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Hammerheads are the species most caught in NSW's shark nets. Shark image from www.shutterstock.com

New South Wales Premier Mike Baird has this week announced a plan for a six-month trial of shark nets off the beaches of northern NSW. This would extend the state’s shark net program from the 51 beaches currently netted between Wollongong and Newcastle.

The announcement was triggered by Wednesday’s shark accident, in which a surfer received minor injuries from a shark bite at Sharpes Beach, Ballina.

The decision marks a turn-around in Premier Baird’s position on sharks. For over a year he has acknowledged the importance of addressing the issue, and has adopted a measured, long-term, non-lethal approach to managing shark hazards. Specifically, the NSW government has, in the last year, allocated funding and resources to non-lethal strategies including surveillance, research and education.

Killing sharks has been highly controversial in Australia in recent years, and in NSW shark nets have been a focus of ongoing, highly polarising debate.

Three common misunderstandings about shark nets

The decision to introduce shark nets in the state’s north invites us to revisit some common misunderstandings about this strategy.

First, there is wide misunderstanding about what shark nets are and what they do. The nets used in the NSW Shark Meshing (Bather Protection) Program do not create an enclosed area within which beach goers are protected from sharks.

They are fishing nets, which function by catching and killing sharks in the area. Nets are 150 m long, 6 m deep, and are suspended in water 10-12 m deep, within 500 m of the shore.

Bondi Beach’s shark net in 2009. NSW Department of Primary Industries, 2009

Second, whether shark nets work is still up for debate. Shark nets have been used in NSW since 1937. Since then, the number of netted beaches, methods for deploying nets, and data collection and record-keeping methods have changed, and data sets are incomplete.

Our use of the beach and ocean has also changed dramatically. There are more people in the water, in new areas, and we’re using the ocean for different activities. At the same time, our observation of sharks and emergency response have improved dramatically.

The suggestion that nets prevent shark accidents is an oversimplification of a complex story, a misrepresentation of both technology and data, and it misinforms the public.

And finally, shark nets cannot be a long-term solution. They are out-dated technology based on outdated thinking, developed 80 years ago.

They go directly against our international responsibility to protect threatened species (under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and our own Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act), and our national priorities for protecting marine environments and species, including several shark species.

We know that shark nets in NSW kill on average at least 275 animals per year (measured between 1950 and 2008), and that the majority of animals killed pose no threat to people. We can do better than this.

Learning from the (very) recent past

Right now we have an opportunity in NSW to learn from recent experiences in Western Australia. In 2012, the WA government, under Premier Colin Barnett, introduced hooked “drumlines” to kill sharks in an attempt to reduce the risk of shark bites. Like this week’s announcement by Premier Baird, that policy change was stimulated by a spike in shark accidents.

The response to the new policy was a highly-polarised debate and extraordinary public outcry, including two public protests at Perth’s Cottesloe Beach attracting 4,000 and 6,000 people, and protests in eleven other cities around the country, including 2,000 at Sydney’s Manly Beach.

The state’s Environmental Protection Authority received a record number of 12,000 submissions from scientific and other experts presenting reasons to cease the cull. The WA government heeded the EPA’s recommendation and cancelled the policy.

Our research with ocean users conducted during this period showed that perspectives are diverse (we surveyed 557 WA-based ocean-users using quantitative and qualitative research methods).

Among people who use the ocean regularly, some strongly oppose killing sharks; others are ambivalent; and a smaller number of people are in favour. People’s views and understandings are nuanced and carefully thought through.

However, within this group, the strategies for managing shark hazards that were most strongly supported were improving public education about sharks, and encouraging ocean users to understand and accept the risks associated with using the ocean. Other widely supported strategies included developing shark deterrents and increasing surveillance and patrols.

The most strongly opposed approaches were those that killed sharks including culling, proactive catch-and-destroy measures, baited drumlines, and shark nets.

In recent years we have been making good progress in Australia on public discussion and investment in more effective and ethical approaches for reducing shark bites. This week’s move to introduce an outmoded technology to the north coast promises to further divide the community.

We should continue to invest in developing new strategies that better reflect our contemporary understanding of marine ecosystems. Perhaps we also need to consider (temporarily) altering the way we use the ocean, avoiding areas of higher-than-usual shark sightings.

Leah Gibbs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The UK's official advisers have issued a sombre assessment of government plans to hold climate change at a safe level.

Dice Australia and AllGrid Energy are hosting a fund-raising event for Indigenous wellbeing and Suicide Prevention.

Seneca Rus, 25, was bitten by a suspected white pointer in surf in Ballina on Wednesday

The surfer attacked by a shark on the NSW north coast is worried the use of nets around beaches could hurt marine life.

Seneca Rus, 25, was bitten by a suspected white pointer on Wednesday at Sharpes beach in Ballina when surfing with his mates.

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Norton Rose Fulbright has advised Redback Technologies on the sale of a stake to major energy company EnergyAustralia

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Tesla’s first integrated retail store in Melbourne opens in Chadstone Shopping Centre’s new luxury offering today.

