Feed aggregator

A scheme that aims to re-establish one of King Henry III's favourite fish in the River Severn is given nearly £20m in funding.

Global wildlife populations will decline by 67% by 2020 unless urgent action is taken to reduce human impact on species and ecosystems, warns the biennial Living Planet Index report from WWF and ZSL. From elephants to eels, here are some of the wildlife populations most affected by human activity

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Natural History Museum, London A short walk takes you on a wildlife journey that would otherwise take days of travel

What would it look like if you tried to compress the English countryside into a 6,000 sq m metropolitan plot? Well, the wildlife garden at the Natural History Museum is as close to achieving the experience as is possible. A short perambulation takes you on a wildlife journey that would otherwise take days of travelling.

Related: An exuberance of life on the undrained fen

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Networks lobby suggests small discount to network charges could keep consumers on grid – if they don't mind being cut off in critical peaks. But it also proposes rule changes that signal shift from blanket "rural electrification", even if its technology estimates are still conservative.

27 October 1906: Billed as the ‘most important exhibition of cage birds in the kingdom,’ Hulme Town Hall allows breeders to show 1,500 birds

Just now the Hulme Town Hall is filled with the twittering of many canaries. It is the show of the Manchester and Northern Counties Ornithological Society, the most important exhibition of cage birds in the kingdom. To the amateur it is astonishing to find to what an extent the breeding of canaries is carried. There are some dozens of distinct varieties, not to speak of the “mules” or cross-breeds between canaries and other kinds of birds.

One walks down long lanes lined on either side by little cages, each containing a small cheery yellow, green, or cinnamon coloured bird. There are more than 1,500 birds, whose niceties of tint and form are giving pleasure to the fanciers. The Norwich canaries are perhaps the most excellent as they are certainly the most numerous exhibits. The Norwich canary is known by his rich reddish-yellow breast. The aim of the fancier is to get as “warm” a colour as possible. Then there is the Lancashire canary, the “Lancashire coppy,” much affected in Rochdale and Oldham and thereabouts. This is the bird of a beautiful pure yellow, with a little round crest like a cap. The spangled lizard canary is a pretty fellow, too, with his neat, trim body and gold-coloured patch on the top of his head. Some lovers of canaries prefer the cinnamon breed, and they are certainly delightful creatures in their deep mellow coat.

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Solar households in Victoria may receive 30c/kWh for critical peaks for their solar output. But the most significant aspect of the new Victoria tariffs are the recognition of environmental and network benefits of household solar power. Other states should follow suit.

Tesla Motors reports first quarterly net profit in more than three years, on track to meet forecast delivery and Tesla 3.

To reduce the risk of vessel strikes and the impacts they may have on marine fauna, the Australian government is developing a National Strategy for Mitigating Vessel Strike of Marine Mega-fauna. Consultation closes 9 December 2016

Can an all electric vehicle be used as the family run-about? We tested the theory using a Tesla Model S, pretended the price tag was more like a Model 3, and came to these conclusions...

CSIRO and BoM's 4th biennial State of the Climate Report says climate change is happening now, and we will have to adapt to changes over next 30 years.

Construction of the first kilometer of solar road in France's northwestern department Orne is underway.

Australia falls to 11th place on EY Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index, just months after cracking the Top 10.

DP Energy has appointed EY and Baker & McKenzie as their financial and legal advisors on their hybrid wind and solar Port Augusta Renewable Energy Park in South Australia.

A fifth of the Great Barrier Reef’s corals are dead after the worst bleaching event on record. Most of these deaths occurred in the northern part of the reef above Lizard Island.

Months after the bleaching event, research teams are now taking stock of the damage. Corals can recover from bleaching. But in a changing world they will have less time to do so before the next event.

Bleaching 101

Reef-building corals are animals that live symbiotically with one-celled algae (a species of dinoflagellate known as Symbiodinium, or colloquially as zooxanthellae).

The coral host provides safe habitat within its cells and supplies nutrients, while the algae in return feeds the coral with products from photosynthesis. This partnership is highly efficient. It allows stony corals that require a lot of energy to produce their skeletons to thrive in nutrient-poor tropical waters. But it is also a fragile balance.

Environmental stress, most commonly caused by increased water temperatures and elevated light conditions, can cause the zooxanthellae to produce too much reactive oxygen species, which is toxic to the coral. So the coral expels the algae.

This is what is actually happening when a coral “bleaches”. Expelling 90% or more of the algae, the coral’s skeleton becomes visible through its tissues.

A bleached coral can stay alive but is deprived of its primary food source and will begin to starve. Its metabolism suffers, the immune system becomes compromised, it becomes more susceptible to disease, and defence against coral predators, such as snails known as Drupella, is weakened.

