem matters to Indigenous peoples.

Martuwarra is a powerful example. The Fitzroy River catchment in the West Kimberley is recognised as a National Heritage Place and the longest registered Aboriginal Cultural Heritage site in WA. It supports threatened, migratory and priority-listed species, as well as nationally and internationally important wetlands. But its cultural significance cannot be understood through ecological listings alone.

Martuwarra connects people to Country and holds a detailed knowledge system. It tells people when it is time to move, hunt and conduct ceremony. It is central to kinship connections and the shared responsibility to care for the river.

When a culturally significant species or place is damaged, the loss can affect more than biodiversity. It can also affect language, cultural practice, teaching and community wellbeing.

What are Culturally significant entities?

Culturally significant entities are the species and ecological communities to which Indigenous peoples attribute cultural value. They are vital to their relationship with Country. They may include animals, plants or ecosystems connected to Totems. They may also be bush foods, tools, cultural materials, or indicators of the health of Country.

Ecological values are often considered in conservation planning, but cultural values are consistently recognised. This means important species, places and ecological communities can be overlooked, especially when not listed as threatened.

Our project has helped develop Australia’s first nationally consistent framework for recognising Culturally significant entities. It encourages governments, researchers and others to ask what a species or place means to people of this Country. How should those values be considered in decisions about its future?

Cultural authority matters

A key framework principle is that cultural significance cannot be defined from the outside. Only Traditional Custodians and Indigenous Knowledge holders with authority for Country can determine what is culturally significant.

Cultural knowledge is located in place. The same species, plant, river or landscape may hold different meanings, stories or responsibilities in different places.

Our project was developed through partnerships with Indigenous Knowledge holders and Traditional Owners. This meant cultural values were identified through Indigenous-led processes rather than imposed or simplified by others.

Alongside the framework, we developed case studies from across Australia. These recognise cultural values alongside ecological data, demonstrating the importance of knowledge, kin and Country.

These include animals such as black cockatoos, coastal emus, dingoes, frogs, green turtles, humpback whales, Murray cod, sugarbag bees and western grey kangaroos. It also includes plants and places such as black bean, red mulga, Fitzroy River Country, Macquarie Marshes and waterholes.

Together, they show why conservation needs to consider more than ecological data. A species, plant, landscape or waterway may be culturally vital, even if it is not rare or formally threatened.

A fuller picture of conservation

Australia’s species and ecosystems are under pressure from pressure such as habitat loss, invasive species, climate change and development.

For Martuwarra, these threats also include mining and gas extraction, intensive agriculture and irrigation.

Our framework gives governments, researchers and conservation organisations a clearer way to recognise the species, ecological communities and places that matter for cultural reasons.

By recognising these, conservation can better reflect relationships between people, culture and place. It also support decisions that protect what matters to Country and communities.

Teagan Shields, Senior research fellow, Curtin University; Anna-Sheree Krige, Senior Research Communications, The University of Western Australia; Anne Poelina, Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council & Professor and Chair Indigenous Knowledges & Senior Research Fellow, Nulungu Institute of Research, University of Notre Dame Australia, and Stephen van Leeuwen, Indigenous Chair of Biodiversity & Environmental Science, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Deeply etched into a cliff face in GunaiKurnai Country, near the township of Buchan in East Gippsland in rural Victoria, is a large limestone cave that hosts an extraordinary story.

Today, the area outside Cloggs Cave is mainly grassland and open woodland, with eucalypt forests further behind the cave. But this was not always so.

The environment changed as the last ice age came and went, and as the Old GunaiKurnai Ancestors managed Country through cultural burning and daily activities on the land. Photographs from the 19th century, as well as regional pollen records, show that during the early colonial times of the mid- and late 1800s, sheoaks were more abundant.

Early colonists cleared nearly all those that then stood near Cloggs Cave. But it is their grassy understorey that is of greatest interest to this story, which we can now tell.

In a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, we report the discovery of thousands of microscopic plant remains known as phytoliths that are testimony to GunaiKurnai rituals repeatedly performed over the past 25,000 years.

Who carried the plants inside?

Phytoliths are microscopic silica bodies that occur in plant tissues, their shapes and sizes varying in different parts of plants and between plant taxa.

Unlike pollen, which is dispersed by wind or insects, the hard, glassy phytoliths mostly get left behind at the spot where a plant decays. They can survive underground for thousands and even millions of years. They can also survive fires.

As sediments accumulate, the phytoliths become trapped in the soil, so that over time the buried sequence leaves a record of the plants that once grew or had been placed there.

Plants cannot grow inside Cloggs Cave, as there is neither sufficient light nor moisture. So the buried phytoliths must have been carried in by people or by animals, such as possums, on their fur or through their scats.

A 25,000-year-old history

In 2019 and 2020, we were part of a team of scientists and local Aboriginal community members who undertook archaeological excavations deep in the cave, to work out how the Old GunaiKurnai Ancestors used it in the past.

As the excavations progressed, we collected small samples of sediment, one to two centimetres at a time. In the laboratory, we focused on the half-burnt phytoliths from the ashy layers, because these layers were clearly the result of fires lit by people inside the cave.

The burnt phytoliths were so concentrated they could not have been incidental to other activities nearby. They were found in thin layers of ash densely packed one on top of the other, unlike during earlier times when the ash was more sparse.

The phytoliths from the various ash layers had almost all come from different parts of grasses, such as stems, leaves, flowers and roots. This indicated the grasses had been brought into the cave whole, roots and all.

The archaeological excavations showed people had entered the cave for some 25,000 years, beginning just as the coldest phase of the last ice age began. They never used the cave for everyday living though, nor for communal food preparation or consumption.

There are hundreds of thousands of animal bones in the cave. But almost all of those dating to the period of human occupation came from owls dropping their pellets on the cave floor, mainly tiny unbroken bones.

Instead, people used the cave to perform secluded rituals, some involving the breaking of stalactites and the erecting of standing stones from blocks of limestone obtained from inside the cave.

A carefully positioned stone revealed

Some 73 thin, superimposed ash layers underlie and then surround one such, fully buried, standing stone.

The 28-centimetre-tall stone was positioned upright on a bed of ash 2,000 years ago, and fires were then regularly burnt around it over the next 400 years. The microscopic phytoliths in the thin layers of ash now reveal otherwise invisible traces of those activities.

We found 29 different types of phytoliths from a range of plant groups including grasses, herbs, and woody plants at different levels of the excavation. Most of the phytoliths were well preserved, and even delicate silica forms such as hair cells and multicellular structures had survived intact in their original plant positions.

Grasses were the most abundant plant type identified (up to 97%). Two subfamilies of grasses were particularly well represented: Pooideae, which grows in temperate, cool conditions, and Panicoideae, which prefers warm, humid climates.

Woody plants and herbs are low phytolith producers, and phytoliths from these plant types were rarely observed.

Retelling the stories in the land

The phytoliths are more than an indication of the simple burning of grasses in the cave.

Senior members of the GunaiKurnai community told local pioneering ethnographer Alfred Howitt in the 1800s that individuals would be smeared with ash and charcoal powder during the jeraeil initiation ceremony and various other powerful rituals to perform healing, cursing and magic.

Plants were also laid and burnt on the ground to leave ashy floors to make it easier to track the footsteps of dangerous beings who may be lurking nearby, such as nargun who are thought to have lived in caves.

The details of these rituals have been partly forgotten over the years. But our research – together with GunaiKurnai people’s retained cultural knowledge of ancestral practices in local caves – is helping to unearth and make sense of them.

These were peopled landscapes whose rich stories can again be told.

Russell Mullett, Traditional Custodian — Kurnai, Indigenous Knowledge; Bruno David, Professor, Australian Research Council Industry Laureate, Monash University, and Elle Grono, Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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.

2. The plants that aren’t plants

Some of the most conspicuous organisms beneath the waves are seaweeds. They photosynthesise and often resemble underwater plants. Yet despite their appearance, seaweeds are not true plants.

Seaweeds belong to several distinct lineages of algae found across the evolutionary tree of life. The giant kelps that form underwater forests are brown algae. Nori and dulse are red algae, while sea lettuce belongs to the green algae.

Unlike plants, they lack true roots, stems and leaves, and they do not produce flowers or seeds. However, their plant-like appearance is a reminder that evolution can produce similar forms in very different groups of organisms when they face similar environmental challenges.

3. Great depths

Plants need sunlight to photosynthesise, which usually limits them to land or shallow water. Yet some aquatic mosses survive at astonishing depths. Knieff’s hook-moss (Drepanocladus aduncus) has been recorded at 140 metres below the surface in the exceptionally clear waters of Crater Lake, Oregon, US. This makes it the deepest known underwater plant which also grows on land, surviving at a depth greater than the height of the London Eye.

Deep-water mosses have also been recorded in lakes in New Zealand, Antarctica and elsewhere, so deep these environments are effectively pitch black and few animals can survive.

4. Rootless

Roots are one of the defining features of plants, anchoring them in the ground and absorbing water and nutrients from the soil. Yet many aquatic plants have reduced their roots dramatically – and some have seemingly lost them altogether.

Life underwater changes the rules. Water and dissolved nutrients surround the plant, making extensive root systems less important than they are on land. Instead, many aquatic species absorb nutrients directly through their leaves and stems.

Duckweeds provide one of the most extreme examples. Some species have only a single root compared to multi-rooted relatives like giant duckweed. Members of the genus Wolffia – the world’s smallest flowering plants – have no roots at all, floating freely on the water’s surface. Individual Wolffia can be a millimetre in length, with flowers at 0.3 millimetres.

5. Underwater carnivores

Not all aquatic plants rely on sunlight and dissolved nutrients. Some supplement their diet by capturing and digesting animals.

The most spectacular examples are the bladderworts (Utricularia), a group of rootless aquatic plants found in freshwater habitats around the world. Their leaves are modified into tiny bladder-like traps that create a vacuum by pumping water out of the chamber.

When a small animal brushes against trigger hairs near the trap entrance, a door springs open and the prey is sucked inside in less than a millisecond. This makes bladderwort traps among the fastest movements in the plant kingdom. While they usually capture tiny aquatic invertebrates, fish larvae and tadpoles have occasionally been recorded as prey.

