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New light shed on Charles Darwin's 'abominable mystery'

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A scientist has shed new light on the origins of Charles Darwin's "abominable mystery".

The famous naturalist was haunted by the question of how the first flowering plants evolved.

Darwin feared this inexplicable puzzle would undermine his theories of evolution, says Prof Richard Buggs.

Forgotten historical documents show a rival scientist was arguing for divine intervention in the rise of the flowering plants.

This greatly vexed Darwin in his final months, says the evolutionary biologist at Queen Mary, University of London.

"The mystery seems to have been made particularly abominable to him by its highly publicised use by the keeper of botany at the British Museum to argue for divine intervention in the history of life," he says.

What is the abominable mystery?

Darwin coined the phrase, abominable mystery, in 1879. In a letter to his closest friend, botanist and explorer Dr Joseph Hooker, he wrote: "The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery."

The mystery centres on the rise of the flowering plants, or angiosperms, the family of plants that produce flowers and bear their seeds in fruits.

They make up the vast majority of all known living plants, from oaks to wildflowers and water lilies.

Flowering plants appeared on Earth relatively recently on a geological timescale, then swiftly diversified in an explosion of colour, shape and form.

"In the fossil record they appear very suddenly in the Cretaceous, dated at about 100 million years ago, and there's nothing that looks like an angiosperm before them and then they suddenly appear and in considerable diversity," says Prof Buggs.

Questions raised by the sudden appearance of flowering plants are at the heart of Darwin's abominable mystery, he explains.

"Why isn't there a gradual evolution of the angiosperms? Why can't we see intermediate forms between the gymnosperms - things like conifers - and the flowering plants? And why, when they appear, are they already so diverse?"

Why was Darwin puzzled?

Darwin was deeply bothered by how flowering plants conquered the world seemingly in the blink of an eye, while other large groups, such as the mammals, evolved gradually.

The advent of flowering plants suggested evolution could be both rapid and abrupt, in direct contradiction to an essential element of natural selection, natura non facit saltum - nature makes no leap.

Darwin toyed with the idea that flowering plants might have evolved on an as yet undiscovered island or continent.

In August 1881, only months before his death, he wrote to Hooker: "Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants. I have sometimes speculated whether there did not exist somewhere during long ages an extremely isolated continent perhaps near the South Pole."

What's the new thinking?

In the library at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Prof Buggs came across a re-print of a lecture from 1876 by the Scottish botanist William Carruthers that gives new context to Darwin's thinking.

William Carruthers rose to become keeper of botany at the British Museum, and "a towering figure at the time in paleobotany".

In a lecture to the Geologists Association in the library of University College London, Carruthers highlighted the problems that Darwin had with the fossil record, focussing on the sudden appearance of flowering plants.

His comments were reported in The Times and the scientific press, sparking a public debate.

"Carruthers was using the abominable mystery to launch an attack on evolution itself," says Prof Buggs. "He thought that God had created the angiosperms in the Cretaceous; they hadn't evolved.

"To Darwin and his friends, this was anathema, basically, because [Carruthers] was trying to bring supernatural explanations into the fossil record."

But Darwin had a problem. The points Carruthers was making about the fossil record were actually very difficult to explain in terms of evolution, says Prof Buggs.

He thinks this is what prompted Darwin to coin the phrase "an abominable mystery" and makes his case in a scientific paper, published in the American Journal of Botany.

The mystery was to Darwin what Fermat's Last Theorem was to the 17th Century mathematician Pierre de Fermat, he adds.

"It gives an insight into what was going on in Darwin's mind in the last few years of his life and it gives it an extra romance, almost, a bit like Fermat's Last Theorem - Darwin's last mystery, this problem preying on his mind in his final months."

And is the mystery solved?

In short, no. "One hundred and forty years later, the mystery's still unsolved," says Prof Buggs. "Of course, we've made lots of progress in our understanding of evolution and in our knowledge of the fossil record, but this mystery is still there."

Follow Helen on Twitter.

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New light shed on Charles Darwin's 'abominable mystery'

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A scientist has shed new light on the origins of Charles Darwin's "abominable mystery". The famous naturalist was haunted by the question of how the first flowering plants evolved. Darwin feared this inexplicable puzzle would undermine his theories of evolution, says Prof Richard Buggs.

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Divers swim with one of biggest great white sharks off Hawaii - BBC News

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Desalination plants produce more waste brine than thought - National Geographic

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Desalination plants produce more waste brine than thought - National Geographic

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There's enough wastewater from the world's facilities to cover Florida a foot deep-here's why that's a potential problem.

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Oysters Open and Close Their Shells as the Moon Wanes and Waxes - Smithsonian

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Oysters Open and Close Their Shells as the Moon Wanes and Waxes - Smithsonian

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A new study suggests the mollusks may widen and narrow their shells depending on movement of plankton, which shifts with the lunar cycle

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'One million' fish die in Australian river in 'ecological catastrophe' - Sky News

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'One million' fish die in Australian river in 'ecological catastrophe' - Sky News

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Up to a million fish have died in an Australian river in "an ecological catastrophe on an international scale".

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Australian Jellyfish Swarm Stings Thousands, Forcing Beach Closings - The New York Times

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Australian Jellyfish Swarm Stings Thousands, Forcing Beach Closings - The New York Times

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Bluebottle jellyfish are normally found far from shore, but they have been descending on Australia's east coast in what officials called a "relentless" assault.

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Bluefin tuna sells for £2.5m world record at Tokyo fish market - Sky News

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Bluefin tuna sells for £2.5m world record at Tokyo fish market - Sky News

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A bluefin tuna has sold for a record £2.5m (333.6 million yen) at a Tokyo market - but the buyer has admitted he may have got a bit carried away.

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Fishing: New EU rules could have 'grave' impact on UK industry - BBC News

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Fishing: New EU rules could have 'grave' impact on UK industry - BBC News

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Fishers can no longer discard fish to avoid busting quota - but that could put boats off the water.

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Shark Cannibalism: It's A Thing And It Just Got Weirder. - Forbes

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Shark Cannibalism: It's A Thing And It Just Got Weirder. - Forbes

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Sharks live a tough life. Their parents are not in the picture at all, they are prey before they become a top predator, and some species even eat each other while in the womb. Science is now shedding light on this cannibalistic uterine battle that will leave you astounded.

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Climate change: The massive CO2 emitter you may not know about

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Concrete is the most widely used man-made material in existence. It is second only to water as the most-consumed resource on the planet.
But, while cement - the key ingredient in concrete - has shaped much of our built environment, it also has a massive carbon footprint.

Cement is the source of about 8% of the world's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, according to think tank Chatham House.

If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world - behind China and the US. It contributes more CO2 than aviation fuel (2.5%) and is not far behind the global agriculture business (12%).

Cement industry leaders were in Poland for the UN's climate change conference - COP24 - to discuss ways of meeting the requirements of the Paris Agreement on climate change. To do this, annual emissions from cement will need to fall by at least 16% by 2030.

So, how did our love of concrete end up endangering the planet? And what can we do about it?

In praise of concrete

As the key building material of most tower blocks, car parks, bridges and dams, concrete has, for the haters, enabled the construction of some of the world's worst architectural eyesores.

In the UK, it helped the massive wave of post-World War Two development - much of it still dividing opinion - with several of the country's major cities, such as Birmingham, Coventry, Hull and Portsmouth, largely defined by the concrete structures from that building push.

But concrete is also the reason some of the world's most impressive buildings exist.

Sydney Opera House, the Lotus Temple in Delhi, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai as well as the magnificent Pantheon in Rome - boasting the largest unsupported concrete dome in the world - all owe their form to the material.

A mix of sand and gravel, a cement binder and water, concrete is so widely embraced by architects, developers and builders because it is a remarkably good construction material.

"It's affordable, you can produce it almost anywhere and it has all the right structural qualities that you want to build with for a durable building or for infrastructure," explains Felix Preston, deputy research director at the Energy, Environment and Resources Department at Chatham House.

Despite known durability problems with using steel reinforcement, which can crack concrete from the inside, it is still the go-to material across the world.

"Building without concrete, although it is possible, is challenging," says Mr Preston.

Growth of cement industry

It is these unrivalled attributes of concrete that have helped boost global cement production since the 1950s, with Asia and China accounting for the bulk of growth from the 1990s onwards.

Production has increased more than thirtyfold since 1950 and almost fourfold since 1990. China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the US did in the entire 20th Century.

But with Chinese consumption now appearing to level off, most future growth in construction is expected to happen in the emerging markets of South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - driven by rapid urbanisation and economic development.

The floor area of the world's buildings is projected to double in the next 40 years, say Chatham House researchers, requiring cement production to increase by a quarter by 2030.

Concrete has a long history

While many of us assume concrete is a recent addition to our cities, architects and builders have actually been using it for millennia.

The earliest use of concrete is believed to have been more than 8,000 years ago, with traders in Syria and Jordan creating concrete floors, buildings and underground cisterns.

Later, the Romans were known to be masters of concrete, building the Pantheon in Rome in 113-125AD, with its 43m-diameter free-standing concrete dome the largest in the world.

But the concrete used in our modern-built environment owes much of its make-up to a process patented in the early 19th Century by bricklayer Joseph Aspdin of Leeds.

His new technique of roasting limestone and clay in an oven and then grinding it to a powder to make "artificial stone" is now known as Portland cement - still the key ingredient in almost all modern concrete.

But, despite its ubiquitous presence, concrete's environmental credentials have come under increased scrutiny in the last couple of decades.

Not only does the production of Portland cement involve quarrying - causing airborne pollution in the form of dust - it also requires the use of massive kilns, which require large amounts of energy.

The actual chemical process of making cement also emits staggeringly high levels of CO2.

'Action needed'

The sector has made progress - improvements in the energy-efficiency of new plants and burning waste materials instead of fossil fuels has seen the average CO2 emissions per tonne of output fall by 18% over the last few decades, according to Chatham House.

The newly-established Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA), currently representing about 35% of the world's cement production capacity and with a focus on sustainable development, was at COP24.

Chief executive Benjamin Sporton says the fact the organisation now exists "is a demonstration of the commitment of the industry to sustainability, including taking action on climate change".

The GCCA is due to publish a set of sustainability guidelines, which its membership will have to follow.

"By bringing together global players to provide leadership and focus, as well as delivering a detailed work programme, we can help ensure a sustainable future for cement and concrete, and for the needs of future generations," Mr Sporton says.

But despite the promise, Chatham House argues that the industry is reaching the limits of what it can do with current measures.

If the sector has any hope of meeting its commitments to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, it will need to look at overhauling the cement-making process itself, not only reducing the use of fossil fuels.

'Clinker' - the big polluter

It is the process of making "clinker" - the key constituent of cement - that emits the largest amount of CO2 in cement-making.

1. Raw materials, mainly limestone and clay, are quarried and crushed

2. They are ground and mixed with other materials - such as iron ore or ash

3. They are fed into huge, cylindrical kilns and heated to about 1,450C (2,640F)

4. The process of "calcination" splits the material into calcium oxide and CO2

5. A new substance called clinker emerges as marble-sized grey balls

6. The clinker is cooled, ground and mixed with gypsum and limestone

7. The cement is transported to ready-mix concrete companies

In 2016, world cement production generated around 2.2 billion tonnes of CO2 - equivalent to 8% of the global total. More than half of that came from the calcination process.

Together with thermal combustion, 90% of the sector's emissions could be attributed to the production of clinker.

Because of this, Mr Preston and his colleagues argue the sector urgently needs to pursue a number of CO2 reduction strategies.

Further efforts on energy efficiency, a move away from fossil fuels and pursuing carbon capture and storage will help, but can only do so much.

"We've got a long way to close the gap," Mr Preston says.

What the industry really needs to do is plough efforts into producing new types of cement, he argues. In fact, low-carbon cements and "novel cements" might do away with the need for clinker altogether.

New cements

One of those trying to drum up greater support for such alternative cements is Ginger Krieg Dosier, co-founder and CEO of BioMason - a start-up in North Carolina that uses trillions of bacteria to grow bio-concrete bricks.

The technique, which involves placing sand in moulds and injecting it with microorganisms, initiates a process similar to the one that creates coral.

"I have a long fascination with marine cements and structures," explains Ms Krieg Dosier, a trained architect who was surprised to find no real green alternatives to bricks and masonry when she began research at an architectural firm more than 10 years ago.

The discovery led her to create her own solution, which, after years of development, now takes only four days. It happens at room temperature, without the need for fossil fuels or calcination - two of the main sources of the cement industry's CO2 emissions.

Ms Krieg Dosier believes green cements and technologies such as hers offer a solution to the sector's emissions issue.

"Traditional Portland-based cement production practices will continue to release CO2 due to its fundamental chemistry," she says, adding that rather than turning to carbon capture and storage, we should be investing more in techniques that actively remove carbon from the atmosphere.

"Alternative cements and binding technologies go beyond evolutionary CO2 capture to revolutionary methods that fundamentally sequester CO2."

'Disruptive forces'

Alongside such alternative cements, other "disruptive" forces are also beginning to drive change. Digitalisation, machine learning and an increasing awareness of sustainability are all having an impact on the cement industry's culture.

"It's partly changing because of how people want to live, but also because of our ability to dream up new and innovative structures and test those with computer models," says Mr Preston. "There's also the ability to build things more cheaply with robots - with automation."

But changing processes quickly enough to meet the cement industry's obligations will be a challenge.

The sector is dominated by a small number of major producers who are reluctant to experiment or change business models. Architects, engineers, contractors and clients are also, rather understandably, cautious about using new building materials.

"This quite slow-moving, difficult-to-change sector is starting to bump against these quite profound disruptions that we're starting to see in the built environment," says Mr Preston.

But, with very few low-carbon cements reaching commercialisation, and none being applied at scale in an industry where bigger and taller is often the ambition, it looks likely that sustained government support will be needed.

Without governments applying pressure on the industry or providing funding, it may not be possible to get the next generation of low-carbon cements out of the laboratory and into the market within the required timescale.

