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The program can work well for polygamous species such as gorillas. Mary Ann McDonald/shutterstock.com

A quick look at the popularity of online dating services like OkCupid and eHarmony shows us that people are pretty comfortable with letting an algorithm choose them a mate. Now we at the Flinders Molecular Ecology Lab want to do a similar thing for other animals.

With human-driven extinctions on the rise, many species are likely to be left relying on captive breeding for their survival. We hope that our algorithm will help ensure these breeding programs are successful, by pairing up matches who will have healthy, thriving offspring.

Unlike human dating services, we cannot ask a snake, fish or possum to answer questions. But we can look at their DNA. This allows us to breed individuals who are not closely related, avoiding the genetic problems that arise from inbreeding, and thus producing healthy populations with a diverse gene pool.

We have created Swinger, a computer program that uses DNA profiling to matchmake endangered animals for captive breeding - especially those that have multiple mates - and which we describe in a paper published in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources. We envision it helping to conserve many endangered animals, with the first animals being native freshwater fishes in Australia.

It’s all in the DNA

Genetic diversity is crucial, because it helps populations to adapt and evolve in response to environmental changes that they may encounter in the future. So maintaining a large gene pool is an important consideration for captive breeding programs, particularly in populations that have already dwindled to small numbers. This makes avoiding inbreeding vitally important.

Many species kept in zoos – such as pandas – have clear family relationships or are bred in pairs and so their parentage is certain. Armed with pedigree information, it is relatively easy for zoos to select unrelated breeding pairs, often by working in collaboration with other zoos.

But most animals in the world are polygamous, with each individual naturally having multiple partners, even around the same time. This is where it becomes harder to track family relationships, unless you can examine their DNA.

It’s easier with pandas - well, the choosing part at least. Ritesh251123/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The matchmaking algorithm is also ideal for starting a captive breeding program from individuals newly brought into captivity. This is because we often have no idea about their relationships to each other, except through DNA, and they may be highly related individuals.

The very circumstances that brought about the need for captive breeding also often results in inbreeding in wild populations. This is because the population has reduced in size to the point that individuals may unavoidably breed with their close relatives. This makes it especially important to ensure breeding in captivity occurs between unrelated individuals.

Captive breeding of swingers

Even when dealing with such serious issues as extinction, we like to keep a sense of humour – hence the name Swinger, which we feel is pretty appropriate given that individuals of most species in the world are naturally polygamous. Indeed, our algorithm is just as suitable for setting up polygamous breeding groups as monogamous ones.

The algorithm is inspired by our efforts to save freshwater fishes in Australia. Native freshwater fish lineages recently became at risk of extinction due to human activities during the Millennium Drought in the Murray-Darling Basin, in southeastern Australia. The fish needed to be saved by their removal from the wild before their habitat completely dried out.

We created breeding groups of these rescued polygamous fish. This was done by using DNA information to create, by hand, “swinger” groups of unrelated individuals. The breeding was successful, with offspring reintroduced to the wild. However, the breeding groups were unavoidably sub-optimal because at that time we had no algorithm to work out the best possible mates for individuals.

Swinger is now being used to save native rainbowfish in northern Queensland. Although it is still early days, the rainbowfish breeding has been very successful, producing thousands of fingerlings that our collaborators are releasing to the wild.

We are also using Swinger to inform the design of a breeding program of endangered species of Galápagos giant tortoises previously considered extinct. These tortoises were rediscovered in a remote volcano and moved to the captive breeding facility of the Galápagos National Park. The aim is to reintroduce the captive-born offspring to the island where they evolved.

The brilliance of DNA is that it is in all living things. This means that Swinger could potentially be used to help breed all endangered species with sexual reproduction - especially, of course, the many polygamous species.

To borrow another concept from the world of human dating, there will hopefully soon be “Plenty of Fish” as a result of our efforts.

Catherine R. M. Attard has received funding from the Australian Government and other organisations.

Luciano Beheregaray receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jonathan Sandoval Castillo ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son poste universitaire.

The higher the plume, the bigger the problem. Jim Peaco/Wikimedia Commons

The journal Climatic Change has published a special edition of review papers discussing major natural hazards in Australia. This article is one of a series looking at those threats in detail.

Fire has been a driving force across Australia for millennia. Indeed, the health of many of our ecosystems is intrinsically dependent on fire. But bushfires are also one of our most frequent natural hazards, with a total cost estimated at A$8.5 billion per year.