The carnivore lifestyle allows bladderworts to thrive in nutrient-poor waters where other plants struggle.

6. Pollination by current

When we think of plant pollination, people often pictures bees buzzing between colourful petals on a sunny afternoon. However, if your flower is underwater, pollination becomes tricky. Instead of relying on insects or wind, many aquatic plants such as the seagrasses have turned water itself into their personal matchmaker, allowing the water’s currents to drift pollen directly to its destination.

To attract pollinators, land plants routinely release airborne perfumes. But beneath the water’s surface, these traditional gas signals do not work effectively. This limitation has led to an evolutionary shift: underwater pioneers like seagrasses have lost the genes responsible for producing these airborne scents. These no longer provided an advantage so they were lost over time.

7. Seagrasses and mangroves are major carbon sinks

Seagrasses and mangroves capture and store carbon in their tissues and the sediments beneath them, making them some of the planet’s most effective natural carbon sinks. Together with seagrass meadows, they store what scientists call “blue carbon” – carbon trapped in coastal ecosystems that can remain locked away for centuries or even millennia.

These ecosystems, including seagrass meadows and mangroves, store 11.5 billion tons of carbon worldwide. Of the 11.5 billion tons of carbon stored, mangroves represents the largest blue carbon pool at 6.5 billion tons.

Whether they are trapping prey in milliseconds, growing in near darkness or storing carbon for centuries, aquatic plants demonstrate the remarkable versatility of life.

Alexander Bowles, Glasstone Research Fellow, Plant Science, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you’d be like … ‘can you not put two and two together?’”

Those are the words of a former Antarctic tour guide we interviewed. For anyone interested in nature, few jobs sound more enviable. You spend months among penguins, orcas and glaciers, helping visitors experience one of the world’s most extraordinary and unspoiled places.

But for some guides, like those we quote in this article, that privilege slowly became impossible to reconcile with their beliefs. Watching climate change unfold while helping thousands more visitors reach the continent eventually led them to leave the jobs they’d once dreamed of.

Antarctic tourism is growing fast, with over 120,000 visits in 2025-26 and up to 450,000 expected each summer within a decade. Our new study reveals how Antarctic tour guides grapple with the dilemma at the heart of their work — bringing more and more people to an ecologically vulnerable area, and helping cause some of the greatest CO₂ emissions of any form of tourism.

“I was down there on the hottest day ever recorded in 2020. Hiking up a glacier in my T-shirt, driving boats without gloves. It was really sad. The impacts of climate change absolutely hit you in the face.”

We interviewed 25 former Antarctic guides who decided to quit their jobs (all quotes are anonymised). These guides couldn’t align their morals with the effects of tourism they were witnessing day after day.

“Very often, for long periods of time, the penguins had maybe a few hours’ break during the night. Otherwise there were hundreds of people walking through the colonies non-stop.”

While tour operators often argue that visiting Antarctica can heighten tourists’ awareness of environmental issues, former guides were struck by guests’ ignorance of human impacts.

None of the guides quit overnight. Their decisions emerged through years of reflection, uncertainty and moral conflict.

“We are always in conflict in our minds with two parts; the excitement to go to Antarctica to work in remote places we like, and being complicit in tourism industry development.”

“I can’t work in the farce of climate change cruise tourism anymore. It’s just, how can I go there, tell people about climate change and not do anything about it?”

The former Antarctic tour guides show meaningful change is often a painful and gradual process rather than a single dramatic moment. For many, years of acting against their values affected their wellbeing.

“I think what it comes down to for me is, you know, if I think about being on my deathbed and trying to look my kids in the eyes and saying, ‘I tried.’ I don’t know if I could have done that if I kept doing what I was doing.”

The stories of guides who left one of the world’s most extraordinary tourism jobs powerfully illustrate how abandoning unsustainable lifestyles can come with real personal costs.

“To this day, Antarctica … stays in the forefront of my head as the most incredibly raw environment that deserves all the care and protection. And I just think tourism and us being there was doing the opposite of that completely.”

Many of the research participants still felt deeply connected to Antarctica, and they sometimes regretted leaving. Mixed feelings and ambiguity are an inherent part of decisions we take out of concern and care for others, including remote environments.

“Do I wish I was getting on a flight and heading to the floe edge to take people out on the ice? Yes, there’s a big part of me that wishes I was doing that right now. And I also know that I would feel like shit after doing it.”

Loving and leaving

In the case of the people we interviewed, caring about Antarctica meant walking away from Antarctic tourism. The interviews suggest that distance doesn’t necessarily weaken responsibility. For these former tour guides, caring for Antarctica ultimately meant leaving it – and many felt better after they quit. Sometimes the best way to protect a place you love is to leave it alone.

“I was working very much against what I knew wasn’t right, and I think that was coming out in my body as well. And then when I made that decision to walk away, I just felt so much better. It was like I could breathe again.”

If you’ve ever questioned whether your work aligns with your values, these former Antarctic tour guides offer a thoughtful perspective on balancing career, wellbeing, and environmental responsibility. Their stories may also inspire a deeper appreciation for protecting Antarctica by leaving it untouched.

Zdenka Sokolickova, Postdoctoral Researcher, Arctic Centre, University of Groningen; Christy Hehir, Senior Lecturer in Tourism and Events, University of Surrey, and Elizabeth Cooper, Postdoctoral Researcher, Arctic Centre, University of Groningen

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A dip in the sea can provide welcome relief after long stretches of hot weather – especially when the water is an inviting 20°C or more, as it has been recently across southern parts of the UK. But such sea temperatures are unusually warm, with UK waters being hit by the third major marine heatwave in four years.

Aside from obvious negative consequences for people, such as more drownings in open water, marine heatwaves can affect sea life of all sizes, from microscopic plankton to huge whales.

Around the world, such instances of unusually warm sea temperatures for five days or more have caused die-back of key species such as kelp, seagrass and corals.

Marine heatwaves have also caused death or changes to the life cycles of marine mammals and shellfish, as well as other species that depend on them, such as seabirds. They have caused species to migrate or shift their geographic range. These changes all disrupt ecosystems, with disastrous ramifications for oceanic food webs.

The UK’s first major marine heatwave, in June 2023, has been followed by another in May 2025 and the current heatwave in July 2026. Evidence of the impacts of these marine heatwaves is still quite limited, because some consequences can be subtle or take years to detect.

Extreme heat has been linked to harmful algal blooms around the UK. A surge in growth of microscopic algae develops when nutrients, warm temperatures, abundant sunlight and calm water combine to create ideal growing conditions.

Algal blooms can produce harmful toxins that accumulate in filter-feeding shellfish, causing severe illness or death in people who eat them. For that reason, the UK government works with food safety authorities to actively monitor marine biotoxins.

Warmer waters may have caused the influxes of octopus to the south coasts of Devon and Cornwall. Their predation on crab and lobster from pots has altered local fishery dynamics, with some fisheries now focusing on catching octopus.

A surge in jellyfish sightings has been suggested as another possible consequence of the latest marine heatwave. But early evidence suggests this may be due to more people at the beach reporting their observations.

Anecdotally, fishers have reported cold-water species such as cod shifting northward. Aside from affecting catch, such shifts may also affect seabird breeding and survival.

Seagrass beds and kelp forests have their own microclimates which can provide sanctuary from extreme heat. But they are also under threat from marine heatwaves, as warmer waters hinder their ability to provide refuge for marine species.

Because of changes to fisheries and ocean health, marine heatwaves have huge social and economic consequences.

In Western Australia, the consistently warm seas led to the coining of the term “marine heatwave” in 2011. This caused decimation of seagrass meadows, along with die-back of kelp, corals, fish, abalone, prawns and crabs. Some parts of that marine ecosystem took years to recover; other parts have never bounced back.

Forty questions

Now, the race is on to understand the knock-on effects of marine heatwaves and which marine species are most threatened.

Management interventions, such as harvest strategies or catch quotas, can protect breeding populations and young fish, helping to maintain healthy fish and shellfish numbers. The earlier these interventions are implemented, the better.

There is still so much that marine scientists need to understand about the effects of marine heatwaves. A diverse range of experts recently identified the 40 priority questions to advance understanding of the risks and opportunities of UK marine heatwaves. These questions centre on heatwaves’ effects on marine ecosystems, the services they underpin, the blue economy and society.

The UK’s 2023 and 2025 marine heatwaves did not occur during the month of August, when UK waters are at their seasonal warmest and added heat could tip conditions past critical thresholds.

Should the current marine heatwave continue into August, the consequences could be dire, giving these priority questions new urgency.

Jules B. Kajtar, Senior Research Scientist - Physical Oceanography, National Oceanography Centre and Zoe Jacobs, Biogeochemical Modeller, National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A surprisingly large number and diversity of bee species – 74 out of 96 tested – have magnetic properties, according to research my colleagues and I recently published in the journal Science Advances.

Some animals are able to use iron-based magnetic compounds such as magnetite to detect and navigate via the Earth’s magnetic field – a sense called magnetoreception. We considered magnetism in the insects we tested to be a proxy for which species might be magnetoreceptive.

For decades, biologists have known that social, cavity-nesting honeybees exhibit magnetoreception. Most researchers assumed that this internal compass was tied to living in a colony; honeybees communicate the location of floral resources to other colony members through a dance that indicates direction relative to the position of the Sun and the geomagnetic field.

Our study had two goals: to compare magnetism between bee species that live in groups versus on their own, and to track down the evolutionary origin of magnetoreception in bees.

Finding magnetism wherever we looked

To test magnetic responses, we collected bee specimens from across the bee family Apidae, which includes social species such as honeybees along with solitary species such as chimney bees. We ground dried dead bees into a powder, then measured how magnetic this powder was in a magnetometer.

To our surprise, we found that the magnetic response was strong in both bees that live in groups and those that live alone. This result forced us to reject our initial hypothesis that magnetism was necessary only for social bee species.

Even more unexpected, a bee from a small social species in the family Halictidae was also strongly magnetic. We then broadened our search to include bees from across the bee evolutionary tree, suspecting that the evolutionary origin of magnetism could be found in older bee lineages.

