At least 45 whales were entangled by fishing ropes and line on the east coast in 2024. 'There’s a lot of times when we’ll get out to an entanglement where we just think, this animal should just probably be put to sleep,' says Sea World’s head of marine sciences, Wayne Phillips.
The constant drag of rope and floats slowly causes a whale to succumb to exhaustion. 'It’s probably the worst way of dying for any marine … animal,' marine scientist Olaf Meynecke, says. 'It takes weeks to several months until they actually die'
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
01/10/2025 - 09:00
01/10/2025 - 09:00
Exclusive: The kaputar slug, which can grow longer than a human hand, was almost wiped out in the black summer bushfires of 2019-20
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A giant, fluorescent pink slug’s comeback on Mount Kaputar has been mapped by eager citizen scientists.
The kaputar slug grows up to 20cm long – outstripping the average human hand – and 6cm wide. The only place it exists in the entire world is on an extinct volcano in NSW’s Mount Kaputar national park.
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01/10/2025 - 09:00
Experts recorded 45 entanglements off Australia’s east coast in 2024 – but believe that’s ‘the tip of the iceberg’
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At least 45 whales were entangled by fishing ropes and line on the east coast in 2024, and experts are calling for better management of fishing gear in Australia to prevent marine suffering.
Dr Olaf Meynecke, a marine scientist at Griffith University, said the issue of preventing whale entanglements was “largely ignored in Australia”.
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01/10/2025 - 08:51
Strong winds and low humidity continue as five fires rage across Los Angeles area, with death toll expected to rise
Los Angeles fires: the damage in maps, video and images
Weather forecasters in Los Angeles were expecting fast, dry winds to return towards the end of the weekend, threatening to fuel wildfires that have already destroyed 10,000 structures and killed 11 people.
Urgent “red flag” alerts – meaning critical fire weather conditions – announced by the US National Weather Service (NWS) said moderate to strong wind and low humidity would continue on Friday morning, as five fires raged across the metropolis.
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01/10/2025 - 08:00
Those who lived in regions with firefighting training areas earned about 1.7% less later in life, research shows
Early life exposure to toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” could affect economic success in adulthood, new first-of-its-kind research suggests.
The Iowa State University and US Census Bureau working paper compared the earnings, college graduation rates and birth weights of two groups of children – those raised around military installations that had firefighting training areas, and those who lived near bases with no firefighting training site.
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01/10/2025 - 06:00
A similar campaign of rumors and lies was seen after the North Carolina hurricane, with DEI a primary target
As Los Angeles firefighters battle ongoing blazes, prominent rightwing figures are spreading bigoted criticism of the response and lies about who is to blame, including that the fire is raging because of diversity within the fire department.
The misinformation echoes the claims that plagued the North Carolina hurricane response. Both disasters led to outrage, which partisan actors seized upon to advance their political goals, muddying the already confusing information ecosystem that accompanies a fast-moving news event.
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01/10/2025 - 05:55
Second pair of illegally released animals safely captured in Cairngorms after they were spotted on camera traps
Two more lynx abandoned in the Cairngorms have been safely captured, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland said on Friday.
Two of the illegally released animals were captured on Thursday after being sighted in the Dell of Killiehuntly near Kingussie in the Scottish Highlands.
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01/10/2025 - 03:00
The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world
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01/09/2025 - 22:00
Highest recorded temperatures supercharged extreme weather – with worse to come, EU data shows
Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”.
The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows. That is a jump of 0.1C from 2023, which was also a record hot year and represents levels of heat never experienced by modern humans.
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01/09/2025 - 19:09
It’s possible for massive fires to burn in Australian cities. Planning needs to reflect this
As the Los Angeles wildfires rage, we are watching a disaster unfold in real time.
We knew this would happen eventually. We have moved from possible futures to these things now happening. The deferment has ended.
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