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FOSSIL CLUES: Discovery of the oldest known bird voice box is shedding light on what sounds dinosaurs were capable of making - or not!

Penguin Bloom is the story of an Australian family who rescued a ‘a tiny, scruffy, injured’ magpie chick they called Penguin. In caring for the newest member of their family, the Blooms – including mother Sam, who was herself coming to terms with paralysis after an accident – found that Penguin helped them to heal emotionally. Their story went viral on Instagram and has now been turned into a book, royalties from which will go to Spinal Cure Australia and Wings For Life in the UK

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This cow has the right idea. Cow image from www.shutterstock.com

When Canadian farmer Joe Dorgan noticed about 11 years ago that cattle in a paddock by the sea were more productive than his other cows, he didn’t just rediscover an Ancient Greek and Icelandic practice.

While the Ancient Greeks didn’t have to contend with global warming, it turns out that this practice could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from 21st-century livestock farming.

Cows and sheep produce methane, a greenhouse gas that is 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Despite misconceptions, most cow methane comes from burps (90%) rather than farts (10%). Livestock produce the equivalent of 5% of human-generated greenhouse gases each year, or five times Australia’s total emissions.

From Canada to the world

Dorgan’s cattle were eating storm-tossed seaweed. Canadian researchers Rob Kinley and Alan Fredeen have since found that seaweed not only helped improve the cows’ health and growth, but also reduced their methane production by about 20%.

This and other lines of evidence led Kinley, who by then had moved to CSIRO, to team up with other CSIRO scientists and marine algae specialists at James Cook University to test a wide range of seaweeds.

They tested 20 seaweed species and found that they reduce methane production in test-tube samples from cow stomachs by anything from zero to 50%. But to do this required high amounts of seaweed (20% by weight of the sample) which was likely to present digestion issues for animals.

But when the researchers tested a particular type of seaweed collected from Queensland’s coastal waters, they thought their instruments were broken and ran the tests again. It turns out that Asparagopsis taxiformis reduces methane production by more than 99% in the lab. And unlike other seaweeds where the effect diminishes at low doses, this species works at doses of less than 2%.

Asparagopsis produces a compound called bromoform (CHBr₃), which prevents methane production by reacting with vitamin B12 at the last step. This disrupts the enzymes used by gut microbes that produce methane gas as waste during digestion.

Fighting climate change, feeding people

Globally, 1.3 billion people depend, partially or entirely, on livestock for their livelihoods. Livestock provides protein and micronutrients to many of the world’s 830 million people experiencing food insecurity.

Livestock methane production is not just an environmental problem. All this burped methane is wasted energy that could be going to make animals produce more food. Around 15% of feed expenses are lost in methane emissions. As feed is the primary expense for livestock farmers, this is no small problem.

It’s not just the cost, either. As wealthier consumers become more aware of environmental issues around agriculture, some are choosing to eat less meat.

If farmers could supplement their feed with seaweed, this might just help with two of the biggest challenges of our time: fighting climate change and growing more food with fewer resources.

In Australia, if we could develop a way to include seaweed feed in the Emissions Reduction Fund (as for dairy farmers), farmers might even be able to get carbon credits at the same time.

CSIRO and partners James Cook University, with funding from Meat and Livestock Australia, are currently conducting further experiments to examine how feeding seaweed to cattle affects production. These experiments aim to confirm the effects measured in the lab and in live sheep experiments. Confirmation through these experiments could create a new industry in growing seaweed as a feed supplement for livestock.

Where can we grow all the seaweed?

Seaweed production globally is booming, with more than 25 million tonnes (measured when wet) farmed each year, which is about double the global commercial production of lemons.

Producing enough Asparagopsis to feed 10% of the almost 1 million feedlot and 1.5 million dairy cattle in Australia would require about 300,000 tonnes a year, and millions of tonnes if it were to be scaled up globally.

With selection and breeding of seaweed varieties for higher bioactivity, this figure could come down, but perhaps only by half, and it would still require large areas of land and water. With typical seaweed production rates at 30-50 tonnes of dry matter per hectare, this suggests that to supply 10% of the Australian livestock industry will require at least 6,000 hectares of seaweed farms.

The booming seaweed industry is already aware of the pitfalls experienced in fish farming.

There are likely to be many indirect benefits, including creating alternative livelihoods in many developing countries where fishing may be in decline, and the use of seaweed as a means to filter detrimental nutrients from rivers or effluent from fish farms.

But seaweed farms more generally will be part of our increasing demands on the marine environment and will need to be part of integrated ecosystem wide management and marine spatial planning.

But for now, Joe Dorgan, of Seacow Pond in Prince Edward Island, Canada, will continue to feed seaweed to all of his cattle and reap the rewards of improved health and production.

Michael Battaglia works for CSIRO. CSIRO, MLA and JCU hold a patent of the use of Asparagopsis for methane reduction, and the partners are actively involved in seeking to commercialise the technology Funding to test and develop the use of Asparagopsis for animal feeding has been provided by the Australian Government under the National Livestock Methane Program, of Filling the Research Gaps.

