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Any guess what this is ??

• UNESCO has declared the floodplain around Malaysian Borneo’s Kinabatangan River a biosphere reserve, linking the Heart of Borneo to the Lower Kinabatangan–Segama Wetlands.
• Conservationists warn that the landscape remains heavily fragmented by oil palm plantations and faces persistent threats from pollution and weak land governance.
• They argue that lasting change will require land reform, corporate accountability and stronger coordination between Sabah’s forestry and wildlife authorities.

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See: Calcifying plankton: From biomineralization to global change

The study: Floral scent chemodiversity is associated with high floral visitor but low bacterial richness on flowers

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29116041

• New research carried out in Colombia by the University of Cambridge suggests that local surveys assessing the effect of land clearances on biodiversity may be underestimating the impact by as much as 60%.
• To fully understand the effects of clearing forests for pastureland, much surveys of a much larger scale are required to reflect the different levels of biodiversity in regions and habitats and their resilience to change.
• More accurate species surveys, the authors say, could also support future programs such as biodiversity offsetting schemes as well as influencing farming policies.

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October 20 marks International Sloth Day, a day dedicated to celebrating these enigmatic and often critically endangered creatures.

You walk into a tea shops and find countless varieties. All those herbal teas: not really tea. They are made from non-tea plants, most of which taste nothing like real tea. Peu-er is probably as close as it gets.

The remaining (real) tea all comes from the same singular specie. Green and black is just a difference in processing of the same plant. White tea is just taking the tips of the tea leaf. All the flavors are just ways we dress it up with additives, or by smoking it (e.g. Russian Earl Gray).

Why the lack of biodiversity? Because no one has genetically modified a tea tree to give us more choice. There are far more tea drinkers in the world than coffee drinkers. That’s ideal b/c coffee has environmental consequences. It also means there should be a huge market for something like a tea tree that is married to a maple tree to give us maple tasting tea, or GMO tea that tastes like coffee.

Gynandromorphs are rare organisms that are half-male and half-female, where each side of the body presents differently, split right down the middle. Gynandromorphs are distinct from hermaphrodites in that hermaphrodite organisms still have bilateral symmetry and naturally have both sex organs. Hermaphroditism is common in some organisms, while gynandromorphism is much rarer.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6440648

Global temperature rise may feel like it’s gradual, but the changes it brings can turn out to be sudden, massive, and self-reinforcing. These changes are what scientists call tipping points. When a tipping point is reached, an Earth system abruptly and dramatically changes, often irreversibly, like the Amazon rainforest turning into a savanna — a point of no return that is already perilously close.

But today, a group of 160 scientists from 23 countries is announcing that the planet has already reached its first major tipping point: the widespread death of warm-water coral reefs. That’s due primarily to rapidly rising marine temperatures — the seas have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat we’ve created — but also the acidification that comes from more atmospheric CO2 interacting with water. (This interferes with corals’ ability to build the protective skeletons that form the complex structure of a reef.) Since the late 1980s, ocean surface warming has quadrupled. Accordingly, in the last half century, half of the world’s live coral cover has disappeared.

“We’re no longer talking about future tipping points — there’s one happening right now,” Steve Smith, a research impact fellow at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and a coauthor of the report, told Grist. “Although our governments are used to planning for incremental, slow change, things do seem to be speeding up.”

The more individual corals perish, the harder it gets for a reef to bounce back, destabilizing it and pushing it into a spiral of die-off. A quarter of all marine species rely on these bustling warm-water ecosystems — which cover some 350,000 square miles — but corals are bleaching as they release the symbiotic algae they need to harvest energy. Since 2023, more than 80 percent of the world’s reefs have suffered through the most widespread and intense bleaching event on record. Ever-higher acidification makes it even harder for corals to reproduce and then grow back from this kind of disturbance.

Warm-water corals are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they’ve made an evolutionary compromise. Being close to the ocean surface, their symbiotic algae soak up bountiful sunlight to provide energy, meaning they don’t need to rely as much on outside nutrients. But that positioning also means that during marine heat waves, hot water envelops the corals, stressing them to the point where they release their algae, causing bleaching.

“This is a tradeoff. They have a balance they have to strike,” said Gordon Zhang, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Reef Solutions group who wasn’t involved in the new report. “If the water doesn’t move much, and it’s a very shallow place, the water just keeps heating up.”

Beyond their critical role in hosting marine life, these reefs provide $9.9 trillion a year in goods and services, like fishing and tourism, supporting the livelihoods of 1 billion people. They also act like giant barriers for coastal communities, absorbing the impact of storm surges, the walls of water that hurricanes shove ashore: Reefs in Mexico, for instance, reduced the damage from 2007’s Hurricane Dean by 43 percent.

Coral reefs, then, are both ecologically and economically essential, yet civilization is woefully unprepared for them reaching this tipping point — to say nothing of the other looming tipping points, like the retreat of glaciers. “We are now in a new reality, and we can no longer rely on the institutions and policies designed for the old one,” Manjana Milkoreit, who researches global governance at University of Oslo and coauthored the report, said during a press conference announcing the findings.

For one, nations as a whole are nowhere near ambitious enough in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are putting unprecedented stress on coral reefs and other essential systems. Secondly, certain tipping points could be so catastrophic that governments would struggle to deal with the society-shaking fallout. A change in ocean currents in the Atlantic, for example, would plunge Europe into deep freezes and mess with the monsoon rains that faraway nations need for their crops. And thirdly, these irreversible changes can reinforce and exacerbate other crises — droughts would worsen if the Amazon turns into a savanna, for instance — a very unwelcome kind of synergy.