And the timescale is ever-shrinking.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the leading international body on global warming - last month argued the global average temperature rise needed to be kept below 1.5C - not 2C as noted in the Paris Agreement. This means CO2 emissions need to decline by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030.

Like other young companies, Ms Krieg Dosier describes the difficulties of simultaneously developing and marketing her products and scaling up manufacturing processes to compete within the wider construction industry.

But she thinks there are reasons to be optimistic.

"I do believe the construction industry is approaching a point where alternative materials will be more widely adopted," she says. "This is in part due to market demand, other innovative technologies and wider concern for climate change."

The cement industry, too, points to more optimistic assessments of the industry's progress on emissions and suggests that, across its lifetime, concrete could make a net climate benefit when all possible action is taken into account.

This includes re-carbonation (or the re-absorption of CO2 by cement), concrete's contribution to the energy efficiency of buildings, and innovation in the way cement is manufactured - including carbon capture and storage.

The GCCA says such innovation is its key priority in the months and years ahead. Projects are already underway and showing promise, it added.

But Mr Preston says it is imperative that governments and industry now act quickly at a time when global development is expected to rise but CO2 emissions need to fall.

"There's a desperate need for quality, affordable homes," he says. "There's a need for new infrastructure. We can only square this circle if we can dramatically improve the way that we build, so that overall these buildings are constructed with, as close as possible, net zero emissions."

Design by Lilly Huynh.

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The massive CO2 emitter you may not know about

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Concrete is the most widely used man-made material in existence. It is second only to water as the most-consumed resource on the planet. But, while cement - the key ingredient in concrete - has shaped much of our built environment, it also has a massive carbon footprint.

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Exclusive photos show deep-sea canyon in U.S. waters teeming with life - National Geographic

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Exclusive photos show deep-sea canyon in U.S. waters teeming with life - National Geographic

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A stunning array of biodiversity lies at the depths of a marine region that some fear the Trump administration will open to fishing and mining.

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7 ways wildlife won in 2018 - National Geographic

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7 ways wildlife won in 2018 - National Geographic

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Elephants, rhinos, whales, and other imperiled species received a boost this year.

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Microplastics found to permeate the ocean’s deepest points - National Geographic

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Microplastics have permeated even the deepest parts of our oceans - National Geographic

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One liter of water from the Mariana Trench contains thousands of tiny plastic pieces, according to new research.

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Prehistoric Whale Jaw Bone Sheds Light on the Evolution of Baleen - Smithsonian

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Prehistoric Whale Jaw Bone Sheds Light on the Evolution of Baleen - Smithsonian

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Hidden in a museums' collections for years, a fossil provides a link between past and present feeding mechanisms

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Great Barrier Reef to be restored by 'coral IVF' - Sky News

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Great Barrier Reef to be restored by 'coral IVF' - Sky News

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Scientists in Australia are attempting to restore the Great Barrier Reef by using IVF-style techniques on coral.

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Why Brexit could threaten Dutch fishing industry - BBC News

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Never mind silver bells and cockleshells, Mary should have tossed dead fish to help her garden grow.

A team of US researchers has found that sockeye salmon carcasses has helped boost tree growth by up to 20%.

Over a 20-year period, students from the University of Washington tossed dead fish from a stream on to a river bank.

Data shows the nutrients from the rotting flesh boosted growth in the area's trees.

What did the scientists do?

For two decades, students taking part in a long-term study on who/what was eating sockeye salmon in a stream in Alaska have been tossing fish carcasses on to one river bank in order to avoid double counting them during surveys.

"We would find carcasses on both sides of the stream, explained Prof Tom Quinn, who supervised the study.

"But we always tossed the carcasses on one side of the stream so effectively we were reducing the density of carcasses on one side and increasing the density of carcasses on the other.

"It was something of a natural fertilisation experiment."

What did they find?

After taking samples from the surrounding trees of Hansen Creek, the scientists found that the fish carcasses (almost 300 tons over the 20-year period) had affected the growth rate of the trees.

"We took cores from live trees that we estimated to be at least 40 years old," observed Prof Quinn.

"We saw that the effect of the carcass manipulation was to accelerate the growth on that side.

"There was a significant increase in the growth of the trees on the side that we fertilised relative to how well they have been doing prior to the experiment."

Why does it matter?

Prof Quinn said the study highlighted the importance of long-term studies when observing ecological changes or influences because changes, such as dead fish fertilising soil, would not be detected in shorter studies.

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Never mind silver bells and cockleshells, Mary should have tossed dead fish to help her garden grow. A team of US researchers has found that sockeye salmon carcasses has helped boost tree growth by up to 20%. Over a 20-year period, students from the University of Washington tossed dead fish from a stream on to a river bank.

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Earwax reveals how humans have changed whales’ lives - National Geographic

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Earwax reveals how humans have changed whales' lives - National Geographic

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Hormones in earwax reveal how human activities, from whaling to war, have been stressing out whales for more than a century and a half.

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Large shark nursery found near coral reef off Irish coast - Sky News

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Large shark nursery found near coral reef off Irish coast - Sky News

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A rare shark nursery has been found off the Irish coast by marine scientists exploring the country's coral reefs.

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As oceans grow more acidic, they’re eating away at their protective floors - Popular Science

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As oceans grow more acidic, they're eating away at their protective floors - Popular Science

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Acidic ocean waters, an effect of climate change, are destroying the seafloor.

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Scientists count whales from space - BBC News

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Scientists count whales from space - BBC News

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UK scientists demonstrate the practicality of identifying and counting whales from orbit.

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The strongest hurricanes in recorded history—see how Michael stacks up - National Geographic

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The strongest hurricanes in recorded history-see how Michael stacks up - National Geographic

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From the Atlantic to the Pacific, these killer storms have packed the most wallop in recorded history. Here's what you need to know.

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25 Amazing Photos of Life Underwater - National Geographic

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25 Amazing Photos of Life Underwater - National Geographic

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From sleeping whales to schools of fish to eerie caves, these underwater pictures showcase submarine spectacles the world over.

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New, Ultra-Colorful Neon Fish Species Discovered - National Geographic

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New, Ultra-Colorful Neon Fish Species Discovered - National Geographic

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The small, vibrant fish, found in a Brazilian island reef, is named for the Greek goddess of love.

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Michael Gove calls for a third of the world's oceans to be given protected status to save marine life - The Telegraph

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Michael Gove calls for a third of the world's oceans to be given protected status to save marine life - The Telegraph

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Almost a third of the world's oceans should be protected by 2030, Environment Secretary Michael Gove has urged.

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Plastic pollution: Giant barrier to clean up eastern Pacific

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The ambitious project aims to tackle a collection of waste known as the Great Garbage Patch.

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Few conservation issues generate as emotional a response as whaling.

Commercial whaling has been effectively banned for more than 30 years, after whales were driven almost to extinction.

But the International Whaling Committee (IWC) is currently meeting in Brazil and next week will give its verdict on a proposal from Japan to end the ban.

Could countries soon be allowed to kill whales for profit again?

Don't the Japanese already kill whales?

Yes, they do - but it's complicated.

IWC members agreed to a moratorium on hunting in 1986, to allow populations to recover.

Pro-whaling nations expected the moratorium to be temporary, until consensus could be reached on sustainable catch quotas.

Instead, it became a quasi-permanent ban, to the delight of conservationists but the dismay of whaling nations like Japan, Norway and Iceland who argue that whaling is part of their culture and should continue in a sustainable way.

But by using an exception in the ban that allows for whaling for scientific purposes, Japan has caught between about 200 and 1,200 whales every year. since, including young and pregnant animals.

Among other things, it says it's investigating stock levels and to see whether the whales are endangered or not.

Critics say this is just a cover so they can kill whales for food. And in fact, the meat from the whales killed for research usually does end up for sale.

What's Japan's proposal?

Hideki Moronuki, Japan's senior fisheries negotiator and commissioner for the IWC, told the BBC that Japan wants the IWC to get back to its original purpose - both conserving whales but also "the sustainable use of whales".

Whaling in the 19th and early 20th Century brought the giant mammals to the brink of extinction.

By the 1960s improved catch methods and giant factory ships made it obvious that whale hunting could not go unchecked. Hence the moratorium.

Today, whale stocks are carefully monitored, and while most species are still endangered, others - like the minke whale which Japan primarily hunts - are not.

So Japan, the current chair of the IWC, is suggesting a package of measures, including setting up a Sustainable Whaling Committee and setting sustainable catch limits "for abundant whale stocks/species".

As an incentive to anti-whaling nations, the proposals would also make it easier to establish new whale sanctuaries.

But isn't whaling just... wrong?

Not everyone thinks so.

Anti whaling activists are up in arms about the proposal.

"These graceful giants face so many threats in our degraded oceans such as entanglement, plastic and noise pollution, and climate change, the last thing they need is to be put back in the whalers' crosshairs," says Kitty Block, president of Humane Society International.

"People often assume we already saved the whales back in the 1980s, but sadly that's not the case."

There's also the argument that whales are very intelligent animals with highly developed social structures. Killing them causes them fear, panic and pain.

The old way of whaling with a plain harpoon meant a slow and agonising death.

Modern hunters aim to kill the animal instantly, usually with an exploding harpoon, but conservations argue it can still take very long for a whale to die.

Two years ago the Australian government released graphic footage from 2008 showing a Japanese research ship harpooning a whale which activist group Sea Shepherd said took more than 20 minutes to die.

"And that's not to mention that they are killing them with their family members, with their pods having to witness their family members screaming out in pain," says Jeff Hansen, managing director of Sea Shepherd in Australia.

But those in favour of whaling say such cases are exceptions - accidents that may happen in any abattoir. They also say opposition to sustainable whaling is deeply hypocritical.

Industrial meat production keeps pigs, cows and chicken in grim captivity from birth to slaughterhouse, but this seldom stops shoppers from reaching for a nice cut of pork or beef.

There is also the hunter's defence that killing a wild animal is more ethical than raising an animal in captivity with the sole purpose of eating it.

Lars Walloe, former head of Norway's delegation to the IWC, told the BBC whaling is the same as killing "other large mammals in the forest, like deer, elk, moose".

"We kill them for meat and we don't see the difference between killing a minke whale and a moose as long as it's done humanely."

What the likely verdict?

Leading anti-whaling nations like Australia have already said they would band together to reject any attempts to undermine the current ban.

Australia has long been Japan's major opponent when it comes to whaling and wants to strengthen the IWC's protection of whales. It would face fierce opposition at home if it changed its mind.

Canberra took the issue to the International Court of Justice, which in 2014 ruled against Japan, saying it was not necessary to kill whales in order to study them.

But that was in reference to one specific scientific programme - so Japan simply changed said programme and resumed whaling.

Japanese officials, however, have told the BBC they hope the new proposal will be considered and adopted. "This issue should be resolved based on science and international law, but not with emotion," urges Hideki Moronuki.

Donald R Rothwell, professor of international law at Australia National University, told the BBC an end to the moratorium might not ultimately have much impact.

"If Japan would offer to end its scientific programme, a future commercial whaling quota would likely see very little change in the actual number of whales killed," he said.

Under the scientific programme, Japan takes around 300 to 400 animals each year and a commercial quota could limit them to a similar number.

Currently, some of the whales are hunted in a whale sanctuary in the Antarctic. Japan argues the sanctuary is to protect against commercial whaling but that scientific whaling does not break any rules.

If in future, Japan was to whale under an IWC quota for commercial purpose, it would be bound by the sanctuary rules.

And if Japan were simply to leave the IWC, it would still be bound by international laws that bind countries to "co-operate on whale conservation".

But ultimately, there's a good chance the contentious issue will gradually die down by itself.

Japanese demand for whale meat has long been on the decline.

The industry is already survives on state subsidies so eventually, changing tastes might mean commercial whaling is undone by plain commercial arithmetic.

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Japan's push to resume whaling for profit

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Few conservation issues generate as emotional a response as whaling. Commercial whaling has been effectively banned for more than 30 years, after whales were driven almost to extinction. But the International Whaling Committee (IWC) is currently meeting in Brazil and next week will give its verdict on a proposal from Japan to end the ban.

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The first significant steps towards legally protecting the high seas are to take place at the UN in New York.

These waters, defined as the open ocean far from coastlines, are threatened by deep-sea mining, over-fishing and the patenting of marine genetic resources.

Over the next two years, government representatives aim to hammer out a binding agreement to protect them against over-exploitation.

But several nations, including the US, are lukewarm towards the proposals.

Experts believe that the oceans of the world are vital for a number of reasons. Scientists say they capture around 90% of the extra heat and about 26% of the excess carbon dioxide created by humans through the burning of fossil fuels and other activities.

"The half of our planet which is high seas is protecting terrestrial life from the worst impacts of climate change," said Prof Alex Rogers from Oxford University, UK, who has provided evidence to inform the UN treaty process getting under way on Tuesday.

"Yet we do too little to safeguard that or to protect the life within the ocean which is intrinsic to our collective survival. Protecting the biodiversity of the high seas by bringing good governance and law to the whole ocean is the single most important thing we can do to turn the tide for the blue heart of our planet."

So what exactly does 'high seas' mean?

The high seas are defined as the oceans that lie beyond exclusive economic zones. These zones are usually within 370km (200 nautical miles) of a country's coastline. These waters cover one and a half times the total land area of the planet and are home to some of the rarest and most charismatic species - but all countries have the right to navigate, fly over, carry our scientific research and fish on the high seas without restriction.

Aren't these water already protected?

In 1982, the UN adopted the Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which, when it became active in 1994, regulated sea-bed mining and cable-laying to some extent. There are also a host of other international groups, including the International Whaling Commission that look after aspects of the seas, but there is no overarching treaty that would protect biodiversity or limit exploitation.

What are the big threats to the high seas?

Researchers believe the high seas may be a major source of mineral resources in years to come. Just last year, a team of British scientists exploring an underwater mountain in the Atlantic Ocean discovered high concentrations of a rare and valuable substance used to build solar panels.

They're not the only ones - companies are also targeting deep-sea hydrothermal vents, home to a range of extremely rare and often exotic species.