Not your average starling. Nathan Rupert/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Encountering a snake in the wild is many people’s worst nightmare. So imagine walking through the dense tropical forests of north Queensland and stumbling across an aggregation of 15 hungry snakes loitering beneath a giant canopy tree.

You’re probably wondering why the snakes are there? The answer is that the tree above is laden with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of bird nests; a colony of metallic starlings (Aplonis metallica).

And it’s not just snakes. For the past three years I have been studying these colonies as part of a PhD program at the University of Sydney. Our paper describing this remarkable ecological phenomenon has just been published in PLoS ONE.

In a single year, I recorded more than 100,000 animals (representing 42 species) beneath starling colony trees.

Annual bonanza

These aggregations are tiny (with an average of 140 square metres). They therefore represent one of the most dense and species-rich animal groupings on Earth. Many of the species encountered beneath the starling colonies are 1,000 times more abundant there than beneath otherwise similar trees in the surrounding landscape.

The hosts of this annual animal extravaganza are small, glossy-black birds with bright red eyes (the metallic starlings). In reality, we know little about them.

Existing literature suggests they migrate to northern Queensland from New Guinea each year, although it is possible that some stay in Australia year-round. The starlings begin nesting in November, and we think they raise three broods of young before nesting ceases at the beginning of April. Starlings return to the same trees every year (I know of one tree active for at least 15 years), and the trees they use are remarkably unique.

Most trees used by starlings are poison-dart trees (Antiaris toxicaria; the same species Asian peoples used to dip the tips of their poison darts). The significance of the tree’s toxicity to the starlings is unknown, but they are tall (emergent from the surrounding canopy), with smooth bark, and are isolated from nearby vegetation.

Through climbing experiments, we found that starlings likely actively seek out these trees to minimise nest predation by snakes (in most cases, snakes cannot climb the tree trunks).

The area directly beneath the colonies is similarly unique. The ground is covered by seeds and guano dropped by the thousands of starlings above, and the smell is extraordinarily pungent. The massive surge of nutrients dropped at these sites, together with mechanical disturbance by visiting animals, kills the surrounding vegetation such that the colonies form a barren moonscape in stark contrast to the dense forest just metres away.

Rainforest menagerie

I stumbled across my first Cape York starling colony when I was 14 years old. Despite the large number of snakes using the tree, I initially took the system for granted – the snakes are there to eat the birds – that seemed straightforward enough.

It wasn’t until I described the system to Rick Shine at the University of Sydney that we decided to investigate the colonies in more details, as part of my PhD program. To do this, I located 28 trees in the rainforests at the northern tip of Cape York, which I’ve been surveying for the last three years.

Nightly surveys with a head-torch regularly revealed enormous numbers of scrub pythons (Morelia amethistina), brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis), cane toads (Rhinella marina), giant tree frogs (Litoria infrafrenata), small mammals (such as Melomys capensis) and centipedes. Those animals aggregate to feed on fallen starling chicks, massive numbers of invertebrates, and seeds dropped by the starlings.

To survey for day-time visitors, I primarily used infrared camera traps. Sifting through the first set of photos was mind-blowing. Nearly every photograph showed more than 30 feral pigs or scrub turkeys (Alectura lathami), as well as more “exotic” species such as noisy pittas (Pitta versicolour) and palm cockatoos (Probosciger aterrimus). The latter species is meant to be rare, but we sometimes found 10 individuals in a single photograph.

We even recorded three specimens of a giant blue-tailed monitor lizard never previously recorded from the Australian continent (Varanus doreanus).

There is little doubt that these seasonal gatherings of animals are a unique part of Australia’s natural heritage. Animal aggregations captivate people’s imaginations, and there are few places on earth where so many different species come together to utilise such a massive nutrient subsidy.

Remarkably, this system remained undescribed until now, offering yet-another reminder of the scientific importance and sheer awesomeness of the Australian tropics.

Daniel Natusch received funding for this research from the Skyrail Rainforest Foundation, the Holsworth Wildlife Endowment, and the Australian Research Council.

I read about the butterfly decline noticed by people all around the country, described by Patrick Barkham (Record low UK butterfly count is ‘a shock and mystery’, 10 October). I don’t find it so much of a mystery, having spent the summer planning for and walking from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh on what we called a Bee Line.

This initiative was triggered by a visit in September 2014 to our former farm on the edge of Salisbury Plain. When we moved there in the late 1940s, there were permanent pastures, hedges and ancient drove roads lined with wayfarers’ trees and carpeted with wildflowers – orchids, harebells, trefoils – and abuzz with bees, butterflies, dragonflies and pollinators of all kinds. Now, 60 years on, it is a silent landscape; no cows, chickens, sheep, or even farm workers, just contractors, and of course no birds, butterflies, bees or flying insects. Between 30 August and 6 September we followed our Bee Line, walking some 80km from Edinburgh to our home along small roads, footpaths, cycle tracks, disused railway lines, through open moorland. We saw few butterflies, moths or bees and even noted a lack of midges.

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Scientists have reconstructed the "voicebox" of an extinct bird that lived at the time of the dinosaurs - and they say it honked or quacked like a duck.