The Guardian

Type of whale immortalised in Moby-Dick has only been spotted handful of times this century

It is the most mythic animal in the ocean: a white sperm whale, filmed on Monday by Leo van Toly, watching from a Dutch merchant ship off Jamaica. Moving gracefully, outrageously pale against the blue waters of the Caribbean, for any fans of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s book of 1851, this vision is a CGI animation come to life.

Sperm whales are generally grey, black or even brown in appearance. Hal Whitehead, an expert on the species, told the Guardian: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fully white sperm whale. I have seen ones with quite a lot of white on them, usually in patches on and near the belly.”

Alert over Southern, Yorkshire and SES Water amid concerns over pollution and flooding in sector

The water regulator has raised a red flag over the financial health of three of Britain’s biggest water companies as concern grows over the industry’s poor record on tackling flooding, leaks and pollution.

Ofwat called out Southern Water, Yorkshire Water and SES Water for “weak levels of financial resilience” and levels of customer service which lag behind the rest of the industry.

Tiny bridge in Lancashire will connect two wild populations of the tree-dwelling hazel dormouse

Measuring 12 metres long and just 30cm wide, it’s a bridge of miniature proportions.

But it is hoped that the square metal tube – set to become the first “dormouse bridge” across a UK railway – could help to save Britain’s endangered wild hazel dormouse population from extinction.

Climate models show switch will happen decades faster than previously thought, with ‘profound’ implications

Rain will replace snow as the Arctic’s most common precipitation as the climate crisis heats up the planet’s northern ice cap, according to research.

Today, more snow falls in the Arctic than rain. But this will reverse, the study suggests, with all the region’s land and almost all its seas receiving more rain than snow before the end of the century if the world warms by 3C. Pledges made by nations at the recent Cop26 summit could keep the temperature rise to a still disastrous 2.4C, but only if these promises are met.

Mycorrhizal fungal networks are a major global carbon sink. When we destroy them, we sabotage our efforts to limit global heating

If we want to tackle the climate crisis, we need to address a global blindspot: the vast underground fungal networks that sequester carbon and sustain much of life on Earth.

Fungi are largely invisible ecosystem engineers. Most live as branching, fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium. Globally, the total length of fungal mycelium in the top 10cm of soil is more than 450 quadrillion km: about half the width of our galaxy. These symbiotic networks comprise an ancient life-support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world.

Toby Kiers is professor of evolutionary biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-founder of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (Spun)

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures

Local conservationist recognises ‘honeybee propaganda’ beside mural before writing to famed British naturalist

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A suburban South Australian shopping centre has created a buzz after it falsely attributed a quote about bees, written on a plaque in a bathroom hallway, to the famous British naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

The plaque, labelled “honeybee propaganda”, has now been removed after Attenborough himself intervened.

While greenhouse emissions were stable over the year, an uptick in the June quarter shows pollution is not in decline despite Australia’s net zero by 2050 pledge

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Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rose in the June quarter by about 2% as pollution from the electricity sector and transport increased.

Figures released on Tuesday by the Morrison government showed that on a year to year basis, emissions for the 12 months to last June totalled 498.9m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That tally was down 2.1%, or 10.8m tonnes compared with the same period a year earlier.

A dozen countries block Morrison government’s ‘highly inappropriate’ push to suspend process for adding sites to world heritage ‘in danger’ list

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A dozen countries have accused the Australian government of trying to hit pause on a process that could still lead to the Great Barrier Reef being placed on a list of world heritage sites “in danger”.

But a global climate change policy to guide how more than 190 countries deal with the crisis affecting some of the world’s most special places, couldn’t be agreed on at a major international meeting in Paris.

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World Wildlife Fund Australia awards commonwealth wooden spoon over missed opportunity at Cop26

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The federal government has been ranked last behind all Australia’s states and the Northern Territory in the move toward clean energy, with a new report showing Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia are leading the transition to renewables.

World Wildlife Fund Australia’s second “renewable superpower” scorecard ranks Australian governments on their progress in switching to clean energy and developing new renewable export industries.

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Overload of chicken and dairy cow manure has left some catchments critical, says author of book on issue

UK farmers may have to reduce the number of animals they keep because of the critical state of some river catchments, a pollution expert from the government’s environment watchdog has said.

Farming is the most significant source of water pollution and ammonia emissions into the atmosphere in the UK, according to government data. It accounts for 25% of phosphate, 50% of nitrate and 75% of sediment loadings in the water environment, which harms ecosystems.

Speaking independently, Tim Bailey of the Environment Agency said the state of catchments such as the River Wye and the Somerset Levels and Moors had become critical because of the number of chickens and dairy cows and the problem of disposing of manure from farms.

Even if warming is kept to 1.5C, bleaching would hit more than three times a decade, study predicts

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Parts of the Great Barrier Reef would be hit with extreme levels of coral bleaching five times each decade by the middle of this century if global heating was kept just below 2C, according to ‘“confronting” new research.