The undersea world far from shore is also of growing interest because the strange and wonderful creatures that live there may lead to new pharmaceuticals - certainly a select group of research bodies believe this to be the case with 84% of patents related to marine species filed by just 30 institutions over the past 30 years.

It's the same story when it comes to fishing. Ships from 10 rich countries - among them Japan, Korea and Spain - take around 70% of the catch. Several studies using satellite data have shown the scale of fishing taking place away from national waters, including the practice of unloading catches on to other ships in international waters, something that allows boats to evade monitoring and enforcement.

How would a new treaty work?

There would be three likely elements to any new treaty. Firstly, it would allow the setting up of Marine Protected Areas in international waters - something many countries have already done in their own jurisdictions. A new pact would also allow the carrying out of environmental impact assessments to guard against potential harm from activities on the high seas. In addition, a new, legally binding deal would allow poorer countries to benefit from any discoveries developed from marine genetic resources.

"A strong global ocean treaty would allow us to create a network of ocean sanctuaries to protect wildlife, ensure food security for billions of people and help us to tackle climate change," Sandra Schoettner, a marine biologist with Greenpeace, told news agencies.

Why are some governments reluctant to support the treaty?

The US rejected the UNCLOS treaty back in 1994 and is reticent about these new proposals. Some whale-hunting countries, such as Japan, Iceland and Norway, are said to be cautious about the idea because they fear it will restrict their fishing operations. Russia is also said to be dragging its feet.

Campaigners, though, are optimistic that eventually a deal will be reached.

"The current high seas governance system is weak, fragmented and unfit to address the threats we now face in the 21st Century from climate change, illegal and over-fishing, plastics pollution and habitat loss," said Peggy Kalas, from the High Seas Alliance,

"This is a historic opportunity to protect the biodiversity and functions of the high seas through legally binding commitments."

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UN takes first steps to protect high seas

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The first significant steps towards legally protecting the high seas are to take place at the UN in New York. These waters, defined as the open ocean far from coastlines, are threatened by deep-sea mining, over-fishing and the patenting of marine genetic resources.

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Maggie Georgieva is turning a jar of preservative around in her hands. "This is it," she says. "This is 'The Hoff' - the famous yeti crab with a hairy chest," referring to the object suspended in alcohol.

Most of us would be hard pressed to name a recently discovered creature from the deep, and this animal may even be the only one that triggers any sort of recognition.

The Hoff made headlines in 2012 after being spotted living 2,000m down in a volcanic region of the Southern Ocean.

A novel species, the researchers who found it joked that the crustacean's fluffy appearance had something in common with a certain American movie star. The nickname stuck.

Of course, The Hoff eventually got a proper title and description. It's correctly called Kiwa tyleri. And, as is customary, reference examples were lodged at the Natural History Museum in London, which is how a specimen comes to be in the hands of Dr Georgieva.

She's fascinated by hydrothermal vents. These are volcanic systems found along mid-ocean ridges - places where new sea-floor is created by the upwelling of magma.

In some locations, water can get drawn through cracks in the hot rock and become loaded with dissolved metals and other chemicals, before then being ejected back into the ocean. Specialised bacteria are able to exploit these hot fluids (up to 400C), to provide the energy foundation for a beautiful and bizarre collection of more complex organisms.

The Hoff, for example, "farms" the bacteria on its hairy chest. Comb-like mouthparts scrape up the microbes into a meal.

Dr Georgieva has another jar in her collection of what are known as tubeworms.

These do symbiosis in a slightly different way. The animals have no mouth parts, no stomach and no gut. Instead, they possess an organ called a trophosome which acts as a kind of shelter for the bacteria. The microbes pay their rent to the worms in nutrients.

Yet another jar contains a little shrimp, Rimicaris. It nurtures the bacteria under its shelly hood, or carapace. Rimicaris will swarm around vents in vast numbers. Thousands per square metre.

The shrimp needs to keep its farm of microbes in the optimum waters - close enough to make use of the scalding fluids and their chemical bounty, but not so close that there's a risk of getting cooked.

Rimicaris has no eyes, just an "eye-spot" - a concentrated patch of the light-sensitive pigment rhodopsin on its back. The thinking is it can use this feature to detect thermal radiation. But this cliff-edge existence is nothing compared with the peril faced by the fourth creature in Dr Georgieva's vent collection - the Pompeii worm.

It builds paper-thin tubes on the sides of the "chimney" structures where the fluids emerge. Temperatures inside these dens can top 80C. "Pompeii" seems an apt name and the worm uses a thick blanket of bacteria to help insulate it from harm.

"The remarkable thing about hydrothermal vents is that they can produce these unique and strange adaptations in animals," says Dr Georgieva. "We're trying to get an idea of how quickly animals can adapt to these environments. The adaptations tend to be related to getting symbionts and dealing with the harsh conditions, obviously.

"In order to get symbionts, one thing you have to do is make changes to your immune system - which you might expect because there'll be some bacteria you want to let in but others that you don't."

One interesting question is how some of the creatures have spread so far around the globe.

Vents are nutrient-rich oases in what is otherwise a resource-poor environment thousands of metres down from the sunlit surface of the ocean. And yet the likes of The Hoff and its five yeti-crab cousins have managed to reach widely separated volcanic ridges across the Southern Hemisphere.

Their last common ancestor probably lived 30-40 million years ago in the eastern Pacific. What we see today is the result of successful colonisations of vents by dispersed larvae. (Females release mini-Hoffs in big numbers to drift through the water column, some potentially making it to the next vent system).

It's all very precarious, to say the least, because vent systems are patchy. What is more, they will switch on and off through time, and when one dies so do all the local animals. Somehow a species must inhabit multiple locations - multiple stepping stones along a ridge - so that if one foothold is temporarily lost, the overall population will remain robust.

It's like a game of Whac-A-Mole, says yeti crab expert Nicolai Roterman from Oxford University. Successful dispersion ensures a species can pop back up in a new location. But the worry now is that certain human activities might soon load the game in favour of extinction by widening the gap between the places where a species could re-emerge.

It is one of the dangers posed by the proposed mining of metals at hydrothermal vents, believes Dr Roterman.

"The critical thing is if you start ploughing through and bulldozing hydrothermal vents, this human activity effectively simulates what is already happening naturally. It's then possible you could get to a situation where a meta-population simply collapses because it can't be sustained anymore."

The United Nations is meeting this week to begin discussions on the formulation of a treaty that would better regulate certain activities on the high seas - deep-sea mining among them.

Some of the creatures described by Dr Georgieva - such as the Pompeii worm - can be seen currently in the Life In The Dark exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

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Marvels of the deep and their superpowers

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Maggie Georgieva is turning a jar of preservative around in her hands. "This is it," she says. "This is 'The Hoff' - the famous yeti crab with a hairy chest," referring to the object suspended in alcohol.

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Absolutely Crabulous: Why Some Crabs Get Dressed Up - National Geographic

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Absolutely Crabulous: Why Some Crabs Get Dressed Up - National Geographic

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Covering themselves in everything from algae to urchins, crabs know how to accessorize for safety.

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Dive Beneath Greenland's Mysterious 'Terra Incognita' - National Geographic

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Dive Beneath Greenland's Mysterious 'Terra Incognita' - National Geographic

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The expansive gray-and-white landscape might look barren, but scientists say life lurks in the Arctic waters below.

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Invasive Species Are Riding on Plastic Across the Oceans - National Geographic

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Invasive Species Are Riding on Plastic Across the Oceans - National Geographic

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Crustaceans and mollusks foreign to the United States have survived up to six years riding on ocean trash.

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Experimental scheme set to boost sustainable fishing in the UK - Sky News

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Experimental scheme set to boost sustainable fishing in the UK - Sky News

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An experimental scheme hailed as the future of sustainable fishing is being rolled out to four new areas around the UK.

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India monsoon floods 'kill more than 300' in Kerala - BBC News

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At least 324 people have been killed in flooding in the southern Indian state of Kerala in what local officials say is the worst flooding in 100 years.

India's monsoon season started in June, but the death toll in Kerala has soared in the past 24 hours.

Rescuers are battling torrential rains to save residents, with more than 200,000 people left homeless in camps.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has arrived in the state to see the devastation for himself.

The Kerala government said many of those who died had been crushed under debris caused by landslides.

With more rains predicted and a red alert in place, Kerala's main airport is expected to remain shut until 26 August.

Hundreds of troops have been deployed to rescue those caught up in the flooding.

Helicopters have been airlifting people marooned by the flooding to safety, with photographs and footage emerging from the area showing elderly people and children being rescued.

More than 300 boats are also involved in rescue attempts, AFP news agency reports.

The government has urged people not to ignore evacuation orders, and is distributing food to tens of thousands of people who have fled to higher ground.

The Indian home ministry says more than 930 people have now died across India since the country's monsoon season began.

How bad is the Kerala flooding?

The region's chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, has described the flooding as the worst the state has seen in a century.

"We're witnessing something that has never happened before in the history of Kerala," he told reporters.

Mr Vijayan said more than 223,000 people were now living in more than 1,500 emergency relief camps set up in the area.

Parts of Kerala's commercial capital, Cochin, are underwater, snarling up roads and leaving railways across the state impassable.

The state's airport is a hub for domestic and overseas tourists, so its closure is likely to cause major disruption.

Some local plantations are reported to have been inundated by water, endangering the local rubber, tea, coffee and spice industries.

Schools in all 14 districts of Kerala have been closed and some districts have banned tourists, citing safety concerns.

What is the government doing?

Prime Minister Modi arrived in the region on Friday evening, Indian media reported, and is due to see the worst affected areas from the air on Saturday.

The country's home minister has also offered his support.

Anil Vasudevan, the head of the Kerala health disaster response wing, has said they are prepared to help victims and are setting arrangements in place to deal with the potential risks of water-borne diseases when the flooding recedes.

Why is the situation so bad?

It is normal for Kerala to get some of the country's highest rainfall during monsoon season, but the India Meteorological Department said it had been hit with 37% more than usual because of a spell of low pressure over the region.

Further downpours are forecast for the weekend, leading many to fear the situation may get worse.

Environmental scientists are also blaming deforestation, especially the failure to protect ecologically fragile mountain ranges in the area, local media report.

Mr Vijayan, the region's chief minister, has said the situation in Kerala has been made worse by neighbouring governments.

Earlier this week, he and his counterpart in Tamil Nadu entered a public spat over the release of water from a dam.

Kerala has 41 rivers flowing into the Arabian Sea, and 80 of its dams are now said to be open after being overwhelmed.

"Almost all dams are now opened. Most of our water treatment plants are submerged. Motors are damaged," Mr Vjayan said.

'Neck-deep water'

BBC Tamil's Pramila Krishnan spoke to several people who had escaped the flooding in Cochin.

Krishna Jayan, 58, said she was at home sleeping when her friend woke her up.

"I opened the door and water gushed in," she said. "When we stepped into the street, we were neck-deep in water."

She said locals had tied ropes along the streets to help people walk through the water, allowing her and her friend to reach a bus to escape.

Another resident, 33-year-old Shabbir Saheel, said he had to carry his two-year-old daughter on his shoulders through the flooded streets to safety.

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At least 324 people have been killed in flooding in the southern Indian state of Kerala in what local officials say is the worst flooding in 100 years. India's monsoon season started in June, but the death toll in Kerala has soared in the past 24 hours.

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Researchers in the Highlands of Scotland are giving farmed salmon feed made from genetically modified crops.

The aim of the scientific trial is to increase the nutritional value of the fish.

The feed is rich in healthy fish oils, which the team hope will be absorbed by the salmon.

Critics argue that GM technology is "propping up" an unsustainable system of industrial food production.

Why does it matter?

Tests have shown that levels of an oil called omega-3 have decreased by half in farmed salmon in the past 10 years. It is what makes the fish so healthy. The oil is thought to be involved in brain development and reduces the risk of heart disease, arthritis and diabetes.

Even at current levels, farmed salmon is still a rich source of omega-3 - but levels are continuing to fall.

The salmon get their omega-3 from eating other oily fish, such as anchovies, that have been ground up and added to pellets that are sprayed into their pens.

But there's a limited supply of anchovies and a growing demand for the salmon. So that means that all across the world there's less oily fish to go round to make food for salmon.

So what's the answer?

Researchers have added a gene from a type of marine algae to a camelina plant to produce the omega-3 fish oil. Lab tests show that fish fed on this oil have boosted levels of omega-3. The question that the researchers are now trying to answer is whether the same happens on a real fish farm.

Prof Douglas Tocher, of University of Stirling, who is leading the study is hoping his GM produced fish food will help turn things around and make farmed salmon as good for you as it once was.

"These are essential nutrients to our diet to maintain our health; particularly cardiovascular health, some inflammatory diseases and some cancers. Here in the UK, particularly up in Scotland, we suffer quite badly from many of the diseases for which dietary omega-3 has beneficial effects".

Prof Tocher's colleague, Dr Monica Betancor, of University of Stirling, says that GM technology is needed to feed an increasing population.

"We are feeding a starving world and we need to find an alternative.

"The population is growing very fast and omega-3 should be available to everyone, not just to those who can afford it.

"There is going to be a gap between supply and demand, and that gap can be filled by GM technology."

Will I be able to buy it in the shops?

If the trial is successful it will be used by the industry to produce "GM healthy salmon" which will be on sale in North and South America and Asia but - as it stands - is unlikely to be used in the UK and the European Union because of perceived resistance to GM products.

Prof Johnathan Napier, who developed the GM plants at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden believes that Brexit might provide the UK government with an opportunity to rethink its approach to GM.

"I think the technology has a great deal to offer. It's not necessarily a silver bullet but I think we should use it along with other approaches we could adopt. Especially now that we are going to be leaving the EU, we could make this an opportunity as to how we regulate GM."

I bet not everyone agrees with them?

Liz O'Neill, who is the director of the campaign group GM Freeze, believes that the GM solution increases what she sees as an intensification of the mass production of food:

"Fish farming is a fundamentally unsustainable and inefficient form of producing food. So, yet again, GM is being used as a sticking plaster to prop up unsustainable farming methods and the industrialised production of our food.

