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A daisy which flowers in bursts of yellow and orange is threatening Australia's environment and agriculture. Luckily two spaniels stand in its way.

They call him the godfather of coral, and these days that's more a responsibility than a compliment.

They call him the godfather of coral, and these days that's more a responsibility than a compliment.

The Toronto Zoo releases a compilation video of their giant panda cubs falling and tumbling.

Readers respond to George Monbiot’s call for an end to raising animals for food

George Monbiot’s fear of the few remaining British farmers (Goodbye – and good riddance – to livestock farming, 4 October) reached new levels when he wrote that the “rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased” and blamed us for the tectonic drift that moved Britain from the equator towards the Arctic, perhaps 300m years ago. In the rest of his article he mixed unrelated science from all over the globe with the peculiar claims of noted eccentrics, and suggested that we should plough unsuitable land to grow soya, which will not grow in this climate, to produce artificial meat in urban factories.

He didn’t mention inconvenient features of the British ruminant livestock industry, such as the fact that most feed that animals get other than grass is made up of byproducts of the human food industry such as brewers’ grains, sugar beet and fruit-juice pulp, most of which would have to go to landfill if cows and sheep did not recycle it. Without the income from this form of recycling, the price of food in the shop would increase. We do need to moderate excessive meat consumption, and we do need to act on climate change, but this article sows confusion that will delay necessary change.
Huw Jones
St Clears, Carmarthenshire

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Conservationist who took on the ivory poachers to protect the African elephant

When he was offered a leading role in the documentary The Ivory Game (2016) by its producer, Leonardo DiCaprio, the conservationist Wayne Lotter modestly gave the credit instead to his wildlife rangers, who led the way in tracking down one of Africa’s most notorious poachers, thought to be responsible for 10,000 elephants’ deaths. Lotter preferred to be in the background, while the spotlight fell on the cause for which he fought: saving the dwindling populations of Africa’s wild elephants, through practical, dogged, on-the-ground tracking of poachers and protection of their prey.

Lotter has been shot dead in Dar es Salaam, aged 51. Although the identity of his killers is not known, the murder may have been connected to one of the criminal groups involved in wildlife killing and ivory trafficking in Tanzania. These groups have turned what used to be small-scale ivory poaching into a highly organised international criminal enterprise that exists mainly to service Chinese demand for ivory and other rare animal products. “The more you go after them, the more situations where there is confrontation between poachers and rangers will take place,” Lotter said last year. “There are going to be risks.”

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Environmental health officers are urging consumers not to switch back to plastic following recent warnings that raw foods can spread harmful bacteria. So how can you keep your reusable bags hygienic?

The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) is urging consumers to continue to shop for food with reusable “bags for life”, fearing that worries about the food poisoning risks could trigger a backlash and even a resurgence in the use of thin plastic bags.

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Politicians may debate the merits of a cap on energy bills but making our leaky houses energy efficient is the solution that all political parties should unite behind

As the letters began to fall off the slogan behind Theresa May during her leader’s speech at the Conservative party conference, it was hard not to see symbolism. Not just of a premiership under threat, but also of a signature policy falling apart within hours of being announced.

The cap on energy bills was a pledge in the Conservative manifesto and the prime minister promised to introduce the legislation to make it happen. The Conservatives had at first dismissed an energy price cap as a reckless intervention in the market that would kill competition. But by the 2017 election the policy had been adopted by Theresa May and there was cross-party support.

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The EU offered protection to everything from the harbour porpoise to hen harriers. Now, the future of UK conservation law is uncertain

• Read more: Britain’s wildlife needs urgent new protections ahead of Brexit
  

As an EU member state, British wildlife has been protected under two important pieces of European legislation: the habitats directive and the birds directive. These have required the UK government to establish and manage sites for the protection of vulnerable and rare animals, birds, plants, habitats and other species. In the UK, there are 271 special protection areas for birds (SPAs) and 658 special areas of conservation for other species and habitats (SACs). The future of nature conservation law after Brexit, when EU directives will no longer apply to Britain, is unknown.

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EU laws that have protected hundreds of conservation sites and the species that live in them for decades could be watered down or lost with the EU withdrawal bill

• Interactive: How will Brexit affect British wildlife?