Even under the most ambitious scenario where heating is kept to 1.5C, coral bleaching strong enough to kill corals would hit somewhere on the reef more than three times a decade, the study predicts.

In a bid to secure the future of the near threatened species, 30 animals have been driven, flown and finally rehomed in Akagera national park

Getting stuck into the in-flight wine wasn’t an option for the 30 passengers flying overnight from South Africa to Rwanda. Crew members instead worked to keep the first-time air travellers placid and problem-free. The last thing anyone wanted was a 1.5-ton rhino on the rampage aboard a Boeing 747.

“All the rhinos were slightly sedated to keep them calm and not aggressive or trying to get out of the crates,” said Jes Gruner, of conservation organisation African Parks, who oversaw the largest single rhino translocation in history this weekend. “The rhinos weren’t sedated on the plane in the sense they were totally lying down, as that’s bad for their sternums. But they were partly drugged, so they could still stand up and keep their bodily functions normal, but enough to keep them calm and stable.”

Portfolio selection rules on evaluating risk used to pick 50 reefs as ‘arks’ best able to survive climate crisis and revive coral elsewhere

A Nobel prize-winning economic theory used by investors is showing early signs of helping save threatened coral reefs, scientists say.

Researchers at Australia’s University of Queensland used modern portfolio theory (MPT), a mathematical framework developed by the economist Harry Markowitz in the 1950s to help risk-averse investors maximise returns, to identify the 50 reefs or coral sanctuaries around the world that are most likely to survive the climate crisis and be able to repopulate other reefs, if other threats are absent.

Brash piles provide safety from predators and place to breed for animal now hailed as ‘ecosystem engineer’

Symbol of Easter and scourge of Mr McGregor, the rabbit may be the cute hero of children’s books but its rapid reproduction has traditionally made it a pest for farmers and gardeners.

Now, however, with British rabbit populations are being decimated by disease, the humble bunny is being hailed as an “ecosystem engineer” and landowners encouraged to create innovative “rabbit hotels” to revive its numbers.

In a taste of things to come, a secret Office of National Assessment report worried the ‘carbon dioxide problem’ would hurt the nation’s coal industry

The report was stamped CONFIDENTIAL twice on each page, with the customary warning it should “not be released to any other government except Britain, Canada, NZ and US”.

About 40 years ago this week, the spooks at Australia’s intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), delivered the 17-page report to prime minister Malcolm Fraser.

When Cousin Greg was disinherited by his grandfather in favour of the environmental group, inquiries about such legacies soared

In one bewildering and painful scene in the hit TV drama Succession, Cousin Greg sees his future of ease and wealth turn to dust. His grandfather, Ewan, announces he is giving away his entire fortune to Greenpeace, depriving Greg of his inheritance.

Now Greenpeace is hoping to benefit in real life as well as in the fictional world of the media conglomerate Waystar Royco. Thousands of people have looked into leaving money to the environmental group since the darkly comic storyline about Cousin Greg losing his inheritance and then threatening to sue the organisation was broadcast. More than 22,000 people have accessed online advice about making donations in their wills to Greenpeace. The group’s legacy webpage has also seen a tenfold surge in traffic since the episode was first broadcast earlier this month.

Expert says claims that EVs will ‘end the weekend can be put to bed’ by new figures

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Australian electric vehicle drivers are on average driving further than people with petrol vehicles as infrastructure improves, new statistics show.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics for the first time looked at how electric vehicle drivers use their cars and found that in the 12 months to 30 June 2020 they had travelled 69 million km.

Scientists have carefully collected spawn bundles by moonlight in a bid to help save the reef

It’s nearing 10pm, and Dr Kate Quigley is still waiting. Using red lights to minimise disruption to the animals’ behaviour, she is inspecting corals.

Quigley, who studies reef restoration at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, is looking for “little red dots all over the surface”. A pimply appearance is a hallmark sign that a coral is about to spawn, releasing sperm and eggs in bundles resembling small bubbles.

Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science are hoping to breed corals that are more resilient to extreme heat events. The researchers collected hundreds of coral samples from the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef that have survived three mass bleaching events since 2016. The samples have to be collected before they spawn which occurs only once a year, several days after a full moon in spring. They then hope to breed these samples with corals from the southern part of the reef which are less heat tolerant

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• Great Barrier Reef’s future dealt blow as study finds only 2% escaped coral bleaching

Material Focus says tech superseded by purchases on Black Friday and beyond can be donated or recycled

Black Friday and pre-Christmas spending sprees will create an e-waste mountain as 5m unwanted electrical items are binned or put in storage in Britain, a campaign group has warned.

The end-of-November sales event triggers the commercial run-up to Christmas and is followed days later by the Cyber Monday e-commerce frenzy, with retailers offering cut-price deals on a range of goods from mobile phones to laptops and smart speakers.