"Using prime agricultural land to grow a crop that is then fed to fish who are kept in potentially environmentally damaging fish farms is not a holistic solution to the problem. People want a short food chain and they want to be connected with their food."

Follow Pallab on Twitter

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Researchers in the Highlands of Scotland are giving farmed salmon feed made from genetically modified crops. The aim of the scientific trial is to increase the nutritional value of the fish. The feed is rich in healthy fish oils, which the team hope will be absorbed by the salmon.

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Trial to test if GM fed salmon are more nutritious

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The prospect of the Gulf Stream slowing down and even stopping altogether has worried many experts in recent years.

Some believed that this would cause a rapid cooling around the world with resulting global chaos.

But this new study finds the Gulf Stream go-slow will have a significant impact on planetary temperatures, but not in a chilled out way.

Researchers say a slower current will carry less heat down to the deep oceans meaning more will enter the atmosphere.

Worries over the fate of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc), of which the Gulf Stream is part, were graphically illustrated in the 2004 film, The Day After Tomorrow.

It focused on a sudden collapse of the Amoc caused by global warming leading to a disastrous freezing and the dawning of a new ice age.

So much for Hollywood - the reality according to the corresponding author of this new study is very different.

"The headlines have said that the Gulf Stream is collapsing and the Ice Age is coming sooner than scientists think," Prof Ka-Kit Tung from the University of Washington told BBC News.

"The answer from our work is no to both of them."

Instead Prof Tung and his colleagues have reconstructed what's happened with the flow of the Amoc over the past 70 years. They found a natural pattern with declines, flat periods and increases over the decades.

What is the Gulf Stream?

It's a powerful ocean current that is part of the Amoc and it flows from the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida and up along the east coast of the US, before crossing the Atlantic towards Ireland, the UK and Europe.

Why is it important?

For decades we've believed that the Gulf Stream and the Amoc were like a giant hot water bottle, keeping Europe and the Eastern US warm in the winter.

It's believed that the impact was as much as 5C, keeping London and Western Europe far less cold than say parts of Canada which are at the same latitude.

But this new study indicates that the Amoc plays a far more important role as a massive global heat distribution system than it does in keeping Europeans toasty.

It works like this - The warm waters from tropical regions are carried up to the North Atlantic where the current sinks them deep into the oceans, with cooler waters then returning south in their stead.

When the Amoc current moves faster, more of the heat that is trapped in our atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is taken and stored up to 1,500m below the surface of the ocean. When it slows down, less heat is sequestered in the seas and so our land surface temperatures increase.

What's the evidence for this new Amoc theory?

When the Amoc was at a minimum between 1975 and 1998, more heat entered the atmosphere and global temperatures gradually went up. When the current started to accelerate from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, and sink more heat it coincided with a so-called slowdown in the pace of global warming.

Now the authors say that the big decline is Amoc flow since 2004 means less heat going into the waters and more into the air, leading to higher global temperatures. And that is likely to continue.

"It is difficult to predict changes," said Prof Tung.

"But under the scenario that greenhouse gas forcing hasn't changed much, it would be comparable to the warming in that period of 1975-1998, if slightly lower, but it's comparable."

Will the slowdown in the Atlantic current continue?

That's unlikely according to this study.

"We think that the decline of Amoc is reaching the minimum and if history repeats, we will think this one will last about two decades."

"Where we have direct measurements, such as off the coast of Florida, the measurements there have flattened since 2011. In the northern Atlantic it is still declining."

So what will this mean for the UK?

While the waters of the North Atlantic will definitely cool as a result of changes in the flow, the experts says it's likely that the UK will see continued impacts of climate change over the next 20 years according to this study.

"The air temperatures globally will be warming and there's no barrier for that so there won't be much cooling in the UK, you will probably still see the normal global warming," said Prof Tung.

The study has been published in the journal Nature.

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The prospect of the Gulf Stream slowing down and even stopping altogether has worried many experts in recent years. Some believed that this would cause a rapid cooling around the world with resulting global chaos. But this new study finds the Gulf Stream go-slow will have a significant impact on planetary temperatures, but not in a chilled out way.

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Slowing Gulf Stream current to boost warming for 20 years

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Whalers in Iceland have killed what appears to be a blue whale, one of the largest creatures left on the planet.
Photographic evidence from campaigners opposed to whaling show a large animal being butchered for export.

Several experts have concluded from these pictures that it's a juvenile male blue, a species that hasn't been deliberately killed since 1978.

The whaling company involved say they are confident that the animal is a hybrid between a blue and fin whale.

DNA testing will be needed to confirm the whale's true identity.

Why does the species matter?

The key reason for interest in the species is to determine whether this killing is legal or not under Icelandic law.

Weighing as much as 200 tonnes and stretching up to 30 metres, blue whales were hunted to the brink by commercial whalers from many countries including the UK from the 1940s to the 1960s when they became a protected stock under the International Whaling Commission. That means that all countries, including Iceland agreed not to kill the creatures.

It's different for fin whales. While there is an international moratorium on killing all whales, Iceland doesn't agree that fin whales are threatened and gives permits for their hunting.

Hybrids between fin and blue whales are a grey area, say specialists. A hybrid allows the whalers to say they simply made a mistake.

"If this is a blue whale, it would be illegal and a breach and there could be fines and perhaps the company might lose their licence to hunt whales," said Arne Feuerhahn, from campaign group Hard to Port, which documented the latest killing.

What do experts think?

From the photographic evidence, most seem to be of the view that it is a blue whale.

"We cannot confirm 100%," said Arne Feuerhahn.

"We have consulted a lot of international experts, most think that it is a juvenile male blue whale but there also has been some doubts with some believing that it could be a hybrid between a blue and a fin whale."

Others were more definite.

"From the photos, it has all the characteristics of a blue whale," Dr Phillip Clapham, from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Alaska Fisheries Science Centre, said in a statement.

"Given that, notably the coloration pattern, there is almost no possibility that an experienced observer would have misidentified it as anything else at sea."

What do the whalers say?

The company involved is certain that the animal it has killed is not a blue whale but a hybrid.

"I am absolutely confident that it's a hybrid," said Kristján Loftsson who runs Hvalur hf.

"To mistake a blue whale for a fin whale is impossible, this whale has all the characterisations of a fin whale in the ocean. There are a lot of blue whales off the Iceland coast, when we see the blows and sail to it, and we realise it is a blue and then we leave it and go and look for fin whales."

What have the Icelandic government said?

Kristján Thor Juliusson, Iceland's Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, said: "While initial information suggests that the animal in question was not a blue whale, we take these reports seriously and the relevant authorities are investigating this matter with all urgency.

"At present, Icelandic authorities are not in a position to confirm the species, although initial information from the directorate of fisheries in Iceland suggests the animal caught is not likely to be a blue whale but rather a hybrid of a fin whale and a blue whale.

Campaigners believe that whether it's a blue or a hybrid won't matter that much in the long term as the overall impression in their view is negative.

"These images leave people around the world speechless - thousands come to Iceland to see these animals in the wild and there is just one company who keep this industry alive in Iceland. It really shines a bad light on Iceland's reputation internationally," said campaigner Arne Feuerhahn.

Will DNA testing be definitive?

Yes it's likely that it will be. But there are doubts among campaigners that this will happen swiftly.

"We've been contacting the Icelandic authorities and requested samples," said Arne Feuerhahn.

"But it looks right now that they are not really bothered as they have said it could be fall or winter before they get the results of DNA tests."

The Icelandic government say they are not dragging their feet on this issue..

"This will only be confirmed once a DNA analysis has been concluded, a process that is being expedited due to the nature of these reports," said Minister Kristján Thor Juliusson,

Are hybrid blue whales common?

Specialists believe that hybrids are not very common in the waters off Iceland.

"Since 1983, they've only recorded five of them," said Astrid Fuchs from the charity, Whale and Dolphin Conservation.

"Four of them have been killed by whalers and one is a very beloved whale watching object and is still alive - they are very rare," she told BBC News.

What will happen to the whale meat?

Iceland sells almost all of its whale meat to Japan one of a handful of countries that reject the international consensus to protect whales. However, if this whale is a blue then this meat can't be legally shipped anywhere.

If it turns out to be a hybrid whale, then it is possible that it could be sold in Iceland. However, under the international regulations that govern animal trading, it is the status of the hybrid parents that matter - so if it has blue whale parentage, the Japanese market would be closed.

What are the implications for Icelandic whaling?

Kristján Loftsson's company has already captured and killed 22 whales including this recent and most controversial one.

If it turns out to be a hybrid, then it is likely there won't be major repercussions for the whalers.

Mr Loftsson says he is being targeted by campaigners and there is nothing unusual about the recent killing.

"This is nothing new to us, we have had at least five in previous years with similar characteristics and DNA analysis shows a completely different profile from a fin whale and that has been described as a hybrid of a blue and a fin," he told BBC News.

Campaigners, though, believe it could be the beginning of the end.

"We hope it might be the nail in the coffin of Icelandic whaling," said Astrid Fuchs from WDC (Whale and Dolphin Conservation).

"It confirms what scientists have been saying for years, whaling can't be regulated - it is always a bit out of control, they are going out there but they don't know what they are shooting. If this is a blue it would drive home the message that you can't regulate this."

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Whalers in Iceland have killed what appears to be a blue whale, one of the largest creatures left on the planet. Photographic evidence from campaigners opposed to whaling show a large animal being butchered for export. Several experts have concluded from these pictures that it's a juvenile male blue, a species that hasn't been deliberately killed since 1978.

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Whale killing: Iceland accused of slaughtering rare whale

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The much maligned rat is not a creature many would associate with coral reefs.

But scientists studying reefs on tropical islands say the animals directly threaten the survival of these ecosystems.

A team working on the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean found that invasive rats on the islands are a "big problem" for coral reefs.

Rats decimate seabird populations, in turn decimating the volume of bird droppings - a natural reef fertiliser.
The findings are published in Nature.
Scientists now advocate eradicating rats from all of the islands to protect these delicate marine habitats.

How do rats harm coral reefs?

The Chagos Archipelago provided a large-scale natural laboratory to answer this question; although the islands are uninhabited by humans, some of them are now home to invasive rats, brought by ships and shipwrecks. Other islands have remained rat-free.

"The islands with and without rats are like chalk and cheese," said lead researcher Prof Nick Graham from Lancaster University.

"The islands with no rats are full of birds, they're noisy, the sky is full and they smell - because the guano the birds are depositing back on the island is very pungent.

"If you step onto an island with rats, there are next to no seabirds."

By killing seabirds, this study revealed, rats disrupt a healthy ecosystem that depends on the seabird droppings, which fertilise the reefs surrounding the island.

On rat-free islands, seabirds including boobies, frigatebirds, noddies, shearwaters and terns travel hundreds of kilometres to feed out in the ocean. When they return to the island, they deposit rich nutrients from the fish they feed on.

"These nutrients are leaching out onto the reef," explained Prof Graham.

He and his team were able to track the source of those nutrients back to the fish that seabirds fed on by analysing algae and sponges growing on the reef.

"We also found that fish on the reefs adjacent to islands with seabirds were growing faster and were larger for their age than the fish on reefs next to rat-infested islands," Prof Graham explained.

There were also significantly more fish on rat-free reefs than on those around "ratty islands".

Why does this matter?

Coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the ocean's area, but house about one third of ocean biodiversity.

"Coral reefs are also hugely threatened," said Prof Graham. "So anyone who cares about extinctions and biodiversity needs to care about the future of coral reefs."

The reefs and their abundance of marine life provide livelihoods for millions of people around the world, so the decline in coral reefs is poised to become a humanitarian crisis.

In an accompanying commentary article Dr Nancy Knowlton, a marine scientist from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, pointed out that, while "adding rats to the list of dangers faced by reefs might seem discouraging, the discovery of these negative impacts points directly to a specific strategy" that could slow the ongoing degradation of reefs.

That strategy - rat eradication on islands throughout the world - is exactly what the researchers who carried out this study now advocate.

"Coral reef systems are at crisis point because of climate change," said Prof Graham. "And we're desperately trying to find ways to enhance the resilience of coral reefs and allow them to cope with climate change.

"This is one of the clearest examples so far, where eradicating rats will lead to increased numbers of seabirds and this will bolster the coral reef."

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The much maligned rat is not a creature many would associate with coral reefs. But scientists studying reefs on tropical islands say the animals directly threaten the survival of these ecosystems. A team working on the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean found that invasive rats on the islands are a "big problem" for coral reefs.

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Green Lights Could Save Birds and Turtles From Fishing Nets - National Geographic

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Both animals were less likely to get ensnared by fishing nets that shined green light, a new study found.

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Green Lights Could Save Birds and Turtles From Fishing Nets - National Geographic

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These Shrimp Are a Clean-Up Crew For Dirty Fish - National Geographic

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Along this Caribbean reef, Pederson cleaner shrimp wait to feast on the parasites of these fish.

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These Shrimp Are a Clean-Up Crew For Dirty Fish - National Geographic

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Red sea gets green light from government

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A photographer captures stunning images of blue glow "sea sparkle" on the Anglesey coastline.

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With plastic protests around the country and a proposed ban on cotton buds, is plastic becoming the 'new fur'?

We've all been there. You're going through the checkout at the supermarket, and you need to ask for 5p bags.

The shop assistant rings them through silently, and it feels like everyone queuing behind you is giving you 'plastic shaming' looks.

Now we each use about 25 bags a year - a reduction of a phenomenal six billion bags since the charge was introduced in October 2015.

And it's not just bags we're shunning. Single-use plastics are now a no-no, from straws in cocktails, to plastic forks and water bottles. In April, the government proposed a ban on plastic straws and cotton buds in England, and now the EU is in favour of a ban on all single-use plastics. Network Rail has also pledged to ban plastic cutlery and cups from the retail outlets housed in the 20 train stations it manages across the UK by 2020. Although, there has been a backlash against the plastic straw ban with the suggestion it disadvantages disabled people.