Hundreds of treasured wildlife habitats across the UK that have been protected for decades by the European Union must be urgently maintained and preserved with a new environment act, MPs and campaigners say.

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Weather scientists first mistook the radar pattern to be birds, and turned to social media for help.

EU opts for public awareness campaign on the impacts of plastics on the environment saying a tax would not be sustainable

The EU has ruled out penalties on single-use plastic products, in favour of raising public awareness of the damage consumer plastics are doing to the world’s oceans.

Frans Timmermans, vice president of the European commission, said a tax would “not be sustainable”, but that changing the way plastic was produced and used could work. “The only sustainable method is to create recyclable plastic and take out microplastics. You can’t take out microplastics with a tax. You need to make sure things are reused, and not put in the ocean.”

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A lost leopard, a wounded rhino and a sunbathing iguana are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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Increasingly unfamiliar and unpredictable weather events mean that business as usual is not an option for these islands to survive

As a Caribbean climate scientist, I am often asked to speak about how climate change affects small islands. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, one of two category five storms to batter the eastern Caribbean in just a week, three words resonate in my mind.

The first word is “unfamiliar”. Scientific analysis shows that the climate of the Caribbean region is already changing in ways that seem to signal the emergence of a new climate regime. Irma and Maria fit this pattern all too well. At no point in the historical records dating back to the late 1800s have two category five storms made landfall in the small Caribbean island chain of the eastern Antilles in a single year.

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Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), says she initially thought the announcement of the award was a prank. Speaking on Friday at Ican’s head office in Geneva, Switzerland, Fihn describes the prize as a surprise and an honour

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Indigenous leaders say operations in the remote Amazon violate rights and risk fatal epidemics

There are more indigenous peoples living in “isolation” in Peru than any country in the world except Brazil. All live in the Amazon - the majority in poorly-protected reserves, or areas where reserves have been proposed but never established, or “protected natural areas” such as national parks.

For years indigenous federations and other civil society organisations in Peru and abroad have worked for the territories of indigenous peoples in “isolation” to be made off-limits, citing Peruvian and international laws, emphasising their rights to self-determination, and stressing their vulnerability to contact because of their lack of immunological defences and the risk of epidemics and fatalities. The biggest dangers - in terms of outsiders entering their territories, exploiting resources and/or actively seeking contact - are oil and gas companies, loggers and logging roads, narco-traffickers, evangelical missionaries, Catholic priests, artisanal miners and highways.

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Mayor has written to BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen urging them to contribute funding to help combat UK pollution as they have done in Germany

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has written to three leading car manufacturers asking them to contribute to the fund set up to tackle the capital’s air pollution crisis.

Khan has accused BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen of “double standards” after it emerged they had paid £223m to the German government’s Sustainable Mobility Fund for Cities earlier this year, but have given nothing to the UK.

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World leaders must do more to defend custodians of natural world whose lives are at risk from big business, says UN rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

Global leaders must do more to protect indigenous people fighting to protect their land and way of life if the world is to limit climate change, according to the UN special rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.

Speaking ahead of key climate talks in Bonn next month she urged politicians to recognise that indigenous communities around the world were the most effective custodians of millions of hectares of forest “which act as the world’s lungs”.

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Scott and his team at the geographic South Pole, January 18, 1912. National Library of Australia

On February 11, 1913, the world woke to the headline “Death of Captain Scott. Lost with four comrades. The Pole reached. Disaster on the return”. A keenly anticipated, privately funded scientific venture “off the map” had turned to tragedy.

Previous reports had described the polar party of the British Antarctic Expedition striking out confidently just 2.5º latitude from their objective: the geographic South Pole. The journals and letters recovered from the bodies, however, told a tale of heartbreak and desperation: the explorers were shattered to find themselves beaten to the pole by Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen, and weakened terribly during their journey back to base.

Of the five men in Captain Robert F. Scott’s party, Petty Officer Edgar Evans was the first to die, while descending from the high-altitude Antarctic Plateau. Then, while searching in vain on the vast Ross Ice Shelf for the dog sleds ordered to speed their return to base, Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates realised that his ever-slowing pace was threatening the others, and famously walked out into a blizzard with the parting words: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

Pushing on with limited supplies, the remaining men (Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Henry “Birdie” Bowers) found themselves trapped by a nine-day blizzard. All three wrote messages to friends and loved ones while waiting, until eventually their food ran out on about March 29, 1912.

