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| David Haring - Duke Lemur Center |
“Dolphins and manatees don’t interact super often, mainly because manatees spend a lot of their time in fresher waters than you find dolphins,” said Mike Heithaus, dean of Florida International University College of Arts, Sciences and Education and professor of the university’s department of biological sciences.
“There’s no particular reason they wouldn’t interact, but manatee numbers are down and that makes it less likely. The more unique part is to see that many manatees from a drone and it’s always cool to see dolphins swimming through them.
“If we are successful in rebuilding manatee populations to where they should be, we could see this more often. It’s a glimpse of what we could do with the oceans if we work really hard to restore them to what they used to be. The threats are still there and the population isn’t where it used to be.”
To biologists, monogamy is somewhat a mystery. That’s in part because in many animal groups it’s rare. While around 90% of bird species practice some form of fidelity to one partner, only 3% to 5% of mammals do. The vast majority of the roughly 6,500 known species of mammals have open relationships, so to speak.
“It’s an uncommon arrangement,” says Nicholas Grebe, a postdoctoral associate in professor Christine Drea’s lab at Duke University and lead author of the paper, published in Scientific Reports.
Which raises a question: what makes some species biologically inclined to pair up for the long haul while others play the field?
"Mining" for the cryptocurrency is power-hungry, involving heavy computer calculations to verify transactions.Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year - and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps.
Critics say electric-car firm Tesla's decision to invest heavily in Bitcoin undermines its environmental image.
The currency's value hit a record $48,000 (£34,820) this week. following Tesla's announcement that it had bought about $1.5bn bitcoin and planned to accept it as payment in future.
But the rising price offers even more incentive to Bitcoin miners to run more and more machines.
And as the price increases, so does the energy consumption, according to Michel Rauchs, researcher at The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, who co-created the online tool that generates these estimates.
Printing paper money is cheap in comparison and, as an added benefit, isn't a pyramid scam.
Hawaii's Beaches Are Being Washed Away
Property owners are legally only allowed to keep the emergency protections in place temporarily, but officials with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources have liberally interpreted the term “temporary,” allowing walls of sandbags to remain in front of some properties for years, and even decades, after issuing repeated approvals or losing track of them, an investigation in December by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found.
Coastal scientists warn that the structures can be just as damaging to Hawaii’s beaches as seawalls, which have contributed to the loss of about one-quarter of the beaches on Oahu, Maui and Kauai. As waves hit an armored shoreline, they pull sand off the beach. In addition, the sandbags have blocked public shorelines, created eyesores along picturesque coastlines and littered beaches with heavy fabric and rope that gets torn and whipped around by waves.
Wealthy property owners are destroying the beaches for everyone in order to protect their personal investment in beach front property.
Coastal Darkening - One More Disaster for our Oceans
LWM/NASA/LANDSAT/Alamy Stock Photo
“It’s affecting the quality of the sea we know,” says Oliver Zielinski, who runs the Coastal Ocean Darkening project at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. These “changes in the physics will lead to biological changes,” he adds.
Some of the causes behind ocean darkening are well understood: fertilizer enters the water and causes an algal bloom, or boats stir up light-blocking silt as they move. But other causes are murkier. During heavy rains, for instance, organic matter—primarily from decaying plants and loose soil—can enter the ocean as a brown, light-blocking slurry. This process is well documented in rivers and lakes, but has largely been overlooked in coastal areas.
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