Single-use plastics are exactly what the name suggests: any piece of plastic that is designed to be used once and then thrown away. They make life easier - in the short term, at least.

And as David Attenborough warned in his moving finale to Blue Planet II, all of this plastic is killing fish, birds, and other animals.

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"Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about that," he says in the final episode. "Surely we have a responsibility to care for our blue planet."

Just as graphic photos of animals choking on plastic are becoming ubiquitous now, similar images have long been used in anti-fur protests.

Dan Mathews, senior vice president at Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), says the Blue Planet episode reminds him of a striking ad created by fashion photographer David Bailey and anti-fur campaign group Lynx - not the deodorant - in the Eighties.

In it, models walk down a catwalk wearing heavy fur coats, while people in the audience swoon. That is until they turn at the end of the catwalk - spraying blood all over the room.

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"I think people that wore fur were, or at least pretended to be, part of an 'upper class'," Dan says. "So when you have other people who are part of that scene, such as David Bailey, saying, 'You've got it all wrong, these animals are noble and they deserve their lives', it does change the debate. I think David Attenborough has now done that with plastic, very much in the same way as David Bailey did in the Eighties."

In addition, Peta ran undercover investigations at fur farms all over the world to show how animals were beaten, drowned and electrocuted in captivity, just for their pelts.

Footage from these investigations ended up in news broadcasts across the globe, with graphic photos of foxes and mink being skinned alive held up by protesters at almost every demonstration. Today, it's pictures of albatrosses and whales with plastic bottle caps spilling out of their carcasses that dominate the headlines.

"There are parallels between the shock imagery of marine plastic debris you see now, and what we saw in the early days of the anti-fur movement," Wendy Higgins, from Humane Society International UK, adds.

"Shock imagery was certainly what catapulted the anti-fur campaign in the 1970s and 1980s onto most people's radars. Strong images and shock statistics have the effect of making people feel guilty about using plastics - in the same they changed the perception of fur from a luxury item into something to be ashamed of."

Bans are now also coming into force on plastic production. In July 2017, the government banned microbeads from cosmetics, and there were also calls to ban glitter - essentially tiny pieces of sparkly plastic. And with bans on straws and cotton buds in the pipeline, using plastic is arguably on its way to becoming as vilified as wearing fur.

People are speaking with their wallets, too. After environmental groups warned about coffee cups and their hidden plastic lining, which is partly why only one in 400 actually ends up getting recycled, reusable cups have been flying off the shelves. And some high street coffee chains have also introduced incentives for bringing in your own coffee cups, such as money off your drink or extra stamps on your loyalty card.

Marine biologist Rowan Byrne says that our attitude towards plastics has changed remarkably in the two decades that he has been in the industry.

"The culture is changing," he says. "I think this change is driven by social pressure, to an extent, and a bit of shaming. If I forget my own alternative shopping bag now, I actually just leave the supermarket with the stuff in my hands. I don't use a bag because I get so embarrassed about it."

At the same time, Rowan says he sometimes gives people a "longer look" when he sees them asking for a plastic bag or cup - although he tries to give them "the benefit of the doubt" by thinking that they must have forgotten their reusable versions.

"I have been tempted to say something, and depending on the circumstances I may do so in the future," he says. "But to be honest, I prefer to lead by example and show that there are alternative options out there."

Along with carrying groceries in their bare hands, people are taking drastic action to rid themselves of plastic.

Eddie Arnold, a 30-year-old who works in catering in London, was never much of an activist before. But after watching Blue Planet II, he tried to give up plastic entirely for one month to see how easy it would be. For support, Eddie got a group of his mates to join him by doing the Plastic-Free February challenge.

It was much harder than they had all anticipated.

Buying coffee tumblers, metal water bottles, and canvas shopping bags was the easy part. Avoiding single-use plastic packaging in supermarkets and lunch places, on the other hand, was almost impossible.

"It's hard to find food without plastic wrapped around it, even with the amount of choice we're supposed to have in London," he says. "You have to really change your diet if you want to use no plastic at all, or have a lot of money and time to go to specialist places where you can bring your own containers."

Along with fur, Eddie says plastic is "another item to add to the long list of avoidable ways we are destroying our planet and killing animals".

It's an interesting thought - and some people have taken their plastic war direct to supermarkets. Since March, protesters have been staging so-called "plastic attacks" across the country, which involve going into supermarkets, buying a week's worth of groceries, removing all of the plastic wrapping, and then leaving it in a pile at the door. More recently, they've even made their way to cities in Switzerland.

Others have decided to collect their plastic to make a statement that is, quite literally, huge.

Daniel Webb has spent the last year watching a mountain of rubbish grow in his flat. After seeing old soft drink bottles and tags from bags of bread from the 1980s washing up on the beach in his hometown of Margate, he made a conscious decision not to throw any plastic away for 365 days - just to see how much he got through.

"It's just an honest account of what I used in a year," he tells BBC Three. "I want to show people the vast amounts of plastic we're actually getting through, but also that it's not entirely our fault - things are just so over-packaged. I wanted to buy some instant noodles from the supermarket the other day. It had a paper bowl, with a plastic top, which was then wrapped in another bit of plastic - and then inside it had five different ingredients, which were again all wrapped in plastic."

But does he think plastic is like fur? In some ways, he says, plastic is worse.

"Whereas people make a personal choice to wear fur, we often don't have a choice when buying products wrapped in single-use plastic packaging," he says. "It's hard to make people feel guilty for something that they are being forced into buying by supermarkets and producers."

Still, that guilt is definitely there - and it's so strong that people are changing deeply entrenched habits.

While you're unlikely to get red paint thrown on you for drinking from an Evian bottle, it seems that plastic could be going the way of the fur coat.

Maybe one day all of our plastic cups will also be relegated to the back of our cupboards, or stored in a dusty box of shame in our attics. And with people's attitudes changing so rapidly, that day could come even sooner than you think.

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With plastic protests around the country and a proposed ban on cotton buds, is plastic becoming the 'new fur'? We've all been there. You're going through the checkout at the supermarket, and you need to ask for 5p bags. The shop assistant rings them through silently, and it feels like everyone queuing behind you is giving you 'plastic shaming' looks.

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New footage of the devastating impact of plastic pollution on wildlife has been captured by a BBC team.

Seabirds are starving to death on the remote Lord Howe Island, a crew filming for the BBC One documentary Drowning in Plastic has revealed.

Their stomachs were so full of plastic there was no room for food.

The documentary is part of a BBC initiative called Plastics Watch, tracking the impact of plastic on the environment.

The marine biologists the team filmed are working on the island to save the birds. They captured hundreds of chicks - as they left their nests - to physically flush plastic from their stomachs and "give them a chance to survive".

No room for nutrition

The birds nest in burrows on Lord Howe Island, which is more than 600 kilometres off the east coast of Australia. While chicks wait in the burrow, the parents head out to sea and dive for small fish and squid to feed their offspring.

"These birds are generalist predators," explained marine biologist Jennifer Lavers who works with the shearwater colony. "They'll eat just about anything they're given. That's what's allowed them to thrive - a lack of pickiness.

"But when you put plastic in the ocean, it means they have no ability to detect plastic from non-plastic, so they eat it."

Parent birds unwittingly feeding plastic to their chicks means that the birds emerge from their burrows with stomachs filled with plastic, and with insufficient nutrition to enable them set out to sea and forage for themselves.

But when the birds first head out of the burrow, the research team have been stepping in to help.

"If the amount of plastic is not so significant, we use a process called lavage, where we flush or wash the stomach - without harming the bird," explained Dr Lavers.

The BBC crew filmed the team working with individual chicks - using tubes to flush their stomachs with seawater and make them regurgitate the plastic.

Liz Bonnin, who presents the series, said what she saw on Lord Howe Island was one of the hardest things she had witnessed in her career.

"It was shocking to see how much would come out of one chick," she told BBC News. "We saw, I think 90 pieces come out of one of the chicks on the second night.

"But the scientists were telling us they sometimes pull out 200 or 250 pieces of plastic out of dead birds or from the regurgitation.

"It's obscene when you think about it."

Jennifer Lavers added that most of the plastic she and her colleagues have found in their work with the birds is "entirely preventable".

"We find plastic clothes pegs, plastic tooth brushes. Those could easily be swapped out for other materials - aluminium or wood. My own toothbrush is made of bamboo.

"When we look at changes like that and scale them up across the entire human population, it could really make a difference.

"I so look forward to a future where I'm not pulling clothes pegs out of the bellies of baby birds - that would be brilliant."
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New footage of the devastating impact of plastic pollution on wildlife has been captured by a BBC team. Seabirds are starving to death on the remote Lord Howe Island, a crew filming for the BBC One documentary Drowning in Plastic has revealed. Their stomachs were so full of plastic there was no room for food.

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Marine plastic: Hundreds of fragments in dead seabirds

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'Don't swim with wild dolphins' warning after Cardigan Bay picture

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People have been warned to keep their distance from wild dolphins after a woman was photographed swimming with a cow and its calf.

Boat skipper Jonathan Evans witnessed the incident at Ynys Lochtyn off the coast of Cardigan Bay in Ceredigion last month.

He described the woman's behaviour as "selfish" and "unsympathetic".

Ceredigion council said people should enjoy coastal activities but not disturb special wildlife and habitats.

Mr Evans, from Dolphin Spotting Boat Trips, took photographs of the incident before intervening.

He said: "It was a family with two kayaks - a mum, dad, little boy and little girl... they were within feet of the dolphins.

"The mum was in the water and was pursuing the dolphin repeatedly."

He was concerned the young girl was also going to enter the water so shouted over to the kayakers.

"We needed to explain they were in a conservation area and it was against the law to swim with dolphins," he said.

He later reported the incident to the marine protected area officer.

"I have sympathy for the need for people feel to get close to these animals," he said.

"I'm not the person to be lecturing about visiting dolphins when we run a boat trip business but they probably don't know the rules and it's worth going over to them and explaining the rules. "

The Ceredigion Marine Code of Conduct asks water users to stay 100 metres away from dolphins and porpoises encountered at sea.

Under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 it is an offence to deliberately disturb cetaceans.

A spokeswoman for Sea Watch Foundation urged people not to closely approach bottlenose dolphin.

She said: "While dolphins are charismatic animals, they are also large and powerful predators that have the potential to seriously injure a person.

"Persistent pursuit of dolphins can also lead to long term behavioural changes that can affect the survival of the population as a whole."

Ceredigion council's cabinet member responsible for economy and regeneration Rhodri Evans said: "Cardigan Bay's wildlife is a great asset to the economy of our coastal communities and is also important in its own right.

"It is because of this that we ask residents and visitors to enjoy dolphin and other wildlife sightings at a safe distance.

"Although the temptation to have a close-up view is understandable, we can't risk disturbing Cardigan Bay's wildlife and possibly driving them away. It's the last thing anyone wants."

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People have been warned to keep their distance from wild dolphins after a woman was photographed swimming with a cow and its calf. Boat skipper Jonathan Evans witnessed the incident at Ynys Lochtyn off the coast of Cardigan Bay in Ceredigion last month. He described the woman's behaviour as "selfish" and "unsympathetic".

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People have been warned to keep their distance from wild dolphins after a woman was photographed swimming with a cow and its calf.

Boat skipper Jonathan Evans witnessed the incident at Ynys Lochtyn off the coast of Cardigan Bay in Ceredigion last month.

He described the woman's behaviour as "selfish" and "unsympathetic".

Ceredigion council said people should enjoy coastal activities but not disturb special wildlife and habitats.

Mr Evans, from Dolphin Spotting Boat Trips, took photographs of the incident before intervening.

He said: "It was a family with two kayaks - a mum, dad, little boy and little girl... they were within feet of the dolphins.

"The mum was in the water and was pursuing the dolphin repeatedly."

He was concerned the young girl was also going to enter the water so shouted over to the kayakers.

"We needed to explain they were in a conservation area and it was against the law to swim with dolphins," he said.

He later reported the incident to the marine protected area officer.

"I have sympathy for the need for people feel to get close to these animals," he said.

"I'm not the person to be lecturing about visiting dolphins when we run a boat trip business but they probably don't know the rules and it's worth going over to them and explaining the rules. "

The Ceredigion Marine Code of Conduct asks water users to stay 100 metres away from dolphins and porpoises encountered at sea.

Under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 it is an offence to deliberately disturb cetaceans.

A spokeswoman for Sea Watch Foundation urged people not to closely approach bottlenose dolphin.

She said: "While dolphins are charismatic animals, they are also large and powerful predators that have the potential to seriously injure a person.

"Persistent pursuit of dolphins can also lead to long term behavioural changes that can affect the survival of the population as a whole."

Ceredigion council's cabinet member responsible for economy and regeneration Rhodri Evans said: "Cardigan Bay's wildlife is a great asset to the economy of our coastal communities and is also important in its own right.

"It is because of this that we ask residents and visitors to enjoy dolphin and other wildlife sightings at a safe distance.

"Although the temptation to have a close-up view is understandable, we can't risk disturbing Cardigan Bay's wildlife and possibly driving them away. It's the last thing anyone wants."

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People have been warned to keep their distance from wild dolphins after a woman was photographed swimming with a cow and its calf. Boat skipper Jonathan Evans witnessed the incident at Ynys Lochtyn off the coast of Cardigan Bay in Ceredigion last month. He described the woman's behaviour as "selfish" and "unsympathetic".

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'Don't swim with wild dolphins' warning after Cardigan Bay picture

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Smoking Ocean Vents Found in Surprisingly Shallow Water - National Geographic

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Smoking Ocean Vents Found in Surprisingly Shallow Water - National Geographic

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Scientists have found new hydrothermal vents off the Azores, and they may harbor unique life.

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MCS praise for Island's marine stewardship

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Areas outside Manx waters trawled with impunity

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McDonald's will replace plastic straws with paper ones in all its UK and Ireland restaurants, starting from September.

It is the latest company to opt out of some single-use plastic products which can take hundreds of years to decompose if not recycled.