We identified some trends regarding the strength of the magnetic response of the bees in our study. Larger bees tested as more magnetic. Social bees did tend to be more magnetic than solitary bees. And cavity-nesting bees tended to be more magnetic than ground-nesting bees.

Overall, though, we detected magnetism across all the different families of bees, for social and solitary bees, in nocturnal bees, and in bees that live in nests in the ground as well as those that live above ground in hives. Insects from other groups we examined for comparison, including beetles, wasps and flies, were also magnetic.

We again had to reject our hypothesis; this time, we demonstrated that magnetism probably predates the evolutionary origin of bees. We concluded that magnetism is probably an ancient, well-conserved trait.

What still isn’t known

Our work leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

For one, although we assume that the magnetic response is a proxy for magnetoreception, it is notoriously difficult to demonstrate this because it requires experiments with live organisms removed from their natural environment.

Magnetoreception is one of the most controversial animal senses. While there is good evidence that some organisms have the ability to detect and navigate along the magnetic fields of the Earth, it is probably not the primary sense used, even for organisms that do have magnetoreception. That makes it a challenging sense to isolate and study. Even in bumblebees, which biologists believe are magnetoreceptive, there remain many questions and doubts about their use of this sense.

Scientists are more certain that honeybees are magnetoreceptive – researchers have even trained them to discriminate between local magnetic anomalies. So we made the assumption that insects we tested that had stronger magnetic responses than honeybees are also magnetoreceptive. But we cannot prove it. Moreover, our work does not explain the function of magnetism, nor the mechanism behind magnetoreception.

And while the strength of the magnetic signal varied among body parts, it was never restricted to a single body part in the bees we tested. This means that some of the hypotheses for how magnetoreception operates – for instance, through light-sensitive cryptochromes in the eyes – are not well supported by our results.

Laura Russo, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The first detection of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 in New Zealand marks an important milestone, but not an unexpected one.

Since the virus reached Australia last month, and as it continued its global spread, scientists and government agencies have been preparing for the possibility that it would eventually arrive here.

For now, this appears to be a single detection, but ongoing surveillance will be essential to determine whether additional cases emerge.

What Australia’s experience tells us

Australia provides an important indication of what New Zealand may face. H5N1 was detected in a brown skua in Western Australia less than four weeks ago. Further detections followed in Western Australia and South Australia, mainly in migratory seabirds, with a detection subsequently reported in New South Wales.

More recently, H5N1 was confirmed in a greater crested tern in South Australia, marking the first detection in a resident Australian seabird and therefore a possible indication of local transmission. So far, the Australian detections have involved individual seabirds rather than widespread wildlife mortality.

The virus has not been detected in poultry in Australia.

Susceptibility to infection and severe disease varies between species and individual incursions in solitary scavenging or predatory seabirds may not lead to widespread infection.

The risk of transmission is likely greatest in populations that live in large colonies, particularly at high density. These can be a source of transmission to other species that inhabit the same environments – for example, shorebirds and marine mammals such as seals and sea lions.

Proximity to backyard poultry and other livestock populations then becomes critical for onward transmission to domestic animals.

How prepared is New Zealand?

The advantage for New Zealand is that we are not facing this blindly.

The experiences of Australia and the rest of the world have provided several years of information about how H5N1 behaves, which species may be most susceptible and which surveillance and response approaches are most effective.

New Zealand has also spent recent years strengthening surveillance programmes, diagnostic capacity and collaboration between wildlife, agricultural and public health agencies. These systems will now be tested in practice.

No country can be completely prepared for a virus with such a broad host range and capacity to move over long distances in wild birds.

However, early detection, rapid information sharing and clear coordination between agencies will give New Zealand the best opportunity to understand and reduce the impacts of the virus.

Priorities for the response

The immediate focus should be on determining the scale and distribution of infection. This means increasing surveillance around the initial detection, testing potentially affected wildlife, and rapidly sharing information between laboratories, wildlife managers, veterinarians, public health authorities and affected communities.

Enhanced biosecurity measures and clear public communication will also be essential, building on preparedness plans developed by the Ministry for Primary Industries, the Department of Conservation, Health New Zealand and regional authorities.

The Department of Conservation has trialled a vaccine developed for poultry on five of our critically endangered taonga species of wild bird (takahē, kākāpō, black stilts, shore plovers and red-crowned kākāriki). The vaccine is safe and results in an immune response that is likely to be protective.

As a consequence, the Ministry for Primary Industries has approved the vaccine for use in these species, and this is now being rolled out on a larger scale. However, it requires two doses and can only be practically implemented in captive, managed populations or on offshore islands.

The devastating impact of the virus on marine mammals, such as the northern and southern elephant seals, reminds us of the vulnerability of New Zealand populations of seals and sea lions, including the pakake/New Zealand sea lion.

In the US, trials of a bird flu vaccine formulated for cattle have been carried out in the endangered Hawaiian monk seal. While the trials show promise, we are a long way from using these in marine mammals in Aotearoa.

Genomic sequencing will be particularly important. It can help identify where the virus likely originated, whether New Zealand has experienced one or several introductions, and whether transmission is occurring locally. It may also help link detections in New Zealand with outbreaks in Australia or elsewhere along regional bird-migration routes.

The arrival of H5N1 is unlikely to be the end of the story. International experience suggests further incursions may occur as migratory birds continue to move through the region.

The challenge therefore shifts from trying to prevent the virus from arriving to detecting new incursions quickly and managing their consequences.

The coming weeks will be important in establishing whether this is an isolated detection or the first sign of wider circulation. New Zealand has the benefit of advance warning and extensive international experience. The priority now is to put those lessons into action.

Jemma Geoghegan, Professor and Webster Family Chair in Viral Pathogenesis, University of Otago and Nigel French, Distinguished Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Public Health, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Arctic sea ice appeared to be entering a new phase. In the early 2020s, the rapid decline seen over previous decades seemed to ease, leading scientists to ask whether winter sea ice loss had slowed.

Our new study suggests that conclusion was premature. After two exceptionally low-ice winters in 2025 and 2026, the recent slowdown disappears. The almost 6% drop between 2024 and 2025 was the largest single-year decline on record. The latest observations restore a statistically significant downward trend, showing how a few unusual years can quickly change the overall picture.

Sea ice is a crucial indicator of climate change in the Arctic. As the planet warms, the Arctic is warming even faster, and satellite observations have shown that sea ice has declined in every month of the year since the late 1970s. The loss is largest at the end of summer, when the Arctic reaches its annual minimum ice cover, but winter sea ice has also been shrinking.

However, this decline has not been smooth. In the early 2020s, Arctic sea ice loss appeared to slow across much of the year. This did not mean the ice had recovered to what it was before modern global warming. But compared with the rapid losses seen in earlier decades, the trends seemed weaker, raising an important question: had Arctic sea ice decline begun to slow?

Exceptional winters

Our study examines why these two winters changed things. Until 2024, the recent 20-year decline in winter sea ice extent was not statistically significant – meaning the data is consistent with no decline over the past 20 years.

The record low of ice in 2025, followed by another near-record low in 2026, should rewrite the overall narrative. Using the February–March average, which we use to represent winter sea ice extent, 2025 recorded the largest single-year decline in the satellite record.

Including these latest observations changes the picture of a weakened decline. Once the 2025 and 2026 winters are included, the 20-year trend in Arctic winter sea ice extent returns to a statistically significant decline. We can now be much more confident that the trend is real, and the decline is still ongoing.

How Arctic winter sea ice extent has changed since 1980:

A fall of nearly 6% in one year also raises an obvious question: can Arctic winter sea ice really drop this quickly under current climate conditions? To answer this question, we examined climate model simulations of Arctic climates warmed by a similar amount to today, and asked whether they ever produce a one-year winter sea ice drop as large as the one seen in 2025.

They do, although only rarely.

In simulations where the Arctic has warmed by a similar amount to today, about 3°C since 1980, a one-year winter sea ice drop of this size occurs in roughly one out of every 100 simulated years. This suggests that the 2025 drop was unusual, but still physically plausible. It does not require a new explanation. Instead, it is consistent with a warming Arctic in which year-to-year variability can produce abrupt changes. From one winter to the next, the extent of sea ice can decline sharply, remain stable, or even increase.

So what should we expect in the coming years?

If warming continues, the same model simulations suggest that winter sea ice is unlikely to rebound to the higher levels seen in the early 2020s. This does not mean every coming winter will set a new record low. Arctic sea ice will continue to fluctuate from year to year. But under continued warming, these recent low-ice winters may mark a shift towards winter ice fluctuating around a lower average level.

The lesson, at least for winter, is that Arctic sea ice loss has not stopped. The apparent slowdown of the early 2020s looked real at the time, but now looks more like a pause than a lasting change. Short-term variability can temporarily mask decline, but it does not remove the underlying pressure from Arctic warming.

The open question is whether the same pattern will emerge in summer, which has also shown a recent slowdown in sea ice retreat. So far, the renewed winter decline has not yet translated into an equally clear renewed decline in summer.

Winter and summer sea ice are connected. Low winter ice may help precondition the ice cover for stronger spring and summer melt. But the connection is not automatic: Arctic sea ice does not simply move in the same direction, in every season, at the same time. Spring weather, clouds, snow cover, winds, ocean heat and ice thickness all affect how much ice survives to the summer minimum.

Understanding how these factors evolve in a changing climate will be crucial for answering whether, and when, summer sea ice decline re-emerges from its recent slowdown.

Duo Chan, Lecturer in Climate Sciences, University of Southampton and Alessandro Silvano, NERC Independent Research Fellow in Oceanography, University of Southampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The unprecedented flooding in New South Wales in 2022 killed 13 people across the state, left 4,000 properties uninhabitable and damaged a further 10,900 homes. Lismore was especially hard hit due to its location on the Wilson River floodplain.

In response, Australia’s national science agency CSIRO has developed a high-resolution computer model to support flood mitigation research. In a recent report, the agency outlined how building ten large “detention” dams – could reduce flooding in the Richmond and Wilson River valleys.