In the past decade or so, extreme bushfires in southeastern Australia have burned more than a million hectares, claiming more than 200 lives and over 4,000 homes. Similar losses in other major urban areas have prompted questions about whether we are seeing a shift towards a significantly more hazardous fire regime, characterised by increasing fire frequency and intensity, and the development of catastrophic “firestorms”.

While these extreme bushfires account for only a very small percentage of fire events, they are responsible for the lion’s share of bushfire-related losses.

In contrast to typical bushfires, which spread across the landscape as well-defined burning fronts with smoke plumes perhaps a few kilometres high, extreme bushfires exhibit deep and widespread flaming and produce smoke plumes that can extend 10-15km into the atmosphere.

At these altitudes, bushfire plumes can actually develop into thunderstorms (hence the term “firestorm”). As such, extreme bushfires become much more difficult for emergency services to handle, making them all but impossible to suppress and their spread difficult to predict.

Beyond hot, dry and windy

Like other dangerous bushfires, firestorms are driven by hot, dry and windy weather. But to spawn a firestorm, a range of other conditions must also be met; these can include a rugged landscape, particularly nasty weather events that produce “spikes” in fire danger, and conditions in the upper atmosphere that allow fire plumes to grow to considerable heights.

While previous studies have considered past and projected changes in the hot, dry and windy aspect of fire danger, less research has been done on the future projections for these other types of conditions. This means that we have quite a poor understanding of how extreme bushfires might affect us in the future.

As part of a series of reviews produced by the Australian Energy and Water Exchange initiative, my colleagues and I have taken a closer look at the most catastrophic bushfire cases and the factors that drive them, beyond the usual hot, dry and gusty weather.

There has been an overall increase in the frequency of major bushfire events in southeastern Australia since the mid-19th century. In particular, in the past 15 years a major fire event has occurred every 5 years or less. While some of this increase is due to changes in land use since European colonisation, there is also strong evidence of climate-driven changes.

We found that besides increases in dangerous surface fire danger conditions, upper atmospheric conditions have also become more conducive to explosive fire growth. High levels of the c-Haines index, which signals greater potential for a fire’s plume to rise high into the atmosphere, have become considerably more prevalent since the 1980s. The effects of droughts and widespread heatwaves have also contributed to the occurrence of extreme bushfires.

Looking into the future, high c-Haines values are projected to grow more prevalent still, albeit more gradually than over recent decades. Frontal weather patterns associated with particularly bad fire days are also projected to become more frequent during this century, and rainfall is projected to decrease over southwest and southeastern Australia.

All of this suggests that extreme bushfires will become a more common occurrence into the future.

What we still don’t know

Our methods for assessing fire danger do not explicitly account for the effects of extended drought and heatwaves on larger fuel elements such as branches and logs, and so may not properly account for their effects on fire spread and heat release into the atmosphere.

There is also considerable uncertainty about how fuel loads will change into the future. It is possible that the higher fire intensities expected to result from the direct effects of a warmer, drier climate may be offset by lower fuel loads.

Our understanding of extreme fire occurrence is also hampered by the lack of long-term and prehistoric climate data, which makes it hard to work out what the “normal” level of extreme bushfires has been in the past. While charcoal records show promise in this regard, we still don’t know enough about how charcoal is generated, deposited and subsequently preserved during extreme fires.

To predict the future occurrence of extreme bushfires, we also have more work to do in understanding how the trends forecast by global climate models will play out in terms of creating regional-scale fire weather conditions. And we still need to figure out the likely effects of other large-scale patterns such as El Niño.

Given the relatively recent advances that have been made in understanding the key drivers of extreme bushfires, the field is now ready for targeted studies that will help us estimate the future risk of extreme bushfires – and how best we can confront the threat.

Jason Sharples receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.

That the government is now at last being forced to do more to reduce the dangerous levels of nitrogen dioxide air pollution is welcome news (Court defeat for government on air pollution, 3 November). More than a year on from the “dieselgate” revelations, ministers should have been in no doubt about the dishonest and illegal methods used by some manufacturers to cheat emissions tests. Not only has the government failed to update its pollution modelling based on realistic emissions figures, it has also done nothing to support the 1.2 million UK diesel vehicle owners caught up in this scandal.

If anything, the government seems to be going out of its way to protect manufacturers. Cars fitted with the defeat device software are still able to pass MOT emissions tests, so the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency seems to have turned a blind eye to this.