The restaurant chain uses 1.8 million straws a day in the UK.

"Reflecting the broader public debate, our customers told us they wanted to see a move on straws," the firm said.

This decision follows a successful trial in selected restaurants earlier this year. The move to paper straws will be completed next year.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove called it a "significant contribution" to helping the environment, adding that it was "a fine example to other large businesses".

The ban does not yet extend to the rest of the chain's global empire, but trials will begin in selected restaurants in the US, France and Norway.

In some other countries, straws are being offered on request only.

In April, the government proposed a ban on plastic straws and cotton buds in England. But many businesses, including Waitrose, Costa Coffee, and Wagamama, have already started to take action.

All JD Wetherspoon pubs stopped using plastic straws at the beginning of the year. Pizza Express said it would replace all plastic straws with biodegradable ones by summer 2018.

And more than 60 independent British festivals - including Boardmasters and Bestival - have banned plastic straws as part of a pledge to rid their sites of single-use plastic by 2021.

Most straws are made from plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene, which unless recycled take hundreds of years to decompose.

Many end up in landfill and the oceans, and the BBC's Blue Planet II highlighted the damage plastic can cause to marine wildlife.

But not everyone thinks total bans are the answer.

Plastic straws enable many disabled people to drink independently, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson said. She said paper alternatives were not always suitable or safe.

And Tetra Pak - the food packaging company - has said plastic straws serve a "vital" function in cartons and should not be banned.

It argues that straws can be recycled together with cartons if they are pushed back into the box.

Transcend Packaging in Wales, and Huhtamaki in Belfast, will supply the straws for all 1,361 McDonald's restaurants.

The straws will use paper from certified sustainable sources, the company said.

"The government's ambitious plans, combined with strong customer opinion, has helped to accelerate the move away from plastic and I'm proud that we've been able to play our part," said Paul Pomroy, chief executive of McDonald's UK and Ireland.

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McDonald's will replace plastic straws with paper ones in all its UK and Ireland restaurants, starting from September. It is the latest company to opt out of some single-use plastic products which can take hundreds of years to decompose if not recycled. The restaurant chain uses 1.8 million straws a day in the UK.

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Scientists warn material including strands of underwear could be found in the seafood.

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More than 50 nations are taking action to reduce plastic pollution, says the UN in the biggest report so far.

India will eliminate all single-use plastic in the country by 2022, with an immediate ban in urban Delhi.

The pledge from a nation of 1.3 billion people is the most ambitious of the global plans against plastic pollution.

The UN report also reveals that the Galapagos will ban single-use plastics, Sri Lanka will ban styrofoam and China is insisting on biodegradable bags.

But the authors warn that far more needs to be done to reduce the vast flow of plastic into rivers and oceans.

Action against plastic waste has many drivers across the world. In the UK it has been stimulated by media coverage.

In many developing countries, plastic bags are causing floods by blocking drains, or they're being eaten by cattle.

The report says policies to combat plastic waste have had mixed results. In Cameroon, plastic bags are banned and households are paid for every kilo of plastic waste they collect, but still plastic bags are being smuggled in.

In several countries, rules on plastic exist but are poorly enforced.

The report presents an A-Z of 35 potential bio substitutes for plastic. It runs from Abaca hemp (from the inedible banana Musa textilis) to Zein (from a maize protein).

The list includes rabbit fur, sea grass and foam made with fungus. It mentions QMilch, a firm that create casein textile fibres from waste milk.

It also highlights Piñatex, a plastic alternative made from pineapple leaves.

Some policy-makers, though, are wary about hyping the potential of bio alternatives.

Early optimism by some environmentalists about biofuels backfired when rainforests were felled to grow palm oil to fuel cars.

Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment, said: "The assessment shows that action can be painless and profitable - with huge gains for people and the planet that help avert the costly downstream costs of pollution. Plastic isn't the problem. It's what we do with it."

The report says levies and bans - where properly planned and enforced - have been among the most effective strategies to curb plastic waste.

But the authors also cite a fundamental need for broader cooperation from business, including obliging plastic producers to take responsibility and offering incentives to stimulate more recycling.

National actions include:

Botswana - retailers charged but no enforcement and controls "failed".

Eritrea - ban on plastic bags and dramatic decrease in drain blockage

Gambia - ban on plastic bags, but "reappearance after political impasse"

Morocco - bags banned - 421 tonnes of them seized in one year, virtually replaced by fabric

Bangladesh - ban on bags but lack of enforcement

China - was using three billion bags a year pre-2008. Now there is a ban on thin bags, use decreased 60-80% in supermarkets but not in markets.

Vietnam - bags are taxed but still widely used. Government considering increasing tax five times

Ireland - tax led to 90% fall in consumption

Kenya - cows ingested an average of 2.5 bags in their lifetimes. Now there's a total ban, and fines and a four-year jail term for making, importing or using them

Follow Roger on Twitter.

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More than 50 nations are taking action to reduce plastic pollution, says the UN in the biggest report so far. India will eliminate all single-use plastic in the country by 2022, with an immediate ban in urban Delhi. The pledge from a nation of 1.3 billion people is the most ambitious of the global plans against plastic pollution.

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In its June issue, National Geographic magazine has published a selection of startling photos highlighting the vast amounts of discarded plastic choking the world's oceans, shorelines and rivers.

Wildlife, particularly marine animals, are at risk when they become entangled in plastic waste, or ingest it.

Trapped in a plastic bag at a landfill in Spain, this stork has a lucky escape - the photographer later freed it.

One bag can kill more than once: carcasses decay, but the plastic lasts.

This loggerhead turtle has become entangled in an old plastic fishing net in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Spain.

The turtle could stretch its neck above water to breathe but would have died had the photographer not freed it.

Derelict fishing gear poses a major threat to large marine animals such as turtles.

On Okinawa, Japan, a hermit crab resorts to a plastic bottle cap to protect its soft abdomen.

Beachgoers collect the shells the crabs normally use, leaving their rubbish behind.

The magazine has devoted much of its issue to the problem; the plastic pollution we can see at the surface is probably just a small proportion of what's in the ocean.

Plastic waste can break down into tiny particles, which are less visible, but may still affect marine life.

After sheets of clear plastic trash have been washed in the Buriganga River, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a woman spreads them out to dry.

She turns them regularly, while also tending to her son.

The plastic will eventually be sold to a recycler. Less than one-fifth of all plastic gets recycled globally. In the US it's less than 10%.

These hyenas are shown scavenging at a landfill in Harar, Ethiopia.

They have adapted to the new normal: the animals listen for the collection trucks and find much of their food in the rubbish.

Plastic bottles choke the Cibeles fountain, in central Madrid. An art collective called Luzinterruptus filled this and two other Madrid fountains with 60,000 discarded bottles as a way of calling attention to the environmental impact of disposable plastics.

To ride currents, seahorses clutch drifting seagrass or other natural debris. In the polluted waters off the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, this seahorse has latched onto a plastic cotton bud. Photographer Justin Hofman said it was "a photo I wish didn't exist".
Ellen MacArthur Guest Edits the June issue of National Geographic. Working in collaboration with Global Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg and the editorial team, twelve notable British figures, each respected leaders in their fields, have been exploring topics such as sustainability, technology, environmentalism and human ingenuity, as part of this first ever Guest Editor project. It began in January, with the world's greatest living explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes and a further eight Guest Editors were then announced including Dame Ellen MacArthur, Sir Mo Farah, Lily Cole, Archie Panjabi, Katie Piper, Maria Balshaw and Professor Brian Cox.

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Plastic pollution: Images of a global problem

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In its June issue, National Geographic magazine has published a selection of startling photos highlighting the vast amounts of discarded plastic choking the world's oceans, shorelines and rivers. Wildlife, particularly marine animals, are at risk when they become entangled in plastic waste, or ingest it.

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Plastic pollution: Images of a global problem

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Large numbers of endangered whale sharks have been sighted in waters off Madagascar.

The first major scientific survey in the area shows there are far more of the huge fish than previously thought.

Eighty-five individuals were identified in a single season from photographs of their distinctive markings.

The coastal waters contain a huge diversity of marine life, including sharks, whales and turtles.

"No one thought there were that many [whale] sharks," said Stella Diamant of the Madagascar Whale Shark Project in Nosy Be, an island off the coast of Madagascar.

"They don't seem to be there all year round - they come back for the food."

Many stars

Whale sharks, which have unique spot patterns, are known locally as marokintana, meaning many stars.

The marine biologists uploaded photographs of the sharks' markings to a global database of sightings known as the Wildbook for Whale Shark.

They found no overlap with data collected from other feeding areas in the Indian Ocean, suggesting the whale sharks - all juveniles - had not migrated from Mozambique or other neighbouring areas.

Satellite tags attached to the whale sharks to track their movements revealed that half of the tagged sharks visited a second hotspot off southern Madagascar, while five swam over to Mayotte and the Comoros islands.

"It was exciting to see that there is a second hotspot for the sharks in the area," said Diamant, who led the research project.

"Madagascar clearly provides an important seasonal habitat for these young whale sharks, so we need to ensure they are effectively protected in the country."
Microplastics threat to ocean giants Why sharks like it hot - but not too hot
People travel to see and swim with these gigantic, harmless sharks as part of growing ecotourism industry on the island.

Researchers have drawn up a code of conduct to help protect the whale sharks from human interference.

"These sharks can be a major asset for the country," said co-author Dr Simon Pierce, principal scientist at the Marine Megafauna Foundation. "There's already a good marine ecotourism industry developing," he added.

The whale shark, (Rhincodon typus), the world's largest fish, is classed as globally endangered on the RIUCN RedList.

Over the last decade, populations have declined dramatically globally, due to overfishing, accidental catches and boat strikes.

The vast majority of the fish are found in the Indo-Pacific, where numbers have declined by more than 50% over the last 75 years.

A smaller population found in the Atlantic is also in decline.

The research is reported in the journal, Endangered Species Research.

Follow Helen on Twitter.

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Madagascar emerges as whale shark hotspot

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Large numbers of endangered whale sharks have been sighted in waters off Madagascar. The first major scientific survey in the area shows there are far more of the huge fish than previously thought. Eighty-five individuals were identified in a single season from photographs of their distinctive markings.

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Madagascar emerges as whale shark hotspot

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Scientists find new deep sea species in seas off Java

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The creatures were found in previously unexplored waters around the Indonesian island of Java.

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The electric aqua colours are caused by a tide of blooming algae - by day the plankton turn the water red, but come nightfall they radiate a blue glow when the algae are disturbed by movement, such as waves crashing on to the shoreline.

Bioluminescent light shows are not uncommon globally, but the last red tide in San Diego was in 2013 - and it's no less beautiful each time they grace the oceans.
By UGC & Social news

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In pictures: California's neon blue tide

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The electric aqua colours are caused by a tide of blooming algae - by day the plankton turn the water red, but come nightfall they radiate a blue glow when the algae are disturbed by movement, such as waves crashing on to the shoreline.

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Glowing blue algae have transformed California's coast.

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Red tide: Electric blue waves wash California shore

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Indonesian scientists have launched the largest ever study into whether tiny plastic particles can affect human health.

They are investigating the presence of plastic in seafood while also tracking the diets of 2,000 people.

There is no evidence yet that ingesting small pieces of plastic is harmful but potential impacts cannot be ruled out.

Plastic pollution has become so severe in Indonesia that the army has been called in to help.

While public attention is focused on larger items like bags and bottles choking rivers and canals, there is emerging scientific concern over the long-term implications of smaller and less visible pieces known as microplastics.

The project is being undertaken in Semarang, an industrial port city of 1.7 million people, on the north coast of the Indonesian island of Java.

Led by food technologist Inneke Hantoro, the aim is understand how much plastic is contained in seafood, how much of it people eat and whether a safe level of consumption can be devised.

Her initiative is a response to US plastics researcher Jenna Jambeck and colleagues concluding that Indonesia was the world's second largest contributor of plastic waste to the oceans after China.

Ms Hantoro, of Soegijapranata Catholic University, says the lack of evidence about microplastics causing harm is not a reason to delay investigating the risks.

She told BBC News: "With the uncertain conditions right now, where the toxicological data is still limited, we cannot let the situation run as usual because we know consumers are starting to be aware of the presence of plastics - it will make them worry, so we need to do something."

She concedes that until more data is available, it will not be possible to set a definitive safety standard for plastic consumption so she's hoping to come up with "interim guidance".

"We could propose a food safety standard to remove seafood that contains a very high level of microplastics from the market - people don't want to buy something that contains plastic," she added.

The first stage of the work involved gathering 450 samples of six different types of seafood from local waters and also from further afield, and screening them for microplastics.

I joined her on a visit to fish farms on the coast near Semarang. To reach them we had to travel by boat through mangrove swamps that were blighted by plastic - huge loads of it hung from the branches and lay tangled in the roots.

The research has found that every species tested contained some plastic particles, including fragments and fibres - tilapia were the worst with 85% seen with plastic.

The majority of mullet, shrimp, and milk fish tested also had plastic particles. Cockles had the lowest reading with 52% containing plastic.

These findings are broadly in line with similar research conducted in the UK and elsewhere, and they confirm that plastic contamination of seafood is a global problem.

But the next phase of the work in Semarang breaks new ground with an unprecedented campaign to follow the diets of 2,000 volunteers over a period of 2-4 weeks.

As a coastal city, Semarang is known to have a relatively high consumption of seafood and a key task is to find out how people prepare it and whether they take any steps that might minimise their intake of plastic.

Milk fish, for example, can be eaten whole, including their intestines, which may be where microplastics might accumulate.

One of the co-authors of the study is a Dutch environmental scientist, Prof Ad Ragas, of Radboud University.

He plays down any fears of immediate health hazards from microplastics but says the problem does need to be understood.

"Keep in mind that it's not as if everybody is dying from the plastics problem," he told BBC News.

"We know it's there but we don't know yet whether fish are dying or people are dying because of the microplastics, so there's no reason or proof to be pessimistic there.

"But we don't know for sure, so that's the uncertainty we have to live with."