Basically, humans need to actively prevent tipping points, because there may be no going back once one kicks off. Coral ecosystems can’t recover and stabilize if we keep warming and acidifying the oceans. “The key message here is: Do not assume that we already know what to do, or we’re already doing everything we can,” Milkoreit said. “It’s not just more of the same, or a matter of implementing existing policies — a different approach to governance is needed.”

Read NextThe 7 climate tipping points that could change the world foreverAlexandria Herr, Shannon Osaka, & Maddie Stone

But when it comes to society’s response to these risks, the report’s authors actually see a positive tipping point, in that the price of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar, and the batteries needed to store that power, have been cratering, making these cleaner options more economical than developing more fossil fuel infrastructure. Texas, for example, generates way more combined wind and solar power than any other state — in 2023, a third of its electricity came from renewables — not because its Republican leadership is gung-ho about clean energy, but because it’s good business. Still, the market can only tip so fast, as the world is on pace to blow past the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to well below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

More locally, scientists and policymakers can buy coral reefs time. Turning them into marine protected areas, for example, preserves biodiversity and helps keep these ecosystems stable. More voraciously policing overfishing prevents the collapse of fish populations. And reducing pollution from agriculture and sewage into coastal areas removes a stressor that’s only making matters worse for reefs.

The healthier the reef, the better it can weather climatic shocks like marine heat waves, which will only get more common and intense from here. “Like most natural systems, corals can be resilient — they can bounce back, but only so many times,” Mike Barrett, chief scientific advisor at the World Wildlife Fund in the United Kingdom — which funded and coauthored the report — said during the press conference. “What we’ve done is simply push them beyond what they can cope with.”

That’s why scientists are actively saving corals, bringing them into labs and learning how to breed these notoriously sensitive animals. By establishing populations in controlled environments, they can learn the fundamental science around coral biology and reproduction, and how the species respond to different conditions. If a certain part of the ocean becomes inhospitable for corals, researchers could maintain those species in captivity, and even return them to the wild if temperatures come back down.

Even in the nearer term, they might breed healthier, more genetically diverse coral babies that are more tolerant to heat, then reintroduce them to the wild. “Increasingly, corals are being brought into human care, both as a Noah’s Ark and also as a genetic refuge,” said Rebecca Albright, director of the Coral Regeneration Lab at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the new report. “As ecosystem degradation increases and things continue to deteriorate, typically management moves into this more risk-taking approach, where you’re willing to try more things.”

Yes, a tipping point may be a metaphorical cliff, but all is not lost for the world’s corals — if humanity accelerates the translation to clean energy. “The race is on,” Smith said during the press conference, “to transform the entire energetic basis of society within a generation — it’s never been done before — away from fossil fuels and over-exploitation and towards a cleaner, safer future in time to avoid further tipping points and the devastating consequences they will bring.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Corals are disappearing, pushing Earth to its first major ‘tipping point’ on Oct 12, 2025.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6420770

Less than two years after researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom warned that the world was nearing numerous climate tipping points, a report out Monday warns that one such “point of no return” has already been reached, with warm-water coral reefs “experiencing unprecedented dieback.”

Surging global temperatures, especially in recent years, have pushed the world’s coral reefs into a state of widespread decline, with the worst bleaching event on record taking place since 2023. More than 84% of the world’s reefs have been impacted.

In the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 released Monday, the researchers warned that “the central estimate” of coral reefs’ “tipping point of 1.2°C global warming has been crossed,” with planetary heating now at about 1.4°C above preindustrial levels.

The warming waters have caused widespread bleaching of coral reefs, which impacts the nearly a million species of marine animals and organisms that rely on them to support some of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems.

“Unless we return to global mean surface temperatures of 1.2°C (and eventually to at least 1°C) as fast as possible, we will not retain warm-water reefs on our planet at any meaningful scale,” the report says. Minimizing non-climatic stressors, particularly improved reef management, can give reefs the best chance of surviving under what must be a minimal exceedance of their thermal tipping point.“

The decline of coral reefs also leaves coastal communities without natural barriers against storm surge, compounds the overfishing crisis by depriving fish of a habitat in which to reproduce, and impacts thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in reef tourism each year.

”As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation.“

”We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,“ Steve Smith, a social scientist at the University of Exeter and a lead author of the report, told Nature. ”This is our new reality.“

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It’s official: the only Australian shrew is no more.

The latest edition of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the world’s most comprehensive global inventory on extinction risk, has declared the Christmas Island shrew is extinct.

Shrews are small, long-nosed, insect-eating mammals, with many species widely distributed across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. On mainland Australia, similar roles are filled by unrelated small marsupials such as dunnarts, antechinuses, planigales and ningauis, which are themselves not writ large on our national consciousness.

This king cobra was found in the midst of a well populated village and was promptly rescued by a team of professional snake handlers who afterwards safely released the snake into a nearby forested area away from any habitation. When threatened or stressed after immediately consuming a large meal, reptiles, particularly snakes will sometimes regurgitate the contents in their stomachs to lighten themselves to be able to make a quick getaway or defend themselves. King cobras are ophiophagous, with their diet consisting mainly of other snake species including several nonvenomous and venomous snake species, including other king cobras. This one was in the process of regurgitating a ratsnake that it had consumed.

PS. This is for educational purposes only. I cannot stress enough on the fact that you must never attempt to handle wildlife or try to relocate a snake (especially venomous ones) by yourself unless you are a trained professional or rescuer with proper equipment and training to deal with them, as not only is it very stupid and dangerous for both yourself and for the animal involved but it can very well result in grevious injury or death for the people around and for the snake.