Governments have committed several million dollars to a detailed study that will look at the economic, environmental and structural aspects of the proposed dams.

However, there are many reasons authorities should be cautious before committing financial and political resources to these schemes.

How would it work?

The modelled dams would hold water in upstream creeks during flooding, reducing flood heights in Lismore by about two metres and providing smaller benefits to several other towns.

These dams would only partially reduce damage from future floods on the scale of 2022. If built, Australians would have to pay for the costs of the dams – likely billions of dollars – plus future flood damage.

Major cost blowouts are typical of large water engineering projects in Australia and around the world. A 2019 Australian study found pre-construction estimates are systematically biased on the low side. Using dams for flood protection can also face significant operational and legal challenges.

Other options deserve more detailed investigation. The Australian National University, Richmond Landcare Network and Southern Cross University are investigating “nature-based” solutions. These can mitigate future floods by retaining water upstream, reducing the extent of flooding and enhancing habitat and water quality.

Revegetation and ‘softer’ river engineering

ANU research suggests revegetation of the upper slopes of hills, wetlands and riparian zones – the area between land and waterways – lower flood heights and reduce their impacts. Small upstream floodplains known as “pinch points” may have the similar effects. Strategic revegetation works by detaining water upstream.

These approaches aim to work with nature rather than against it. With increasing international evidence that they work, they deserve more research to determine their effectiveness in specific catchments in Australia.

This kind of revegetation is already underway in the region, and could be combined with “softer” river engineering.

What about channels or levees?

One option worth further investigation is a diversion channel to shift floodwaters around Lismore. This would require re-engineering the Wilson River floodplain west of its current course and constructing levees from excavated material.

The diversion channel was first proposed by the Italian businessman, Floriano Volpato, a café proprietor, community leader and founder of Lismore’s Continental Club. After the damaging 1974 floods, he paid two Italian flood engineers from the Po Valley to visit and design a flood mitigation scheme.

The diversion channel proposal was rejected by the council in 1981. Instead, a levee able to protect against a one-in-ten-year flood was built around the central business district. Since being completed in 2005, the three larger floods have exceeded the levee design height of 10.6 metres.

Levees can and do work. They’re successfully used around the world, including in major rivers such as the Rhine. About 100 kilometres south of Lismore, the Grafton levee has protected the city from Clarence River floods for decades.

There are concerns over a “levee paradox” – levees leading to community complacency about flood risks. However, many well designed, well built and maintained levees have successfully restrained floods, stopping major damage and disruption.

Transformation of the Northern Rivers

In anticipation of future flooding, Australia could combine traditional structural and flood mitigation measures, such as dams and levees, with nature-inspired designs.

It is important people do not lose faith in our collective capacity to plan and prepare for future damaging floods. CSIRO’s state-of-the-art hydrodynamic model is an impressive piece of scientific infrastructure that can underpin future flood planning.

Strategic revegetation and a re-engineered Wilson River floodplain could make Lismore Australia’s first “sponge city”, where natural and engineered systems absorb rainfall and prevent flooding.

This would demonstrate Australia is serious about climate adaptation and disaster resilience in ways that build social harmony.

Jason Alexandra, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Neil the Seal became a social media sensation almost overnight.

Neil is a five-year-old male southern elephant seal who weighs roughly one tonne. He was born on the Tasman Peninsula in October 2020, and has made an annual trip to Tasmania each year since. This is because many seal species regularly return to the place they were born, as well as the sites where they breed and rest.

Over the past few years, Neil has been seen lounging on streets and climbing onto cars at southern Tasmania’s Seven Mile Beach. But beyond his hilarious antics, Neil offers a unique opportunity to understand the behaviour of the world’s largest seal species.

From him, we can also learn how to better coexist with marine wildlife, as we encounter them more often.

In need of rest

Imagine you’ve had an exhausting day of travel, work or running between meetings. The last thing you’d want when lying down to rest is to be swamped by hundreds of people wanting to take a picture of you.

For southern elephant seals, this isn’t far from reality.

Rest is essential for these marine mammals. Satellite-tracking studies show southern elephant seals spend months foraging at sea, often travelling thousands of kilometres across the Southern Ocean. So when they do come ashore – typically twice a year – they need time to recover.

After going through a catastrophic moult – the process by which seals shed their fur and top layer of skin once a year – these animals must also replenish their energy by resting.

“Haul-out periods” is the term scientists use to describe these times of rest. Disturbing seals during these critical periods – say by trying to touch, move or get too close to an animal – can stress them. It can also endanger the safety of both the seal and any people nearby.

Behind the antics

Viral videos show Neil appearing to push traffic cones, haul himself over parked cars and even chase people.

So what’s driving this behaviour?

The answer is surprisingly simple. Like any young male elephant seal, Neil was trying to attract the attention of other seals. But instead, he directed this behaviour towards people.

Young male seals spend years developing their size, strength and behaviour to compete with other males. Once they’re older, male seals will contend for the best breeding spots and for females with whom they want to mate. Asserting dominance, testing their strength and exploring unfamiliar objects are all part of their development.

In the absence of other elephant seals, Neil often directed these natural behaviours towards whatever was in his path – be it a traffic cone, bollard or parked car.

By understanding Neil’s actions, we realise that what might seem amusing or scary from a human perspective is often just normal animal behaviour.

What Neil really teaches us

Neil’s story is a striking example of what can happen when scientists, wildlife managers, local councils, police and the public work together.

As his popularity grew, authorities developed management plans to protect both Neil and the eager onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of him. This included setting up temporary barriers to protect Neil from crowds. Public education campaigns helped ensure people behaved safely and responsibly around Neil – for example by staying at least 20 metres away from him.

This collaborative approach is increasingly important, as human-wildlife encounters become more common. We don’t fully understand why this is happening. One reason could be that some populations – such as South American fur seals in Patagonia – are increasing in numbers after previously being hunted. Environmental changes may also be pushing animals further south as climate change alters their habitat.

The public plays a vital role in protecting marine animals. In many cases, citizen scientists are the first to report unusual wildlife sightings. They provide valuable insight into where animals are resting, and how they are coping in changing environments. Without these observations, we wouldn’t know about many wildlife encounters. We also wouldn’t be able to understand how different populations and species are faring.

When humans go too far

Many other charismatic marine mammals have attracted global attention – sometimes with tragic consequences.

One well-known example is Freya the walrus who, by lounging on boats and floating docks, drew fans across Norway. Despite repeated warnings, people failed to keep their distance and kept approaching Freya to take photographs. Eventually, Norwegian authorities made the difficult decision to euthanise Freya, citing ongoing public safety concerns.

Thankfully, such tragedies can be avoided. Neil’s story shows that through good communication and public education, we can keep both wildlife and humans safe.

Will Neil be back?

It’s impossible to know if Neil will return to Tasmania, as he’s done each year since 2020. It’s likely he’s now back in the Southern Ocean, foraging for food. But many Australians are already hoping to see him again.

Either way, Neil’s legacy won’t just be about the viral videos or social media fame. It will also be the lesson he’s taught us, that sharing Australia’s coastline with wildlife comes with responsibility.

Saia Nahir Bartes, PhD Student and Research Teaching Fellow, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

To meet demand from artificial intelligence companies, some of the world’s largest data centres are planned for the outskirts of major Australian cities. Dozens more are planned. OpenAI chief Sam Altman has said Australia could be a global leader.

This week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced plans to fast-track new data centres. He promised the AI boom would not drive up power prices. The government would require big new data centres to “underwrite new power supply” and to “put at least as much energy into our grid as they take out of it”.

The push for more AI data centres is increasingly controversial. Huge data centres use a lot of power to run their servers and keep them cool. In the United States, the AI rush has led to a boom in gas generation as well as for clean energy.

If done poorly, Australia’s data centre boom could risk the ongoing shift to renewables and storage – and potentially drive up power prices.

But if it’s done well, the boom could be a win-win for energy. Many solar and wind projects have been stuck in limbo waiting for grid connections. Locating data centres in these areas could unlock new renewables – and decentralise the AI boom.

Is surging power demand a problem?

Power use by AI-focused data centres worldwide could potentially triple by 2030, according to International Energy Agency forecasts.

Last year, a study commissioned by the Australian Energy Market Operator suggested data centres could account for around 6% of National Electricity Market electricity demand by 2030.

But it could go higher still. Australia has a growing pipeline of giant data centre developments moving through planning and connection processes. These hyperscale centres can typically require 100–500 megawatts of power. Next-generation AI facilities are approaching 1 gigawatt. The eventual power demand could be considerably higher if all are approved.

It’s understandable consumers, policymakers and network planners are worried about whether electricity systems can keep pace.

But focusing on how much more energy is needed can be an error. It would be better to look at where new demand is emerging and focus on coordinating this demand with generation, storage and network investment.

Most big new data centre projects are planned for the outskirts of Melbourne and Sydney. But they don’t have to be built in cities.

An opportunity for regional Australia?

Australia has some of the world’s best solar and wind resources, along with enormous potential for energy storage.

But many renewable projects have to wait years for access to the grid. The new transmission lines essential for the renewable transition have faced long delays, opposition from some communities and planning uncertainty.

It would make sense to encourage new data centre projects to be built in regions with good renewable resources and tricky grid access.

This would mean renewable projects could launch without waiting for grid access in the knowledge they have a reliable customer. Data centre developers could benefit from cheap power. The power grid would benefit from reduced pressure, potentially avoiding the need for expensive network upgrades. And regional communities could benefit from investment and economic development.

A manufacturing plant often needs to be close to transport corridors, customers or raw materials. But these factors don’t matter to data centres, as long as they have access to high-quality internet connectivity, water and affordable and reliable power. Renewable projects would need to be supported by grid batteries, able to store power and release it steadily to keep the data centre running.

More than big energy consumers?

Data centres are often viewed as large electricity consumers that need power all the time. But this doesn’t have to be the case. They can be active participants in the energy system.

Many modern data centres are now designed with their own battery storage systems, and energy management platforms. Some computing tasks such as AI training can be set to run when power prices are low.