Survivors of the bleaching are suffering from increased predation pressure. Drupella snails aggregate on the remaining live corals around Lizard Island following the 2016 bleaching event. Greg Torda

Depending on the intensity and duration of environmental stress, corals can die from the immediate impacts of a severe heat stress; starvation; disease or being eaten.

If conditions get better, corals can regain their symbiotic algae – and with it their brownish colour - from the surrounding water or from the multiplication of the remnant algae within their cells. In this way individual coral colonies can recover.

Corals weakened by heat stress are more susceptible to coral diseases. Here, skeletal eroding band disease is slowly killing a Pocillopora colony in the aftermath of the 2016 bleaching event. Greg Torda

Different coral species bleach at different stress levels, and some species are more likely to die directly from the conditions that cause bleaching.

For example, the fastest-growing corals are highly effective at capturing light to feed their algal fuel cells. Even under normal conditions they are living close to their maximum tolerance of temperature and light. These corals are far more susceptible to more light and temperature than other, slower growing corals.

Incidentally, these fast-growing corals are also the ones that provide the bulk of the intricate three-dimensional structure to the reef that is critical to most reef critters, including fish. Because of their enhanced metabolism, fast-growing corals also die in greatest numbers during bleaching events, therefore they have been considered the losers of coral bleaching.

Field of recently dead staghorn corals. These corals still provide habitat for some reef critters, but will soon erode to rubble. Greg Torda Reef recovery

Due to the variability in bleaching and coral deaths, even moderate bleaching events can decrease the amount of live coral on the reef’s structure and can dramatically alter the species composition.

The recovery of the reef after a disturbance, such as a bleaching event, happens when the amount of live coral covering the reef, the structural complexity, and the composition of the coral community all return to the levels prior to disturbance.

This requires the re-colonisation of the reef by coral propagules (larvae or fragments) that grow into large mature colonies over the course of years and decades.

In severe bleaching events, such as the most recent 2016 mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef and in parts of the remote Pacific Ocean, even the more thermally-tolerant, slow-growing corals severely bleached; several locations suffered large numbers of coral deaths.

The loss of slow growing corals is particularly alarming, because replacing these colonies will require decades, and in some cases centuries, to return the reefs to what they were just a short time ago.

It is unlikely that the reefs affected by the 2016 event in the northern Great Barrier Reef will recover for many decades.

Other symbiotic organisms such as this anemone can also bleach when stressed. Greg Torda Will there be a next time?

It is highly unlikely that reefs will get the decades they need to recover – in fact, the frequency of bleaching events is increasing.

Current trends in ocean temperature and future predictions suggest bleaching will occur each year within the coming decades. Some reefs around the world have just experienced consecutive years of bleaching, with barely any opportunity for colonies, let alone reefs, to recover.

Can corals adapt or acclimatise to elevated water temperatures over the course of a few years? Corals inhabiting unusually warm waters, such as the Persian Gulf and some areas of the Coral Triangle, demonstrate that long-term adaptation to a high temperature regime has been possible.

However, evidence to date suggests that these adaptive processes are unlikely to be able to keep up with climate change.

Action to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, and halt the associated warming, must be quickly and vigorously pursued to avert the predicted degradation of coral reefs. If this is not undertaken, the consequences for reefs will only be amplified from what we have seen this year.

Tracy Ainsworth receives funding from The Australian Research Council Discovery Program and the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Greg Torda receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is also affiliated with the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Scott Heron receives funding from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Satellites division (NESDIS) and Coral Reef Conservation Program, and is affiliated with James Cook University. The contents in this piece are solely the opinions of the authors and do not constitute a statement of policy, decision or position on behalf of NOAA or the U.S. Government.

Campaigners believe a long-standing proposal to establish a vast marine protected area (MPA) in the waters around Antarctica will be accepted this week.

Living Planet Index shows vertebrate populations are set to decline by 67% on 1970 levels unless urgent action is taken to reduce humanity’s impact

The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends.

The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020. Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame.

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Western Australia could become a renewable energy superpower – if the government halts LNG expansion plans and creates an innovation fund

Last year the world’s governments finally got their act together on climate change, agreeing to limit global warming to well under two degrees. To meet this commitment, we need a rapid global transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. The fossil fuel age is over.

The new era, powered by renewable energy, will be swept in on a massive wave of investment. According to Beyond Zero Emissions’ report, Renewable Energy Superpower, the world will invest $US28tn in renewable energy and energy efficiency in the next 20 years.

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Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970, according to a biodiversity report.

Two strong earthquakes hit central Italy, damaging buildings and sending people into the streets.

The Australian Geographic Society recognizes young achievers in its annual awards.