This comes as the city authorities in Semarang have organised a major clean-up - the main streets and rivers look largely clear of plastic waste.

But because the city only has one official landfill site, at least 200 illegal ones have sprung up in poorer districts and in the outskirts of Semarang.

We saw one sprawling dump on the coast, where thousands of bags of rubbish lay heaped and torn, with plastic waste blown by the wind into the ocean, all of it destined to break down into smaller fragments.

In an effort to minimise the amount of plastic reaching the environment, one major food packaging factory in the city has launched an initiative to contain waste and raise awareness.

PT Miramas, which uses plastic for sachets, bottles and other containers, is sponsoring classes in EcoBricks, a scheme that transforms plastic waste into blocks that can be used as furniture or building materials.

Harjanto Halim, director of the company, told me that at the moment he could see no alternatives to using plastic so he wanted to teach people how to make use of it and prevent it leaking into the environment.

As we spoke, dozens of people were learning how to prod old plastic bags into drinks bottles. The filled bottles are then being glued together in batches to form large "bricks" which can be stacked on top of each other.

"You cannot make a magical thing happen in a blink of an eye," said Mr Halim, acknowledging that this project alone will not change attitudes."The people of Indonesia still consider throwing trash into the street or river is normal... but if I am able to get support from the government and schools I think we can make a difference."
Follow David on Twitter

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Study into health risks of microplastics

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Indonesian scientists have launched the largest ever study into whether tiny plastic particles can affect human health. They are investigating the presence of plastic in seafood while also tracking the diets of 2,000 people. There is no evidence yet that ingesting small pieces of plastic is harmful but potential impacts cannot be ruled out.

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The playful mammal seemed to take a shine to Colin Peters.

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Friendly seal nuzzles up to diver in Isle of Man

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Great Barrier Reef: Australia unveils A$60m protection plan

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The Australian government has announced a A$60m (£34m; $48m) plan to help improve the health of the Great Barrier Reef.

The reef suffered mass coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, which scientists said were a result of warmer ocean temperatures.

It has also endured damage from crown-of-thorns starfish and cyclones.

The new money, to be spent in four ways, will particularly target starfish and soil erosion.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said there was a "strong link" between the coral-eating species and run-off from water pollution.

"While [the reef] is facing increasing threats, we intend to remain leaders in reef management," he said.

The new measures include spending:

A$36m on farmers to restore vegetation around reef catchments, offsetting erosion;

A$10m for an "all-out assault" on crown-of-thorns starfish by increasing culling vessels;

A$6m on science agencies to develop ways to make coral more "resilient";

A$4m to employ more field officers to warn about bleaching.

It is part of a commitment by federal and state governments to spend A$2bn on improving the reef over the next decade.

"We want to ensure its future for the benefit of all Australians, particularly those whose livelihood depends on the reef," the government said in a statement on Monday.

However, some environmental groups criticised the package for not focusing more on climate change.

"[This] is the kind of tinkering around the edges approach that has failed in the past and does nothing to address the cause of devastating coral bleaching", Greenpeace said in a statement.

Others reiterated their opposition to a proposed coal mine, which they say would further damage the reef.

But Mr Turnbull dismissed what he called "doomsaying" on the issue, telling reporters on Monday that it was important to "take up this challenge positively".

The reef, located in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, spans an area of 344,400 sq km (133,000 sq mi) and is the largest living structure on Earth.

It contributes an estimate A$6.4bn a year to the Australian economy.

The UN says it is the "most biodiverse" of all the World Heritage sites, and of "enormous scientific and intrinsic importance".

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The Australian government has announced a A$60m (£34m; $48m) plan to help improve the health of the Great Barrier Reef. The reef suffered mass coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, which scientists said were a result of warmer ocean temperatures. It has also endured damage from crown-of-thorns starfish and cyclones.

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Australia to fund Great Barrier Reef restoration and protection

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Australia has pledged A$500 million (£275m; $379m) to protect the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef.

In recent years, the reef has lost 30% of its coral due to bleaching linked to rising sea temperatures and damage from crown-of-thorns starfish.

The funding will be used to reduce the runoff of agricultural pesticides and improve water quality.

Some of the money will be used to help farmers near the reef modify their practices.

Threats to the reef include "large amounts of sediment, nitrogen and pesticide run-off" as well as the crown-of-thorns starfish species, Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg said.

The reef can be seen from space and was listed as a world heritage site in 1981 by the United Nations cultural body Unesco.

There are 1,052 sites of environmental and cultural importance such as the reef on Unesco's World Heritage List.

In 2017, the organisation decided not to place the Great Barrier Reef on its official list of 55 World Heritage sites "in danger".

Unprecedented coral bleaching in recent years has caused damage to two-thirds of the reef, aerial surveys in 2017 showed.

Crown-of-thorns starfish are one of the most damaging creatures affecting tropical coral reefs as they are voracious predators that release the contents of their stomach on to the coral.

Digestive juices then liquify the coral ready for consumption. A single individual starfish can wipe out large areas of a reef.

The reef is actually a vast collection of thousands of smaller coral reefs stretching from the northern tip of Queensland to the state's southern city of Bundaberg.

Conservationists have welcomed the extra funding, but said the government needed to focus on climate change.

"You cannot 'preserve' the Great Barrier Reef without cutting carbon emissions. That means no new coal, oil or gas," Greenpeace Australia Pacific's CEO, David Ritter, said on Twitter.

However, Australia's foreign minister Julie Bishop told Australian news outlets her country was a world leader in managing and protecting the reef.

Australia is considered to be one of the world's worst polluters of greenhouse gases.

In 2015, Australia said it planned to cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels before 2030.

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Australia has pledged A$500 million (£275m; $379m) to protect the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef. In recent years, the reef has lost 30% of its coral due to bleaching linked to rising sea temperatures and damage from crown-of-thorns starfish. The funding will be used to reduce the runoff of agricultural pesticides and improve water quality.

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The new EU satellite tasked with tracking dirty air has demonstrated how it will become a powerful tool to monitor emissions from shipping.

Sentinel-5P was launched in October last year and this week completed its in-orbit commissioning phase.

But already it is clear the satellite's data will be transformative.

This latest image reveals the trail of nitrogen dioxide left in the air as ships move in and out of the Mediterranean Sea.

The "highway" that the vessels use to navigate the Strait of Gibraltar is easily discerned by S5P's Tropomi instrument.

"You really see a straight line because all these ships follow approximately the same route," explained Pepijn Veefkind, Tropomi's principal investigator from the Dutch met office (KNMI).

"In this case, we also looked into how many big ships there are in the region [at the time], and there's really not that many - around 20 or so, we estimate - but each one is putting out a lot of NO₂."

Nitrogen dioxide is a product of the combustion of fuels, in this instance from the burning of marine diesel. But it is also possible to see in the picture the emissions hanging over major urban areas on land that come from cars, trucks and a number of industrial activities. NO₂ will be a major contributor to the poorer air quality people living in those areas experience.

Sentinel-5P is the next big step because of its greater sensitivity and sharper view of the atmosphere.

"Shipping lanes are something we've seen on previous missions but only after we've averaged a lot of data; so, over a month or a year. But with Tropomi we see these shipping lanes with a single image," Dr Veefkind told BBC News.

"The resolution we got from our previous instruments was about 20km by 20km. Now, we've gone down to 7km by 3.5km, and we are thinking of going to even smaller pixels."

Eyes in the sky
Analysis by David Shukman, BBC Science Editor
Far beyond the horizon, steaming through the remote High Seas, the great fleets of global shipping have for years been too distant to be observed.

Only in port can anyone catch sight of the plumes of dark smoke rising from the vessels' engines. But added together, the greenhouse gases from the world's 50,000 ships make this industry the world's sixth largest emitter, and most of it is unseen. This has long fuelled suspicions among environmental campaigners.

Exempt from the Kyoto Protocol and then the Paris Agreement, shipping acquired a reputation as a sector that dodged its responsibilities on climate change. That's why the landmark deal earlier this month for a cut in emissions of 50% by 2050 received so much attention. But it also raised a host of questions about policing: who would keep watch, and how?

Europe's Sentinel programme is part of the answer. Suddenly, at just the right time, the world's shipping lanes are in full view.

S5P's availability is timely. The shipping sector has just signalled its intention to make big reductions in its emissions over the next 30 years, in particular of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

At the moment, those emissions are calculated in a "bottom-up" fashion.

By knowing the size of the global fleet, where it moves, the ships' specifications and how much fuel they are likely consuming - it is possible to estimate how much CO₂, or indeed NO₂, is being pumped into the atmosphere from exhausts.

But this all involves quite a few assumptions, and so the models need to be audited by some top-down analysis as well - which is where satellites come in.

S5P-Tropomi does not see CO₂, although its NO₂ observations can act as a tracer in the sense that wherever nitrogen dioxide turns up on shipping lanes, there will be CO₂ present, too.

But the best solution would be a dedicated carbon-monitoring satellite.

This is why the EU has asked its technical agent on space matters, the European Space Agency, to design a Sentinel specific to the task.

Dubbed Sentinel 7 by many people, because that is the next available number in the series, this future mission should fly in the 2020s.

The aim is to be able track CO₂ down through the atmosphere on a scale of around 3km by 3km, but over a wide area. That would make Sentinel 7 a forceful partner for Sentinel 5.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos

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The new EU satellite tasked with tracking dirty air has demonstrated how it will become a powerful tool to monitor emissions from shipping. Sentinel-5P was launched in October last year and this week completed its in-orbit commissioning phase. But already it is clear the satellite's data will be transformative.

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Sentinel tracks ships' dirty emissions from orbit

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A crisis of plastic waste in Indonesia has become so acute that the army has been called in to help.

Rivers and canals are clogged with dense masses of bottles, bags and other plastic packaging.

Officials say they are engaged in a "battle" against waste that accumulates as quickly as they clear it.

The commander of a military unit in the city of Bandung described it as "our biggest enemy".

Like many rapidly developing countries, Indonesia has become notorious for struggling to cope with mountains of rubbish.

A population boom has combined with an explosive spread of plastic containers and wrapping replacing natural biodegradable packaging such as banana leaves.

The result is that local authorities trying to provide rubbish collection have been unable to keep up with the dramatic expansion of waste generated.

And a longstanding culture of throwing rubbish into ditches and streams has meant that any attempt to clean up needs a massive shift in public opinion.

'Shocking sight'

In Bandung, Indonesia's third largest city, we witnessed the shocking sight of a concentration of plastic waste so thick that it looked like an iceberg and blocked a major tributary.

Soldiers deployed on a barge used nets to try to extract bags, Styrofoam food boxes and bottles, a seemingly futile task because all the time more plastic flowed their way from further upstream.

The senior official in charge, Dr Anang Sudarna, who heads the West Java Environmental Protection Agency, told me that the problem was "impossible to sort out without the highest authority".

That's why he took the drastic step of appealing to the Indonesian president to send in the army, and the move has made some difference, according to Dr Sudarna.

"The result is a little bit improved...but I am angry, I am sad, I am trying to think how best to solve this... the most difficult thing is the people's attitude and the political will."

Frontal assault

For Sergeant Sugito, commanding an army unit, the assignment was new and unusual and "not as easy as flipping your hand".

"My current enemy is not a combat enemy, what I am fighting very hard now is rubbish, it is our biggest enemy."

But he also said that plastic should be recognised as valuable - "for example, plastic cartons and drinking bottles can be separated from the other rubbish and sold", he said.

Encouraging people to see plastic as a resource is a key step towards finding a solution to the crisis.

To encourage recycling, the authorities in the Bandung area are supporting initiatives in "eco-villages" where residents can bring old plastic items and earn small amounts of money in exchange.

The plastics are then divided by type. In one project we visited, two women patiently cut apart bottles and small water cups because separating the different kinds of polymers earns higher prices.

Officials are optimistic that word will spread that plastic has value - and raise awareness of the plastic waste problem - but they also admit privately that many residents are either uninterested or cannot see the point.

Meanwhile, on Bandung's only landfill site - which receives only a fraction of the waste the city produces - an unofficial form of recycling is under way.

Next generation

On a hillside buried in rubbish, amid an overwhelming stench in the tropical heat, 500 so-called "scavengers" search each new load of rubbish for plastic products.

When I asked one man, scrambling from the path of an excavator, what he was looking for, he reached into a bag and held up a plastic bottle.

The work is punishing but generates income which supports entire families living on the dump, and it also demonstrates that there is a market for recycled plastic and more could be done to serve it.

For one activist working to change attitudes, Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano of Greeneration, the solution has to involve law enforcement, education and social awareness.

Investment was needed to teach children about waste and recycling, he said, but that had to be done in combination with improvements in public attitudes.

"If we educate the student, when they go outside the school and the ecosystem is still broken and people are littering everywhere, they are confused so it needs both sides, education and also law enforcement by society."

Monumental scale

A Dutch environmental scientist, Prof Ad Ragas of Radboud University, with long experience of Indonesia's plastic problem, told me he has detected an important shift in the authorities.

Two years ago, when he organised a workshop on plastic pollution in Bandung, "government officials didn't seem to care about it, they didn't see it as a really big problem".

By contrast, at another workshop held last month, "it's changed dramatically".

Social media, rapidly conveying images of choked waterways, had made a difference to people, he said.

"They immediately see that 'this is what my river look likes now and I'm doing that because I'm throwing all this plastic away' so they get feedback much quicker than they used to."

But the challenge is not only monumental in scale; it is also constant.

The soldiers we filmed had planned to load the plastic onto trucks but because the vehicles never arrived they decided on a different course of action: to use a digger to push the waste downstream.

I asked the sergeant what would happen to it. It was up to another unit to collect, he said. It became someone else's problem.

Near the coast, just outside the capital Jakarta, we came across a canal that was totally blocked with plastic. Local residents complained that whenever they tried to clear it, more arrived from upstream, as in Bandung.

Most apocalyptic of all was the scene at a fishing village on the coast itself. The mud of the shoreline was completely hidden by a thick layer of plastic waste stretching over hundreds of metres.