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Scientists believe the animals have been infected with the disfiguring disease for centuries and pose little risk to humans today

Leprosy has been found in red squirrels across the British Isles and scientists believe they have been infected with the disfiguring disease for centuries.

The endangered animals carry the same bacteria that cause the human disease, research has revealed. This results in lesions on their muzzles, ears and paws, adding to the sharp decline in their numbers caused by invading grey squirrels, which appear immune to the disease.

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Jake Yapp condenses the history of everything we ever thought we knew about vaccination into four minutes.

President-elect Donald Trump did not express many views about science and innovation on the campaign trail. But there are some clues to his positions on key issues.

Farming in Devon national park, and sheep and cattle welfare, jeopardised by climbers, cyclists and campers, says livestock society

Adventure seekers who visit one of Britain’s great wild places are making life more difficult for farmers and putting cattle and sheep in danger, a livestock welfare charity claims.

The chair of the Dartmoor Livestock Protection Society, which was formed in 1963, says the “idle amusement” of millions of visitors is threatening to squeeze out hill farmers.

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Palaeontologist Stephen Brusatte explains the significance of the newly discovered dinosaur fossil that was almost destroyed by dynamite.

A newly discovered species of dinosaur is identified from an extraordinarily complete fossil almost destroyed by dynamite.

Mustafah Abdulaziz has spent years documenting humanity’s relationship to a precious natural resource – water. His latest work focuses on the challenges facing California, a highly populated state and a major agricultural center. Water: California was the first prize winner in the Syngenta photography award professional commission category for 2014–15, and will be on display at the National Geographic Museum in Washington DC from 12 November to 30 January 2017

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To celebrate the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust’s 70th anniversary, we asked you to share pictures of wetlands around the UK. From incoming flocks to frolicking otters, here are some of our favourites

• See more contributions and add yours here
  

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Changing autumn colours in the US, New Delhi’s architecture and Hurricane Matthew were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month

The snowy landscape of the Putoransky state nature reserve, a Unesco world heritage site in the central area of the Putorana Plateau in northern central Siberia. The site, about 100km north of the Arctic Circle, serves as a major reindeer migration route – an increasingly rare natural phenomenon – and is one of the very few centres of plant species richness in the Arctic. Virtually untouched by human influence, this isolated mountain range includes pristine forests and cold-water lake and river systems. The lakes are characterised by elongated, fjord-like shapes, such as lake Ayan in the upper-central part of the image. Zooming in on the lake we can see that it is mostly ice-covered, with small patches of water peeking through around its lower reaches. Another feature of this area are the flat-topped mountains, formed by a geological process called ‘plume volcanism’: a large body of magma seeped through Earth’s surface and formed a blanket of basalt kilometres thick. Over time, cracks in the rock filled with water and eroded into the rivers and lakes we see today.

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Anyone who voted for Trump shares the responsibility for the climate damages resulting from his presidency

Many of us in the United States are in deep shock and despair. The election of Donald Trump speaks of a country and a world that represents so many things that go against our deepest grains. However, as I told my children this morning, the Earth will still turn, the sun will still rise. In fact, a Trump presidency will not have the dire consequences that many of us fear – especially for people like me who will be insulated from his policies. Surely it will change the economics and courts in the US, among other things. But really, all of these are transient.

The one thing that isn’t transient is the impact this will have on climate change. It is now virtually certain the world will not meet any of its climate targets. If Trump (and the Republican-controlled Congress) stand by their pledges, we will see a major rollback of the tremendous progress that has been made on reducing emissions. A Trump presidency will likely set us back at least a decade, perhaps longer. And that is a decade we can’t afford.

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A supermoon is due on 14 November and meaning the moon will be the biggest and brightest since 1948 - but what is a supermoon?

Underworld is an immersive exploration of London’s Victorian sewers and is the Guardian’s latest virtual reality offering. Step into the shoes of an urban explorer and experience the labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and hidden waterways that run beneath the city

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Ministers reject court proposal to deliver an effective plan within eight months following their legal defeat against NGO ClientEarth last week

Action to combat the UK’s air pollution crisis has been delayed again after the government rejected a proposal to deliver an effective action plan within eight months.

Environmental lawyers ClientEarth inflicted a humiliating legal defeat on ministers last week – its second in 18 months – when the high court ruled that ministers’ plans to tackle illegal levels of air pollution in many UK cities and towns were unlawfully poor.