Why did they really die?

Their deaths were put down to the fickleness of Antarctic weather, bad luck or, most controversially, poor leadership on the part of Scott.

But my new research, published in the journal Polar Record, has uncovered new evidence about this ill-fated journey. I have identified major contradictions in the testimony of Scott’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Edward “Teddy” Evans, who survived the expedition after being rejected from Scott’s party.

Was Scott scuppered by Evans?

Evans’s actions raise the possibility that he played a role in the deaths of the five men. Furious at not being included in the attempt on the pole, Evans was returning to base when he collapsed with scurvy. Evans was the only expedition member to develop scurvy, most probably due to his refusal to eat fresh seal meat, a known preventive measure.

His companions Tom Crean and William Lashly heroically saved Evans’s life, a tale made famous in no small measure by expeditioner Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic book on the expedition, The Worst Journey in the World.

Foul play over food?

Buried in the British Library, I found a crucial piece of evidence about Evans’s trip back to camp. Seven pages of notes detail meetings held in April 1913 between Lord Curzon, president of the Royal Geographical Society, and Scott’s and Wilson’s widows, both of whom had read their late husbands’ diaries and correspondence.

According to the notes, Kathleen Scott reported that:

Scott’s words in his diary on exhaustion of food & fuel in depots on his return… It appears Lieut Evans – down with Scurvy – and the 2 men with him must on return journey have entered & consumed more than their share.

Several days later, also according to the meeting notes, Oriana Wilson described how:

…there was a passage in her husband’s diary which spoke of the “inexplicable” shortage of fuel & pemmican [sledging ration] on the return journey… This passage however she proposes to show to no one and to keep secret.

Closer examination of diary entries suggest that the food in question went missing from a depot at the southern end of the Ross Ice Shelf. Letters from the time indicate that Curzon immediately shut down the inquiry he was planning to hold. It is not unreasonable to assume that Curzon’s interpretation of events was that Evans was dangerously ill and if he had not taken the food would have also died.

But the account of exactly when Evans fell down with scurvy changed over time. Returning to civilisation in 1912, Evans described in a letter how he was stricken when he was 300 miles from base, a distance confirmed by media interviews from the time.

But by the following year, this figure had changed to 500 miles, a distance also reported in the book Scott’s Last Expedition. This would put the onset of his sickness at the southern end of the Ross Ice Shelf, precisely where the food appears to have gone missing.

Unwittingly, Cherry-Garrard published a substantially embellished version of Lashly’s sledging diary in The Worst Journey in the World, in which Evans’s sickness was shifted one week earlier to align with the public timeline.

Overall, the evidence strongly suggests that Evans took the cached food when he had not yet succumbed to scurvy, possibly because of his anger at having been sent back early and forced to drag his sledge with just two men. The timing of the various pieces evidence suggest that his story was later changed to fit with the idea that he took the food because he was ill.

Disturbingly, Scott’s order to Evans to send the dog sled teams to the southern end of the Ross Ice Shelf does not appear to have been communicated either, fatally slowing the polar party’s return.

Writing from his deathbed, Scott warned: “Teddy Evans is not to be trusted over much, though he means well.”

Given the evidence, this was arguably a generous statement.

Chris Turney receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is the author of 'Iced In: Ten Days Trapped on the Edge of Antarctica' (published by Citadel), 'Shackled' (Penguin Books Australia) and '1912: The Year The World Discovered Antarctica' (Text Publishing).

Current UK law allows trade in ‘antiques’ carved before 1947 but government bows to campaigners and will ban sale of ivory regardless of age

The UK government has bowed to campaigners and will ban the sale of ivory regardless of age, according to a new consultation.

The UK is the biggest exporter of legal ivory in the world and shutting down the trade will help prevent illegal ivory being laundered by criminals. More than 50 elephants are killed by poachers every day on average and the population of African elephants plunged by a third between 2007-14 alone, leading to warnings that the entire species could go extinct.

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