Cats with a fondness for gourmet meals are threatening fish supplies, an Australian scientist says.
Deakin University scientist Dr Giovanni Turchini has discovered an estimated 2.48 million tonnes of forage fish - a limited biological resource - is consumed by the global cat food industry each year.
“That such a large amount of fish is used for [...]
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A wild dolphin is apparently teaching other members of her group to walk on their tails, a behaviour usually seen only after training in captivity.
The tail-walking group lives along the south Australian coast near Adelaide.
One of them spent a short time after illness in a dolphinarium 20 years ago and may have picked [...]
Australian media say a lost humpback whale calf has bonded with a yacht it seems to think is its mother. The 1- to 2-month-old calf was first sighted Sunday in waters off north Sydney, and on Monday tried to suckle from a yacht, which it would not leave.
Rescuers towed the yacht out to sea, and [...]
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The first pictures of what has been dubbed the world’s ugliest dolphin were shown on Australian television on Thursday.
The snub fin dolphin with its distinctive bulbous head was first identified three years ago off Western Australia’s remote Kimberley coast.
It is the first new dolphin species to be discovered in fifty years.
Unlike some dolphins, the snub [...]
An Australian pest controller who got lost in the desert while prospecting for gold survived by turning for help to the bugs he usually kills — and eating them.
Theo Rosmulder, 52, managed to stay alive in the harsh West Australian desert for five days by knocking the tops off termite mounds and “getting stuck into [...]
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Humans have over-exploited the whale shark — the world’s largest living fish — to such a degree that the ocean giants are actually shrinking in size, according to new research.
The whale shark population has also fallen by approximately 40 percent over the past decade in Western Australian waters, the new study has found, suggesting [...]
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Two feet across, with 12 to 20 dark brown arms covered in inch-long spines, the crown-of-thorns starfish sweeps across Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, devouring corals and leaving only chalk-white skeletons behind.
But new research suggests that fishing bans help control starfish outbreaks on the world’s largest reef system.
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Global warming will allow exotic plants and animals to invade vulnerable Australian ecosystems, the WWF conservation group has warned.
Warmer temperatures will allow feral animals and invasive weeds to gain access to cooler and higher areas where they have not previously been able to exist, according to WWF’s Invasive Species Policy Officer Julie Kirkwood.
“Exotic species [...]
Captain Paul Watson founded his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977 because he believed his new organization had to go even further to eradicate whaling, poaching, shark finning, habitat destruction and purported ocean law violations than the Greenpeace group he had co-founded. For three decades, Watson’s group of staff [...]
By combining field work in Australia with mathematical modeling, three scientists from the laboratoire Fonctionnement et évolution des systèmes écologiques (CNRS/Université Pierre et Marie Curie/ENS Paris) have shown that the quality and quantity of winged queens produced by colonies of the Rhytidoponera ant vary according to environmental conditions. In certain cases, colonies even stop producing [...]
Continue reading about To Multiply, Ant Colonies Adapt To Environmental Conditions