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Leaving more contaminated soil and rubble on-site instead of moving it to dedicated dumps is cheaper and allows for quicker clean-ups, say officials

More contaminated soil and rubble will remain at the sites of Britain’s old nuclear power plants rather than going to a dedicated dump, under government-backed proposals.

But officials said that the sites would not be left in a hazardous state because international radiological standards would still be upheld.

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Numbers pass the level deemed viable for the raptor’s long-term survival but it remains missing from a third of its traditional territories

Britain’s golden eagle population has soared to new heights, according to a new survey released on Wednesday.

There are now more than 500 breeding pairs in the UK, up 15% and passing the threshold at which bird’s long-term future is thought viable.

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Australia’s government has announced that it is to ratify the Paris climate agreement, which was struck 11 months ago and entered into force last Friday.

The move comes despite the election of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a Chinese-inspired hoax. Trump has pledged to turn his back on the Paris treaty after he takes office in January, although this would take at least a year and technically leave the Agreement still in force, albeit weakened.

The question for Australia is how Canberra will react to such a seismic shift in US climate policy. The last time a US president pulled the plug on international climate negotiations was in March 2001, when George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto treaty. Australia’s prime minister John Howard followed suit on Earth Day 2002.

The temptation for Australia’s current government would be to follow in Trump’s slipstream in much the same way. Despite its 2030 climate target being widely seen as unambitious, Australia still lacks a credible plan to deliver the necessary emissions cuts, and has no renewable energy target beyond 2020.

While Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull may be a vocal supporter of climate action, not everyone on on his side of politics is as keen – such as MPs Craig Kelly and George Christensen. (It was not always thus under the Liberals.)

The temptation to defect might be strong, but the countervailing pressure will be much stronger that it was in 2002, and the clean energy transition is already underway. Just this week, a high-powered group of business leaders, energy providers, academics and financiers called on Turnbull to expand the renewable energy target and create a market mechanism to phase out coal.

Yet the US election has also reinvigorated Australian opponents of climate action, such as One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, who were cracking champagne at the prospect of Trump in the White House, and media commentator Andrew Bolt, who jubilantly described Trump’s victory as a “revolt against the left’s arrogance”.

Which bit of history will repeat?

On balance, then, it is still hard to predict Australia’s next move – and past form is little guide for future performance.

Over the past 26 years, Australia has made two largely symbolic commitments to international climate action, and one very concrete refusal.

In 1990, ahead of the 2nd World Climate Conference which fired the starting gun for the United Nations’ climate negotiations, the Hawke government announced a target of a 20% reduction by 2005.

The pledge, however, was laced with crucial caveats, like this one:

…the Government will not proceed with measures which have net adverse economic impacts nationally or on Australia’s trade competitiveness in the absence of similar action by major greenhouse-gas-producing countries.

This target was sidelined in the final United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which Australia signed and ratified in 1992.

In 1997, Australia got a very sweet deal at the Kyoto climate talks, successfully negotiating an 8% increase in greenhouse gases as its emissions “reduction” target, as well as a special loophole that allowed it take account of its large reduction in land clearing since 1990. Australia signed the deal in April 1998, but never ratified it.

Kyoto’s rules hid a multitude of sins, anyway, as Oxford University’s Nicholas Howarth and Andrew Foxall have pointed out:

…its accounting rules obscure the real level of carbon emissions and structural trends at the nation-state level… it has shifted focus away from Australia as the world’s largest coal exporter towards China, its primary customer.

Although Kevin Rudd famously ratified Kyoto and received a standing ovation at the Bali Climate summit in 2007, a stronger Australian emissions reduction target was not forthcoming.

The next big moment came at the Paris negotiations of 2015. Australia’s official pledge was a 26-28% reduction on 2005 levels by 2030 – a target unveiled by the former prime minister Tony Abbott, and which met with a lukewarm response from analysts.

Since then, pressure has been building for Australia to explain how it can meet even that target, given the hostility to renewable energy among the federal government, the lack of a post-2020 renewables target, and the inadequacy of the current Direct Action policy.

And now we are looking at the prospect of a Trump presidency, already described as “a turning point in the history of climate action” and “the end of any serious hope of limiting climate change to 2 degrees”.

In a chaotic world that has confounded pollsters, it seems foolish to bet on anything. But two predictions seem sure: atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will rise, and the future will be … interesting.

Marc Hudson 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.

Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef has suffered through the worst bleaching event in its history, part of the world’s third mass bleaching event.