Increasingly, data centres are being paired with separate energy storage facilities such as grid-forming battery systems. These systems do more than simply provide backup power. They can keep electricity voltage and frequency stable, soak up power from renewables during peak output and reduce pressure on the grid during peak demand.

Combining data centres with grid-forming batteries makes energy demand more flexible. The data centres of the future could actively support the grid rather than simply consume power.

Looking ahead

To date, much of the debate over data centres and electricity has focused on how much power they will use.

It’s worth asking a more important question: where can we build them so they interact best with Australia’s energy system as it shifts from fossil fuels to renewables and storage?

Data centres are becoming essential infrastructure. If planned strategically, they could help unlock renewable energy development, strengthen regional economies and support the shift to a cleaner, more resilient electricity system.

It’s worth thinking about how data centres and renewables can work best together as an integrated ecosystem. The question is not whether data centres need too much power. It’s whether we are building the right energy ecosystem around them.

Mehdi Seyedmahmoudian, Professor of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) – the world’s biggest fish – are one of the most charismatic marine species. They connect with the hearts of anyone lucky enough to encounter them, making people deeply curious about their lives and invested in their conservation.

Yet most of what researchers know about the behaviour of whale sharks comes from snorkelling or watching them from boats at the sea surface – only a small part of their entire habitat. Much of their lives below the surface remains a mystery.

Whale sharks live in tropical oceans where food is often sparse and patchily distributed, so they need to constantly adapt. As oceans are affected by climate change, food for whale sharks may become even more scarce, so it’s important to understand their feeding strategies.

Our new research, published today in Marine Biology, used cameras carried by whale sharks themselves, to follow them below the water surface in a tropical coastal gathering site.

Our work has revealed new behaviours and, for the first time, provides a more comprehensive picture of whale shark foraging strategies throughout the water column – from the surface to the bottom of the sea.

Going where we can’t follow

Before our study, researchers mainly described whale shark behaviours from watching them in person while at the surface of the ocean.

This would only provide a snapshot of whale sharks’ full lives, and often these observations ended prematurely when the fish decided to dive deep. For example, one description of a possible mating attempt was cut short because the whale sharks dove out of sight of our research team.

A common method scientists use to investigate animal behaviour in the wild is by attaching electronic tags. These small trackers provide data on movements beyond where we can see them. For marine species, that’s both away from the coast but also when diving beyond the surface.

Although info from tags is incredibly valuable to understand movement patterns, we can’t infer specific behaviours from this data – because we still can’t see the animals.

What do they do when nobody’s watching?

Through our new study, we could finally address the question: “what do whale sharks do when no one is watching?” Filling these research gaps is essential so we can help these majestic, yet endangered filter-feeding animals.

We used tags that collect high-resolution movement data and have a small camera. The camera provided footage of the front half of the shark, along with their own point of view. It’s as close as we can get to seeing the ocean through their eyes.

With these cameras, we could see what the shark was doing while the tag was also collecting data on their movement. We attached our tag to the dorsal (top) fin while snorkelling alongside the shark. Unbothered, these gentle giants continued to swim while we watched them disappear into the open blue water.

After a pre-set 24-hour period, the clamp and camera tag fell off, leaving nothing on the animal and allowing us to retrieve the data without impacting the whale shark.

Using our video data alongside a review of more than 100 scientific publications describing whale shark behaviour, we built the largest catalogue of whale shark behaviours to date, defining 36 distinct behaviours.

We discovered whale sharks use a mix of several feeding behaviours throughout the water column and along the seafloor, up to 70 metres deep in our study site. Researchers previously thought whale sharks predominantly feed at the surface, but this finding challenges that assumption.

Low-effort snacking

The range of feeding behaviours spanned from effectively sinking to the seafloor with an open mouth (gliding slow feeding), to vigorously swimming after krill swarms – their preferred prey – at the surface (active surface feeding).

The whale sharks in our study spent most of their time performing six low-effort feeding behaviours. This suggests they often snack in water with low prey density until they come across a patch with higher prey density, such as a krill swarm. Then, their behaviour changes to active feeding. It’s like snacking from the pantry while you decide what you’re going to cook for dinner.

We also found that whale sharks have a much wider variety of foraging strategies compared to other filter-feeding megafauna, such as basking sharks and whales. This could help explain how they manage to thrive in tropical waters where prey is limited and patchy.

Our study captured behaviours from just one gathering of juvenile whale sharks near a coast at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia. If researchers can attach more cameras to whale sharks at aggregation sites around the world, we will hopefully discover new insights and continue to grow our understanding of this iconic species.

Excitingly, we are beginning to understand the secret lives of the biggest fish on Earth, and from what we have seen, they are the ultimate snackers of the sea.

Christine Barry, PhD Candidate, Marine Movement Ecology, Murdoch University; Australian Institute of Marine Science and Luciana C. Ferreira, Research Scientist, Australian Institute of Marine Science

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s 5am when we crawl out of our tents.

The catbirds are calling and the night sky is fading to dawn, as we prepare to head into the bush. We’re surrounded by the towering eucalypts of southeast Queensland in search of a small, native mouse called the pookila.

Also known as the New Holland mouse (Pseudomys novaehollandiae), the pookila is about the size of a small chocolate bar, weighing less than 20 grams. These mice spend their nights foraging for seeds and fungi, and their days tucked away in a burrow.

We don’t yet understand what the pookila’s preferred habitat is in Queensland. But these mice can be found in patches along the east coast of Australia, from Queensland down to New South Wales, Victoria and Flinders Island in Tasmania.

However, this little mouse is under the pressures of habitat destruction, climate change and predators, among others. These threats have lead to declines and local extinctions in southern pookila populations.

In the past, pookila have been found incidentally at ten locations in southeast Queensland. But these surveys, many of which were conducted several years ago, weren’t solely focused on searching for pookila.

For our new study, we visited most of these sites over a 31-month period to better understand how pookila are living and what threats they are facing.

Here’s what we found.

Pursuing the pookila

To find the elusive pookila, we revisited seven locations west of Brisbane in southeast Queensland where they had been previously found.

At each site, we camped out for four to five nights at a time. And over our nearly three-year study, we set a total of 10,666 traps.

Each afternoon, we’d set out with our trusty box traps and a healthy supply of peanut butter balls – a commonly used enticing snack for small mammals. We then identified suitable spots to place the traps, ideally where we might find different types of native rodents. We covered each trap with leaf litter, and placed a delectable peanut butter ball inside.

The next morning, we’d return to those same traps, crossing all fingers we’d caught some mice. On some days, the rodents were everywhere. Other days, there were no mice in sight. We worked in all sorts of weather, sometimes basking in sunshine and sometimes powering through drenching rain. On particularly wet mornings, all we could do was trudge back to our tents, soaked and exhausted.

But every now and then, the cheeky resident possums would locate our stash of peanut butter balls and steal them right from out of our traps. That made us smile, or cry.

We repeated this process of setting and checking traps over 31 months, all in search of a tiny native mouse.

During that time, we only found and trapped a single pookila.

So, where are they all?

It’s hard to know exactly what happened to Queensland’s pookila population. Since 1996, only around 125 of these mice have been captured in Queensland. So we currently lack the data needed to understand how the species has fared over time.

But our findings suggest pookila may be facing local declines in Queensland. These mice may also be becoming harder to find because specific populations are shrinking or changing where they are living. Queensland’s pookila could also be facing similar threats to their southern counterparts, including habitat destruction and climate change. Indeed, it may be a combination of all the above.

In any case, our results raise serious concerns about the pookila’s long-term survival in both Queensland and across the country.

This is why continued monitoring is crucial. Resurveying our study sites, and other sites across Queensland, will help us track any trends in pookila population numbers. And if we catch more individual mice, we can learn about the species’ preferred habitat and unpack what factors may be driving local declines. We can also identify what conservation actions will be most effective, such as undertaking planned burns to restore habitat.

Other animal encounters

While pursuing the pookila, we encountered several other native rodent species. These include the endangered Hastings River mouse (Pseudomys oralis), graceful eastern chestnut mouse (Pseudomys gracilicaudatus) and stocky swamp rats (Rattus lutreolus).

Native rodents are a crucial, but often overlooked, part of Australia’s ecosystems. They fill various ecological roles, including helping plants and fungi reproduce by scattering seed and spores and aerating the soil by burrowing and foraging.

Our data could tell us more about how Queensland’s other native rodent populations are changing over time, and how we can better protect them.

But we can also help on an individual level, particularly by keeping cats indoors. Pet cats are skilled predators and collectively kill many native animals each day. So ensuring cats are contained will keep both our pets and native wildlife safe.

We can also conserve the habitat of all our native rodents. We still don’t fully understand what kind of habitat each species prefers. But to protect the pint-sized pookila, landholders and conservation groups can start by maintaining fallen logs, native grasses and other forms of shelter.

Meg Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Wildlife Science, University of Southern Queensland and Abby Dennien, PhD Candidate, Wildlife Ecology, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Two weeks ago, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology recorded three distinct, short-lived explosions in less than five minutes at Taal Volcano. The eruption sent a column of ash and steam up to 1.2km into the air.

Despite this, it caused little disruption. The volcano remains at Alert Level 1, or “low-level unrest”, with a smaller eruption logged over the weekend.

Yet even small eruptions like these can reveal important clues about how volcanoes behave and why scientists closely monitor even relatively minor volcanic rumbling.

A history of big eruptions

Taal Volcano lies in Batangas Province, about 60km south of Manila. The active volcano sits on Volcano Island within Taal Lake. It is one of the Philippines’ 24 active volcanoes.

Taal is also among the country’s most closely monitored volcanoes and is one of only 16 Decade Volcanoes around the world. These are volcanoes with a history of large, destructive eruptions and significant risk to nearby populations. Others include Mount Etna in Italy and Mount Rainier in the United States.

Taal has a long history of much larger eruptions. In January 2020, it sent ash plumes more than 15km into the atmosphere, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people, disrupting air travel and blanketing much of Luzon in ash.