However, coral reefs from the other side of the continent have also experienced unprecedented bleaching and coral death. This is bad news because the unique coral reefs of Western Australia’s northwest are home to some of the toughest coral in the world.

Western Australia’s unique coral reefs

Although much less well-known, coral reefs in Western Australia are highly diverse. They include, for example, Australia’s largest fringing reef, the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Reef, as well as Australia’s largest inshore reef, Montgomery Reef which covers 380 square kilometres.

WA’s remote Kimberley region also features “super-corals” – corals that have adapted to a naturally extreme environment where tidal swings can be up 10m. These corals can therefore tolerate exposure to the air during low tide as well as extreme daily temperature swings.

My past research has shown that these naturally extreme conditions increase the heat tolerance of Kimberley corals but that they are nevertheless not immune to bleaching when water temperatures are unusually hot for too long.

Previously I had put these super-corals in tanks and subjected them to a three-week heatwave to see how they would respond, but I always wondered how they would cope in the wild where such events typically unfold over longer timescales. Unfortunately, I did not have to wait long to find out.

The hottest years on record

2015 was the hottest year on record and 2016 will likely be hotter still. This has caused an unprecedented global coral reef crisis. Although global coral bleaching events already occurred in 1998 and 2010, this third global bleaching event is the longest on record and still ongoing.

Sadly, in WA the Kimberley region was hit the hardest. As part of Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, colleagues and I conducted extensive monitoring before, during and after the predicted bleaching event along the entire WA coastline. In the southern Kimberley, we also carried out aerial surveys to assess the situation on a regional level.

The severity and scale of bleaching that we observed in April was devastating. Almost all inshore Kimberley reefs that we surveyed had about 50% bleaching, including Montgomery Reef. Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science found that offshore Kimberley reefs such as Scott Reef fared even worse, with 60-90% bleaching in shallow lagoon waters.

Many corals had already died from the severe bleaching in April, but the final death toll has only been revealed during visits to the Kimberley last month. Vast areas of coral reef are now dead and overgrown with algae, both at the inshore and offshore Kimberley reefs.

According to local Indigenous Rangers and Traditional Owners who assisted in the research, this appears to be unprecedented. Such events had never previously been described in their rich local history of the coastal environment.

Bleached staghorn coral on inshore Kimberley reefs in April 2016. Verena Schoepf Dead staghorn coral on the same reefs in October 2016. Verena Schoepf Some good news

There was nevertheless some good news. Corals living in intertidal areas, where they regularly experience exposure to air, stagnant water, and extreme temperature fluctuations, bleached less than corals from below the low-tide mark, where conditions are far more moderate. And importantly, the majority of intertidal corals were able to fully recover within a few months.

Similarly, researchers from the Western Australian Museum and Curtin University confirmed last month that intertidal coral reefs in the central Kimberley (Bonaparte Archipelago) were in great condition.

Overall, these observations confirm the findings from my past research which showed that highly-variable, extreme temperature environments can boost the bleaching resistance of corals.

It is also important to note that the 2016 severe bleaching event in WA was restricted to the Kimberley region. Ningaloo Reef as well as coral reefs in the Pilbara and the Abrolhos Islands all escaped the bleaching. This is great news because some of these locations are still recovering from major bleaching in 2010-11 and 2013.

Healthy coral at Ningaloo Reef in 2016. Morane Le Nohaic The future of WA’s coral reefs

Although it is now clear that WA’s coral reefs are at risk of bleaching during both El Niño (as in 2016) and La Niña years (as in 2010-11), they have some advantages over other reefs that may hopefully allow them to recover from bleaching more quickly and stay healthy in the long term.

For example, most of WA’s coral reefs are located far away from major population centres and are thus less affected by environmental threats such as poor water quality (though other threats such as oil and gas exploration do exist). We also know that their isolation, particularly in the case of offshore reefs, helped them recover from previous mass bleaching events.

Finally, it is critical that we identify coral populations worldwide that are already naturally adapted to higher temperatures and have a greater bleaching resistance, such as the Kimberley corals.

These super-corals, while not immune to climate change, should be a priority for research into the limits of coral tolerance, as well as conservation efforts.

Verena Schoepf is affiliated with the University of Western Australia, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Western Australian Marine Science Institution (WAMSI). The research presented here was funded by WAMSI, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, the PADI Foundation and an ARC Laureate Fellowship to Prof Malcolm McCulloch.