The 2020 eruption was Taal’s largest since 1977, and scientists have found evidence of many more eruptions going back 670,000 years. Even larger eruptions of Taal (such as one in 1754) buried and displaced towns. That history is why even relatively small bursts of activity from Taal receive such close scientific attention.

Two kinds of eruptions

Since Taal’s main explosive eruption in 2020, it has been intermittently producing minor eruptions. Since the beginning of 2026, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology has recorded 18 isolated eruptive events at Taal – but they haven’t been the kind you might expect.

When we think of volcanic eruptions, we often picture rivers of lava or towering ash clouds blasted high into the atmosphere. But not all eruptions look like that. Some eruptions occur because water interacts with hot rock or magma beneath the surface, producing explosive bursts of steam instead.

Seven of Taal’s eruptions this year have been “phreatic” eruptions: essentially steam explosions.

These occur when groundwater or lake water is heated so rapidly by hot rock or magma that it flashes into steam, breaking apart the surrounding rock. Little or no new magma reaches the surface during this type of eruption.

The other 11 have been “phreatomagmatic” eruptions. These occur when rising magma comes into direct contact with water.

The rapid expansion of steam shatters both the magma and the surrounding rock into fine ash, making these eruptions generally more energetic than phreatic explosions.

Taal is especially prone to phreatic and phreatomagmatic eruptions because its active crater contains a lake. Water is therefore readily available to interact with rising magma, making steam-driven explosions a characteristic part of the volcano’s behaviour.

Whether an eruption is phreatic or phreatomagmatic provides important clues about what is happening beneath the volcano. It helps volcanologists understand how the volcanic system is evolving and whether volcanic hazards may be changing.

Why we watch volcanoes closely

Taal is just one of the Philippines’ many active volcanoes. The country sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a belt of volcanoes surrounding much of the Pacific Ocean where several tectonic plates converge.

Although volcanologists cannot predict exactly when a volcano will erupt, careful monitoring can provide early warning that a volcanic system is changing. Scientists monitor the frequency and intensity of earthquakes, use satellites and GPS instruments to detect subtle ground deformation, measure volcanic gas emissions such as sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, and track changes in crater lake temperature and chemistry.

Together, these observations help determine whether magma is rising, pressure is building, or the level of volcanic hazard is changing. However, some styles of volcanic activity, particularly phreatic eruptions, are extremely difficult to detect and predict as they are not always associated with large volumes of magma rising to the surface.

This challenge is highlighted by the 2019 Whakaari White Island eruption in Aotearoa New Zealand. Since this tragedy which caused several deaths and severe burn injuries to tourists visiting the island, volcanologists have been working actively to more readily identify the warning signs of an imminent phreatic or “hydrothermal” eruption.

The recent eruption of Taal caused little disruption, but it provided another valuable piece of the ongoing puzzle where we try to understand these complex magmatic systems. For volcanologists, each small eruption offers additional clues, helping improve future hazard assessments and better prepare communities living around them.

Saini Samim, Postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Melbourne; Hayden Dalton, Lecturer in Geoscience, The University of Melbourne, and Valerie Shayne Olfindo, PhD Candidate, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 2019, China was a minor player in Australia’s car market. Seven years later, it’s now the biggest supplier of new vehicles overall – including about 80% of Australia’s electric vehicles (EVs). The shift to EVs has accelerated markedly this year amid oil price spikes.

This is good news for Australia’s energy security and efforts to tackle climate change. But to get the most out of electric cars, vans and trucks from China, Australian authorities need better data on how they are designed.

Better data will integrate growing EV numbers in ways that help the Australian economy, not just carmakers.

Decades in the making

It took sustained state investment and planning to turn China’s carmakers from minnows into giants, as part of wider investment in clean technology.

China’s electric vehicle industry has become the global benchmark for mass‑produced affordable EVs and, increasingly, for trucks and buses.

Australia’s car market is one of the most competitive in the world – and becoming even more so. For Australian buyers, China’s surging EV production translates to rapidly increasing numbers of competitively priced EVs from brands not even on the radar ten years ago.

As a result, Australia’s EV transition is taking off. Battery electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid vehicles now make up close to half of new sales. Chinese-made hybrid tractors and electric heavy trucks for road freight and mines are now appearing.

While new vehicles often resemble traditional combustion vehicles, they are far smarter than those that came before – and Australia needs to actively adapt.

Why do we need better data on EVs?

Planning for this shift is essential. But there’s a key problem – authorities often don’t have the data to inform their plans.

When Australia had its own car industry, authorities kept detailed data on the vehicle fleet. But after the last factory fell quiet almost ten years ago, authorities stopped gathering as much data. The Australian Bureau of Statistics stopped its long-running Motor Vehicle Census in 2021.

The best fleet snapshot we now have is the Road Vehicles Australia report from the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics. This is less detailed than the previous census, meaning we lack consistent data on where electric vehicles are and how they’re used.

While industry data shows most of Australia’s EVs are built in China, Australia’s automotive peak body, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, only reports data on member vehicle sales. Tesla cars sold in Australia are made in China, but these sales are not recorded by the peak body as Tesla is not a member.

The lack of data matters for four reasons.

1. Different design standards.

Chinese vehicles are often designed to world-leading standards, which include tighter energy efficiency rules and stronger requirements for safety, battery recycling and circular use of materials. Top carmakers rely heavily on robots to increase manufacturing precision.

If we want these new vehicles to deliver the best results, Australia needs to ensure regulators and planners are able to take full advantage of these improvements.

For instance, the car repair and car recycling industries need detailed data about the types of batteries and other technologies used in EVs. Similarly, emergency services need to understand any potentially different risks when they respond to car accidents. While EVs catch fire much less often than combustion‑engine cars, battery fires behave differently to petrol fires and must be managed appropriately.

2. Consequences for planners.

EVs aren’t like traditional vehicles. They’re very large batteries on wheels, with uses well beyond transport. Many new EVs can feed power back to the grid, meaning they could be a major future source of flexibility and balance in the power system – if authorities plan for it.

Data is key. Authorities need to know not just how many EVs are on Australian roads, but their rough location, how they connect to the grid and whether their owners want to sell power back to the grid.

3. Moving faster.

It would make sense to design power grids and charging networks to match the vehicles most likely to arrive.

Doing so will let us shift to clean transport sooner and cut fuel costs for households and businesses, agriculture and miners. This will boost energy independence and reduce reliance on imported oil.

4. Managing risks.

Some commentators worry that Chinese EVs could pose a risk to national security. But the issue is broader, as all modern vehicles rely on software and data links. Concerns around data and privacy apply across the board.

Better, independent data on which vehicles are in our fleet, what standards they use and how vehicle data and security systems operate would help authorities manage these risks sensibly.

We don’t know what we don’t know

Australia’s rapid shift to electric vehicles is a boon for the climate and welcome from a cost and energy security perspective.

But making the most from this shift requires good planning — and good data.

Bringing back the Motor Vehicle Census seems sensible, though it’s too late to include this in next month’s national census. Collecting this data will let planners see how the EV rollout is unfolding and how it intersects with income, housing, rooftop solar and areas of disadvantage.

Without it, we risk pushing ahead without benefiting fully from these new technologies.

Ray Wills, Adjunct Professor in Sustainability, The University of Western Australia and Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If producing electric vehicles (EVs) was an Olympic sport, China would be dominating the medals podium.

China now leads the world in the sale and export of EVs, a term encompassing everything from battery-powered cars to plug-in hybrids. Chinese companies also produce the lion’s share of the rechargeable batteries that keep EVs running.

Between 2009 and 2022, the Chinese government dished out more than A$41 billion in subsidies and tax benefits to boost the production of electric cars, taxis and buses.

But subsidies alone can’t explain the meteoric rise of China’s EV industry. Over two decades, Beijing has built a manufacturing sector that fosters domestic competition, rapid production and company-level innovation.

The rise of Chinese EVs

By producing more EVs, China aims to reduce its reliance on imported oil from countries such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela. It also hopes to leapfrog countries that historically have dominated the global car manufacturing industry, including Germany, Japan and the US. In September 2020, the Chinese government folded these objectives into a national decarbonisation strategy.

In 2025, more than half of the new cars sold in China were EVs. And Chinese-made vehicles are gaining traction around the world. In the United Kingdom, more than 30% of the new cars sold in 2025 were EVs. In Norway, EV sales surged to represent more than 95% of the country’s total car sales in 2025.

But they are proving less popular in the United States, with EV sales sitting at just 10%. That’s even despite the US walling out Chinese EVs through tariffs.

Australia has also been slow to adopt Chinese-made EVs. But our market reached a tipping point in June 2026, when EVs made up close to 30% of new car sales.

Crucially, Chinese-made vehicles are no longer marginal. In 2026, China overtook Japan – the market leader over nearly three decades – as Australia’s primary source of new vehicles. Affordable models, rising fuel prices, an expanding charging network and the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard all accelerated this shift.

Tesla still sells the most pure battery EVs in Australia, holding 28% of the market. However, Chinese brands such as BYD, Geely and XPeng have gone from being fringe players to mainstream companies. BYD is a prime example, chasing Tesla with its 24% share of the Australian market.

Survival of the fittest

These companies didn’t achieve success overnight. They spent years competing, failing and innovating in an often brutal domestic market.

At the height of China’s EV boom, more than 500 companies rushed into the EV sector. They were driven by cheap capital, local government backing and start-up enthusiasm.

Most did not survive.

As subsidies were wound back and purchase incentives became less generous, roughly 90% of early movers were squeezed out. So the state created the early market, but the market then ruthlessly punished weak players.

To stay afloat, companies had to adapt. Here are three examples.

Geely/Zeekr

Legacy brand Geely began as a refrigerator parts maker. But in 1994, it pivoted to produce motorcycles and China’s first domestically built scooters. It entered the automotive industry in 1997. To produce a competitive EV, Geely drew on the international engineering expertise of Volvo to improve on the product of premium global EV brand Zeekr.

Xiaomi

As a latecomer, Xiaomi launched its first EV in 2024. Founded in 2010 as a software start-up, Xiaomi’s first successful product was an Android-like operating system for smartphones. But it soon brought this technology into the world of smart home appliances and EVs.

BYD

BYD started out manufacturing batteries, becoming China’s largest rechargeable battery producer by the early 2000s. But in 2003, BYD made the leap to EVs after acquiring a struggling state-owned carmaker. And in just two decades, BYD has become the vertically integrated titan of the EV world. By controlling its EV supply chain – ranging from power electronics to vehicle platforms and shipping – the company is able to assemble one vehicle every 52 seconds. In 2025, BYD delivered a record 4.5 million cars globally.

China’s hubs of regional expertise ensure individual companies can rapidly move from design to production. One example is the Pearl River Delta, where EV brands can tap into Shenzhen’s electronics prowess and Guangzhou’s long history in car manufacturing.

Feeling the pressure

Despite its promising growth, China’s EV sector is now under strain.

The reasons for this are complex. But a saturated market and eroding profit margins are two key factors.

And domestic demand simply can’t absorb all the EVs China is producing. In the first half of 2026, Chinese car buyers spent nearly 13% less compared to the previous year. That represents the sharpest decline among China’s major consumer goods.

So for China, overseas markets are not just an expansion opportunity. They are a vital pressure valve.

Winning the global EV race requires more than low-cost production. Tariffs, data security, battery standards, charging infrastructure, resale values and consumer trust will ultimately determine if Chinese EV companies become globally-respected brands.

Where to from here?

For Australia, the rise of China’s EV sector presents a strategic paradox. Without our own car manufacturing industry, we have little economic rationale to impose tariffs that mirror those of the European Union or US.

And relying on Chinese EVs would put the world’s clean energy transition at the mercy of Beijing. However, these vehicles could also help countries such as Australia rapidly reach their transport-emissions targets.

Rather than resisting this shift, countries should bolster their national standards around data security, vehicle safety and battery recycling, and fund more public charging networks. If not, we risk importing thousands of Chinese-made EVs without the knowledge or infrastructure to use them wisely.

Marina Yue Zhang, Associate Professor, Technology and Innovation, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In Germany, Japan and the United States, famous carmakers are in trouble. One reason is intense competition from Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers – and growing public demand for EVs. The automakers who dominated the 20th century have largely failed to shift to electric.

Volkswagen was once the biggest carmaker in China. Now it only has a bit part. In June, it announced plans to cut 100,000 jobs worldwide. “We have no chance against this,” admitted Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe after visiting a high-tech EV factory in Shanghai. Months earlier, Ford CEO Jim Farley warned Western carmakers were “in a fight for our lives”.

In 2025, Chinese factories produced almost 75% of the world’s EVs. As more and more drivers go electric, esteemed brands and luxury carmakers have been forced to close factories and scramble to stay relevant. The global shift to EVs has accelerated amid the US-Iran conflict.

China’s rise wasn’t a given. It was a gamble. But it is now paying off – and legacy automakers are struggling to cope.

Sudden success, decades in the making

In 1949, the Communists won the Chinese civil war. That same year, the new People’s Republic of China established its first car factory to reduce reliance on imports and develop manufacturing strength.

In the late 1970s, leader Deng Xiaoping began opening China to outside investment – including the car industry. During the 1980s and 1990s, local automakers partnered with foreign carmakers to manufacture their cars in Chinese factories. This gave Chinese automakers access to the technological know-how of experienced foreign firms.

Despite this, the Chinese industry remained relatively small, its market dominated by European and Japanese cars. Western carmakers were focused on the threat from giant Japanese carmakers such as Toyota. China wasn’t on the radar.

By the early 2000s, China’s car industry was producing cars for its huge domestic market. But exports were tiny, as foreign carmakers dominated production of internal combustion engine cars. Chinese policymakers realised they couldn’t compete on this turf.

What about hybrids? No chance – Japanese manufacturers were far ahead with models such as the Prius.

The only solution was to focus on new technologies.

Electric vehicles were almost nonexistent in the early 2000s. Tesla would only release its first EV in 2008. But China’s leaders bet heavily on an electric future, investing in the industry and making ambitious plans to encourage existing carmakers and startups.

If successful, electric vehicles would cut China’s heavy dependence on imported oil and curb the severe air pollution that drew world attention during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Success was not guaranteed

In the early 20th century, EVs outsold combustion engine cars. But battery technology wasn’t good enough.

From the 1960s onwards, US automaker General Motors repeatedly tried to develop EV models only to shelve them due to internal pressures, external scepticism and a lack of charging infrastructure.

The most famous was the EV1, briefly available during the late 1990s. Production ended in 2003.

That same year, Chinese leaders announced EVs would be a priority in the country’s new Five-Year Plan, focusing on batteries and other technologies.

Between 2009 and 2022, Chinese authorities handed out over A$41 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to develop electric cars, taxis and buses.

While some companies failed or were bought out, others succeeded. The world’s biggest manufacturer of EV batteries, CATL, began life as a battery manufacturer for consumer electronics. BYD had similar beginnings before moving into combustion engine cars and then EVs. It’s now the world’s largest EV manufacturer. Subsidies and growing demand turned both companies into giants.

Intense competition drove innovation, but also led to price wars and a “brutal” domestic market. This increased the importance of exports.

Why didn’t other carmakers follow suit?

Established Western carmakers operate in a different context.

Changing political cycles mean there’s less certainty about government backing. Their typically older consumer base is more attached to combustion engines. Experimental EV models were never given the backing to scale up. The biggest Western EV manufacturer is Tesla, which began as a startup rather than a large, slow-moving conglomerate.

As they fell behind, legacy carmakers had less state support and answered to short-term profit cycles. They faced bigger supplier and dealer networks – and more powerful unions. These constituencies were unconvinced by EVs, which took 30% less labor.

Even now, Japanese automaker CEOs remain ambivalent about EVs. Last month, Toyota chairman Aiko Toyoda admitted EVs were his “biggest fear”. “I love engines,” he said. For Toyoda and other leaders, there’s a strong tendency to try to keep things as they were. But that is becoming impossible.

The gamble paid off

In China’s cities, roads are almost free of engine noise. Air quality is improving and oil imports are dropping.

China’s automakers have come of age. After exporting few cars 20 years ago, China is now the world’s largest exporter. That threshold was passed in 2023, when exports of almost 5 million cars to over 180 countries saw China overtake Japan.

The pace is dizzying. After launching in Australia in 2022, BYD is now Australia’s second-biggest car brand. Last month founder Wang Chuanfu predicted BYD would overtake Toyota within five years.

For other automakers, Chinese success is a bitter pill to swallow. Larger brands seem best positioned to compete. US legacy automakers may retreat behind tariff walls. But some will not survive.

Timothy Minchin, Professor of History, La Trobe University and Michelle Shu Wun Kuek, Doctoral student in History, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

An adult orca cruises near the surface of the clear, blue water, holding a large sunfish carcass in its mouth.

Seconds later, it releases its prey, right in the path of another adult orca that’s torpedoing up from the depths. The sunfish explodes into thousands of pieces on impact. A younger member of the pod that’s watching on then moves in to feed.

Tourists in the Gulf of California captured this event on camera in July 2024. They captured a similar event nearby in September 2025.

This never-before observed behaviour, reported in a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Ethology, is known as “ram-to-fragment” behaviour.

It’s like someone whacking a piñata, causing it to explode and release hundreds of tasty treats. And it has a lot to tell us about whale intelligence.

Feeding on the go

Orcas, also known as killer whales, are actually the largest members of the dolphin family.

Found in just about all of Earth’s oceans, this cosmopolitan species are grouped into ecotypes. This is a general term which refers to different killer whale groups based on their genetics, appearance, where they are found, behaviour, and even the language (dialects) they use to talk to each other.

Each group looks a little different, with variations of the white patch above their eyes. Different orcas around the world also have varying diets and feeding strategies depending on where they are found.

For example, some orcas in Antarctica are known to cooperatively hunt seals by swimming towards them when the seals are taking shelter on icebergs, in a behaviour known as “wave-washing”.

In South American waters, some orcas have learnt to deliberately beach themselves to feed on sea lions as they risk life and flipper in the shallows of the waters.

Then there’s orcas that eat other dolphins such as those in the Humboldt current system in the South Pacific Ocean.
In South African waters, two well-known orcas feed on white sharks. Others have specialised diets on chinook salmon.

Orcas found in Australian waters are known to take down humpback whales, deep-diving beaked whales, and even the biggest of them all, the blue whale. Then there are orcas that appear to play with potential food, including turtles.

In recent years, we have seen boat-biting orcas. However, this isn’t for food; it’s more likely a kind of play.

Co-ordinated, deliberate and smart

Orcas are highly social and known to work together. This new study, led by Kathryn A. Ayres from Beneath the Waves, a non-profit organisation promoting ocean health, is further insight into their secret lives. It clearly shows that by working together, they can be calculated and co-ordinated.

But why are they doing this?

People have observed orcas interacting with sunfish in other parts of the world.

But it’s the fact that orcas ram the sunfish so hard that it breaks up into pieces that’s the point of difference here, as this behaviour hasn’t been previously described.

There are several reasons why they may do this.

For example, they may be breaking the prey up into little bits to enable all members of the pod a chance to eat parts of the fish.

It could also be a social interaction and a form of play.

Tourists are helping scientists

This paper is clear evidence that we continue to keep learning more about whale and dolphin behaviour, especially through tourism.

Chance encounters, observed by tourism operations with citizen scientists who have access to high-quality underwater cameras, enable us to capture behaviours when we least expect it.

Recently, tourism and social media has been used to document gaping in humpback whales – a newly described behaviour despite them being one the world’s most watched whale species. Gaping refers to a behaviour where whales are observed opening their mouths unrelated to feeding; it’s observed only outside known feeding areas.

In the case of the exploded sunfish, the “stabilize-and-ram” coordination between two adults also indicates a high degree of cooperative precision. And it provides further evidence that the more we keep looking into the lives of animals other than ourselves, the more we continue to learn.

Vanessa Pirotta, Whale Scientist and Lecturer, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Trump administration has decided that destroying the habitat of endangered species is not harmful.

Think about that.

Habitat loss is the No. 1 reason species become endangered. Red-cockaded woodpeckers need mature long-leaf pine forests to reproduce. Endangered western monarch butterflies depend on pesticide-free milkweed for food. Pacific salmon must have clean, cool rivers for spawning. If coastal water becomes too polluted, manatees will starve.

Yet, on July 14, 2026, the U.S. Department of Interior formally rescinded the so-called harm rule under the Endangered Species Act, removing language that has protected species from losing millions of acres of habitat.

As a law professor who has followed these issues for over five decades and litigated early cases under the Endangered Species Act, I believe this effort to gut the nation’s premier wildlife conservation law is unjustified and unlawful.

I see several reasons the rule change is not likely to survive the legal challenges that have already begun.

Origins of the Endangered Species Act

Enacted in 1973 at the behest of President Richard Nixon and passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress, the Endangered Species Act’s stated purpose is to “provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved.”

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 described the act’s role more plainly: to “halt and reverse the trend of species extinctions whatever the cost.”

The act requires federal agencies to designate habitat for species as critical if it is deemed “essential to the conservation and recovery” of that species. Once habitat is designated, federal agencies are required to “insure” that their actions are not likely to result in the “destruction or adverse modification” of such habitat. All of this is spelled out in the text of the law itself.

The ‘take’ prohibition

The Endangered Species Act prohibits the unauthorized “take” of protected species. It broadly defines “take” to include deliberate actions such as hunting and trapping, but also those that “harm or harass” individual members of the protected species.

The prohibition applies to everyone: individuals, corporations, states and municipalities, tribes and others. The act is by far the most important federal law protecting habitat on nonfederal land.

“Take” is a term of art in wildlife law with deep roots in Anglo-American jurisprudence. It has always included requirements to conserve habitat. The earliest wildlife laws in England also required landowners to retain adequate forage and cover for wildlife, in addition to regulating hunting and fishing.

In 1975, shortly after Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Department of Interior created the rule defining harm to include “acts or omissions that actually injures or kills wildlife,” including habitat degradation that “significantly disrupts essential behavioral patterns, which include, but are not limited to, breeding, feeding or sheltering.”

The rule was revised somewhat in 1981 to clarify that harm “may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.”

The 1982 Endangered Species Act amendments

In 1981, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that habitat destruction qualifies as an unlawful take under the Endangered Species Act, ruling in a case brought on behalf of an endangered bird called the palila.

Congress reacted to that ruling by amending the act to create the incidental take program. I testified in favor of this provision during the hearings.

The incidental take program provides a way to reduce conflicts between protected species and commercial development by authorizing only those takes that meet strict rules to minimize and mitigate the impact on the species in question. Over the years, hundreds of incidental take permits have been issued covering over 47 million acres of habitat.

If Congress didn’t believe habitat destruction and degradation constitute “harm” under the statute, why would it require permits and plans to offset habitat loss?

This will factor into the litigation to come challenging the move to rescind the harm rule.

The Sweet Home decision

The controversy over the harm rule reached the Supreme Court in 1995 in a case brought by the timber industry in Oregon. In Sweet Home Communities for a Greater Oregon v. Babbitt, the court upheld the harm rule by a vote of 6-3.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the court’s majority opinion. He cited multiple reasons for upholding the rule as a “reasonable interpretation” of congressional intent under the then-prevailing Chevron Doctrine:

• First, Stevens wrote that the ordinary meaning of “harm” naturally encompasses habitat modification that results in actual injury or death to members of an endangered or threatened species.

• Second, under relevant Supreme Court precedent, every word in a statute must be given effect. Thus the word “harm” must encompass indirect as well as direct injuries or it would have no meaning that does not duplicate the other words in the definition of “take.”

• Third, the fact that Congress amended the act to authorize incidental take permits with habitat conservation plans strongly suggests that Congress intended for the law to prohibit both direct and indirect causes of death or injury.

Justice Antonin Scalia dissented in that case, arguing that the word “harm” applies only to an action “directed immediately and intentionally against a particular animal.” Or as he put it, “A strikes B.”

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor disagreed, arguing in a sharp exchange with Scalia: “… to make it impossible for an animal to reproduce is to impair its most essential physical functions and to render that animal, and its genetic material, biologically obsolete. This, in my view, is actual injury.”

The Loper Bright ruling’s impact

Fast-forward to 2024, when the Supreme Court, in deciding Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, formally abandoned the Chevron Doctrine. In doing so, it ruled that the courts must decide what the “best reading” of statutory text is without deferring to agency interpretations.

The Trump administration argues that the Loper Bright ruling means that the court’s decision in Sweet Home is no longer good law because Stevens’ majority opinion relied on the Chevron doctrine.

Instead, the Trump administration argues that Scalia’s dissent is actually the best reading of “harm” and is now the law of the land.

However, in the majority opinion in Loper Bright, Chief Justice John Roberts cautioned: “We do not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.” In short, it is not enough to say a precedent relied on Chevron and suggest it is no longer valid.

The Trump administration will have to overcome the presumption that the Sweet Home ruling remains the law unless the current Supreme Court overturns it.

Where we go from here

Environmental groups and tribes have already filed multiple lawsuits challenging the repeal of the harm rule.

In addition to defending the validity of the Sweet Home decision as the best reading of the law, the cases allege a number of procedural flaws in how the Department of Interior changed the rule.

Those include alleged violations of the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to prepare an environmental impact statement; violations of the Endangered Species Act by failing to engage in consultation regarding the impacts of the rescinding of the harm rule; and failure to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act to justify and explain the basis for wholesale repeal of the harm rule without proposing an alternative.

While the administration is likely counting on getting the case to the Supreme Court before its time in office runs out, I expect the strategy of the challengers will be to delay the litigation by filing lawsuits in multiple courts and asking the courts for preliminary injunctions to block the rule change pending the cases’ outcome. That would allow a future administration to reinstate the rule.

The stakes are huge for the nation’s most imperiled species. Over two-thirds of listed species depend on nonfederal land for their survival and recovery. The harm rule is the single most important reason they are still alive and have a chance of recovery.

Patrick Parenteau, Professor of Law Emeritus, Vermont Law & Graduate School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Snakes are everywhere in our legends and mythology. Yet for most of us, our blood runs cold whenever we encounter these strangely undulating, scaly tubes of muscle slithering through the leaf litter.

The loss of an arm or leg poses a challenge. Yet snakes do perfectly well without all four of them. This makes them suspect. It also leaves us unable to fathom how this radical transition produced one of the most successful vertebrate body plans.

More than 4,000 species of snakes are alive today, on every continent except Antarctica, from thread-thin burrowers to massive pythons, on land and in the sea. We have studied them since antiquity, and still the oldest question about them has no answer: what turned snakes into snakes?

We have long suspected their peculiar, limbless body plan is explained by how the earliest snakes lived. In a new study, published today in Nature, my colleagues and I describe a small, exquisitely preserved fossil that brings us closer to an answer than ever before.

Sea or soil?

Snakes are essentially highly modified lizards. Sometime in the age of dinosaurs, one lizard lineage lost its limbs and stretched out its body. The key question is why.

For more than a century, several ideas have competed with each other.

One says the first snakes colonised the water, with a long, limbless body suited for swimming, much like an eel.

A second says they lived on the surface of the land, among leaf litter and vegetation, where reduced limbs could have eased their movement through dense ground cover.

A third says they went underground, losing their limbs and elongating their bodies to pursue a head-first burrowing lifestyle, much like modern blind snakes.

The trouble is that the evidence has rested on a tiny handful of fossils. Fewer than ten early snake skeletons are known from that era.

The skull of a burrower

Our fossil is a rare new witness. It comes from roughly 80-million-year-old rock in São Paulo state, Brazil. We named it Tametara mirim, meaning “adorned” and “small” in the local Indigenous language.

The fossil is one of the best-preserved early snakes found anywhere on Earth. It is also the first articulated snake skeleton from Brazil, with its bones still connected in their original arrangement. We found its lifestyle encoded in its bones – in particular, its skull.

Head-first burrowers build denser, thicker bone in this region. This trait has independently evolved across numerous burrowing lizard lineages. We presume this consolidates the skull against the strain exerted during its use as a digging tool.

Tametara shows exactly this trait combination. In fact, our lifestyle reconstruction positions the fossil among the most specialised head-first burrowers living today, and well away from any lizards and snakes that pursue a more generalist lifestyle.

But the skull roof was not our only line of evidence.

We also digitally rebuilt its brain cavity, the most detailed such reconstruction yet for any early snake. This cavity would have closely matched the shape of the brain in the living animal. The reduced visual centres and simplified forebrain point the same way the bones do: underground.

Tuning their senses

But here is where the story turns.

We ran the same analyses on Dinilysia, a famous early snake from Argentina, and we found something astonishing. The two oldest snakes we can study in this detail had brains more different from each other than most snake lineages alive today. Dinilysia was no burrower. It lived on the surface.

Their brains hint at how differently these two animals sensed their world.

Tametara had the reduced eyesight of a creature that spent its life in the dark. Dinilysia, on the other hand, had senses that were shaped for the open. At the very dawn of their history, snakes were already tuning their senses to very different habitats.

How, then, does this fit with the skull bones, which place the ancestral snake lineage in subterranean space? The truth may lie somewhere in between.

As my colleague Tiago Simões from Princeton University, who led the study, says: “Our findings reframe a long-running debate about how the earliest snakes lived.”

Redrawing the debate

We set out to settle the century-old question of what turned snakes into snakes with the firmest reconstruction yet of how the earliest of these reptiles lived.

Instead, we may need to reframe the question: it was never simply sea or soil.

Indeed, our best-preserved early snake was a committed burrower. But the pathway towards modern snakes branched and meandered. No single fossil, however exquisite, can capture the whole of that journey. Each is only a spotlight thrown across a bigger, more convoluted scene.

Shaped underground or not, the snake sliding through the grass today is the survivor of a long, restless experiment, recorded in the bones and brains of animals that have been dead for 80 million years.

This discovery alone has brought us closer than ever to understanding how evolution gave us these iconic yet feared creatures.

Roy Ebel, Research Officer Herpetology, Museums Victoria Research Institute

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