On a walkway crossing over the sea of plastic was a small girl playing with a balloon. By the time Indonesia's plastic nightmare is sorted, she may well have grown up.

Follow David on Twitter.

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A crisis of plastic waste in Indonesia has become so acute that the army has been called in to help. Rivers and canals are clogged with dense masses of bottles, bags and other plastic packaging. Officials say they are engaged in a "battle" against waste that accumulates as quickly as they clear it.

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Recycling hope for plastic-hungry enzyme

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Scientists have improved a naturally occurring enzyme which can digest some of our most commonly polluting plastics.

PET, the strong plastic commonly used in bottles, takes hundreds of years to break down in the environment.

The modified enzyme, known as PETase, can start breaking down the same material in just a few days.

This could revolutionise the recycling process, allowing plastics to be re-used more effectively.

UK consumers use around 13 billion plastic drinks bottles a year but more than three billion are not recycled.

Found in a dump

Originally discovered in Japan, the enzyme is produced by a bacterium which "eats" PET.

Ideonella sakaiensis uses the plastic as its major energy source.

Researchers reported in 2016 that they had found the strain living in sediments at a bottle recycling site in the port city of Sakai.

"[PET] has only been around in vast quantities over the last 50 years, so it's actually not a very long timescale for a bacteria to have evolved to eat something so man-made," commented Prof John McGeehan, who was involved in the current study.

Polyesters, the group of plastics that PET (also called polyethylene terephthalate) belongs to, do occur in nature.

"They protect plant leaves," explained the University of Portsmouth researcher. "Bacteria have been evolving for millions of years to eat that."

The switch to PET was nevertheless "quite unexpected" and an international team of scientists set out to determine how the PETase enzyme had evolved.

Eating plastic

A high definition 3D model of the enzyme was created, using the powerful x-ray beamline at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire.

Once they understood its structure, the team noted that they could improve the performance of PETase by adjusting a few residues on its surface.

This suggests that the natural enzyme isn't fully optimized yet and there is the potential to engineer it.

PETase was also tested on PEF plastic, a proposed plant-based alternative to PET that is similarly slow to degrade in nature.

"We were absolutely stunned when we did that experiment because it actually works better on PEF than PET," Prof McGeehan told BBC News.

Analysis
by David Shukman, Science Editor
The team behind the research at Portsmouth University includes PhD students and even undergraduates, and when I visited their lab their excitement was infectious. They know that it took clever chemistry to design the PET polymer used in so many billions of bottles and they are delighted to have helped find a way to unpick it. They have grown up with the scourge of plastic pollution and feel highly motivated about trying to tackle it.

Yet big challenges lie ahead in turning an ingenious discovery into a real-world application. Developing a technique for producing the enzyme cheaply will be one key hurdle; another will be to harness its power on an industrial scale. But this is an example of accelerated science. A type of bacteria evolved to live off plastic in the last few decades. The enzyme it uses to digest PET was only recently identified.

Now we have details of the newly engineered and more efficient version of that enzyme. In the search for scientific solutions to the plastic pollution crisis, momentum like this is vital.

Closing the loop

Polyesters, industrially produced from petroleum, are widely used in plastic bottles and clothing.

Current recycling processes mean that polyester materials follow a downward quality spiral, losing some of their properties each time they go through the cycle. Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill.

PETase reverses the manufacturing process, reducing polyesters to their building blocks, ready to be used again.

"They could be used to make more plastic and that would avoid using any more oil...Then basically we'd close the loop. We'd actually have proper recycling," explained Prof McGeehan.

The enzyme is a number of years away from being deployed on a widespread scale. It will need to degrade PET faster than its current time of a few days before becoming economically viable as part of the recycling landscape.

Prof McGeehan is hopeful that this marks the beginning of a shift in the management of plastics.

"There is an urgent need to reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in landfill and the environment, and I think if we can adopt these technologies we actually have a potential solution in the future to doing that" he added.

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Recycling hope for plastic-hungry enzyme

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Scientists have improved a naturally occurring enzyme which can digest some of our most commonly polluting plastics. PET, the strong plastic commonly used in bottles, takes hundreds of years to break down in the environment. The modified enzyme, known as PETase, can start breaking down the same material in just a few days.

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The global shipping industry has for the first time agreed to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases.

The move comes after talks all week at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in London.

Shippings has previously been excluded from climate agreements, but under the deal, emissions will be reduced by 50% by 2050 compared to 2008 levels.

One minister from a Pacific island state described the agreement as "history in the making".

Shipping generates roughly the same quantity of greenhouse gas as Germany and, if it were accounted for as a nation, would rank as the world's sixth biggest emitter.

Like aviation, it had been excluded from climate negotiations because it is an international activity while both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement involved national pledges to reduce greenhouse gases.
Plea for action on shipping emissions Shipping faces demands to cut CO2
The United States, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and a few other countries had not wanted to see a target for cutting shipping emissions at all.

By contrast the European Union, including Britain, and small island states had pushed for a cut of 70-100%.

So the deal for a 50% reduction is a compromise which some argue is unrealistic while others say does not far enough.

Kitack Lim, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization, who had chaired the controversial talks, said: "This initial strategy is not a final statement but a key starting point."

The tiny Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands had opened the conference with a plea for action.

Although it has the world's second largest register of shipping, it had warned that failure to achieve deep cuts would threaten the country's survival as global warming raises sea levels.

As the talks concluded, the nation's environment minister David Paul said: "To get to this point has been hard, very hard. And it has involved compromises by all countries. Not least by vulnerable island nations like my own who wanted something, far, far more ambitious than this one."

Mr Paul added: "This is history in the making... if a country like the Marshall Islands, a country that is very vulnerable to climate change, and particularly depends on international shipping, can endorse this deal, there is no credible excuse for anybody else to hold back."

Laurent Parente, the ambassador of Vanuatu, also a Pacific island nation, was not satisfied but hoped the deal would lead to tougher action in future.

"It is the best we could do and is therefore what this delegation will support as the initial strategy that we have no doubt will evolve to higher ambitions in the near future."

By contrast, the head of the US delegation to the talks, Jeffrey Lantz, made clear his country's opposition to the deal.

"We do not support the establishment of an absolute reduction target at this time," he said.

"In addition, we note that achieving significant emissions reductions, in the international shipping sector, would depend on technological innovation and further improvements in energy efficiency."

Mr Lantz reiterated that the US, under President Trump, has announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

He also criticised the way the IMO had handled the talks, describing it as "unacceptable and not befitting this esteemed organisation."

But a clear majority of the conference was in favour of action.

The UK's shipping minister, Nusrat Ghani, described the agreement as " a watershed moment with the industry showing it is willing to play its part in protecting the planet".

The move will send a signal through the industry that rapid innovation is now needed.

Ships may have to operate more slowly to burn less fuel. New designs for vessels will be more streamlined and engines will have to be cleaner, maybe powered by hydrogen or batteries, or even by the wind.

Follow David on Twitter.

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The global shipping industry has for the first time agreed to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases. The move comes after talks all week at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in London. Shippings has previously been excluded from climate agreements, but under the deal, emissions will be reduced by 50% by 2050 compared to 2008 levels.

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Global shipping in 'historic' climate deal

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Research recently published in science journal Nature by the University College London (UCL) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has found that the circulation of water in the Atlantic has been declining since the 1800s.

It's a trend which could exacerbate the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels on the US East Coast and disrupted weather patterns across North America, Europe and north Africa, including the increase in frequency of extreme weather events, like flooding, drought and winter storms.

The weakening of the system isn't likely to be arrested any time soon, according to lead author David Thornalley, according to a press release published to mark the findings.

The causes of the system's slowing down are "predicted to continue in the future due to continued carbon dioxide emissions," he is quoted as saying.

The system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), brings warm, salty water north from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic -- the Gulf Stream -- where it releases its heat atmospherically before sinking to the depths of the ocean, and traveling south to the Antarctic, where it starts its journey again.

The study's findings "suggest that the AMOC has weakened over the past 150 years by approximately 15 to 20 percent" says Thornalley.

The AMOC is a crucial part of the global system of heat transfer throughout the earth's oceans -- the so-called Global Ocean Conveyor Belt.

The study looked at sediment historically carried along by the AMOC -- the larger the grains, the stronger the current. It also reconstructed near-surface ocean temperatures at points along the AMOC's journey to gauge how affected these were by current strength.

Warming at the end of the Little Ice Age, which occurred around 150 years ago, and recent climate change, have been attributed to the disruption of the AMOC system.

The Little Ice Age was "a centuries-long cold period that lasted until about 1850," according to Delia Oppo, a co-author of the study.

The study found that periods of global warming, resulting in meltwater from Arctic sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets, disrupt the system with an influx of fresh water.

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Gulf Stream system at its weakest in 1,600 years, study shows

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Research recently published in science journal Nature by the University College London (UCL) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has found that the circulation of water in the Atlantic has been declining since the 1800s.

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Gulf Stream system at its weakest in 1,600 years, study shows

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Beneath the Arctic sea ice, in the blanket of January's polar night, bowhead whales most prefer to sing.

While the songs of humpback whales have long received the most attention, it turns out that their baleen cousins could have a far greater repertoire.

A study of a bowhead population near Svalbard has shown that their musical calls may be as varied as those of songbirds.

This would make them unique among whale populations, and possibly even mammals.

Whalesong mixtape

Over the course of three years, the whales of the Spitsbergen population produced 184 unique song types. The vocalisations were detected 24 hours a day throughout most of the winter each year.

"The alphabet for the bowhead has got thousands of letters as far as we can tell," Prof Kate Stafford, lead author of the study published in the journal Biology Letters, told BBC News.

"I really think of humpback whale songs as being like classical music. Very ordered. They might last 20 - 30 minutes. An individual [bowhead] song might only be 45 seconds to 2 minutes long, but they'll repeat that song over and over again," the University of Washington researcher added.

Humpback whales are known to sing similar songs across a single season, but for bowheads, song types only lasted a few hours or days before changing.

These complex songs are unusual, as most mammals have distinct, repetitive calls which do not vary.

Although less is known about bowhead populations, the authors think it likely that males do the singing during the breeding season.

With the ability to break through up to half a metre of ice, and a potential lifespan of 200 years, bowheads can seem quite formidable.

Yet their blubber, the thickest of any whale species, led to the Spitsbergen population being commercially hunted as early as the 1600s.

This reduction in their numbers, and the harsh environment of their natural habitat under the ice, has meant that they are poorly studied and remain somewhat mysterious.

Other bowhead groups, such as the Western Arctic population, are better understood thanks to the knowledge of native Alaskans, Prof Stafford explains.

Yet she says that overall we know "relatively little" about the species.

Soloists

It is not yet known whether individual bowheads sing the same song for a lifetime, or if they change from season to season.

The reason for the diversity of calls in this one population hasn't been determined either.

It wasn't possible to count the Spitsbergen group using the hydrophone recordings, but previous work in the region had put the population at a minimum of 343 whales.

What remains, says Prof Stafford, is to acoustically track individuals and learn more about who is vocalising, and why.

"It's a mystery that's going to be really hard to solve," she said.

But being able to eavesdrop under the ice in this remote place... It's pretty remarkable."

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Beneath the Arctic sea ice, in the blanket of January's polar night, bowhead whales most prefer to sing. While the songs of humpback whales have long received the most attention, it turns out that their baleen cousins could have a far greater repertoire.

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Hatchlings from a vulnerable turtle species have been spotted for the first time in decades on a Mumbai beach that was rejuvenated in the past two years by a massive volunteer cleanup operation.

At least 80 Olive Ridley turtles have made their way into the Arabian Sea from nests on the southern end of Versova beach in the past week, protected from wild dogs and birds of prey by volunteers who slept overnight in the sand to watch over them.

Versova has undergone what the United Nations has called the "world's largest beach cleanup project" over the past two years, transformed from a shin-deep dump yard for plastics and rubbish to a virtually pristine piece of coastline.

The man who leads the ongoing cleanup operation, the lawyer Afroz Shah, said he started anticipating the turtle hatchings two months ago when farmers on the southern end of the two-mile (3km) beach reported seeing turtles in the sand.

"The moment we got that news I knew something big was going to happen," he told the Guardian. Last Thursday, some of his volunteers called to say they had spotted dozens of baby Olive Ridley turtles emerging from their nests.

He called the forest department and then went down to the beach with about 25 others, guarding the area while the tiny creatures hobbled across the sand, "making sure not one hatchling suffered a death", he said.

The Olive Ridley species, thought to be named for the olive-green hue of its upper shell, is the smallest and most abundant sea turtle in the ocean, but is still classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Mothers of the species lay eggs in an enormous mass-nesting process known as arribada. Last month on the coast of the eastern Indian state of Odisha, a record 428,083 Olive Ridley turtles nested simultaneously at the Rushikulya rookery.

Though they nest elsewhere in Mumbai, none had been sighted on Versova beach in decades, due to the acute pollution problem there, Shah said. "I had tears in my eyes when I saw them walking towards the ocean."

Sumedha Korgaonkar, who is completing a PhD on Olive Ridley turtles with the Wildlife Institute of India, said it was possible small numbers of the turtles had been nesting on the beach in past years. "We can't say for sure since regular patrolling for turtles nests is not done in Mumbai," she said.

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Clean-up at Versova beach. Photograph: Shashi S Kashyap/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

"Beach cleanups definitely have a positive effect on nesting turtles. Many beaches which are major nesting sites are cleaned prior and during the nesting season by villagers, which increases the chances of getting nests [there]."

For more than two years, Shah has been leading volunteers in manually picking up rubbish from Versova beach and teaching sustainable waste practices to villagers and people living in slums along the coastline and the creeks leading into it.

About 55,000 people live along the beach and the waterways that feed it in the crowded megacity. Shah said he taught them by example, offering to clean communal toilets and pick up rubbish himself before he ever sought their help.

"For the first six to eight weeks, nobody joined," he said. "Then two men approached me and said, very politely, 'Please sir, can we wear your gloves?' Both of them just came and joined me. That's when I knew it was going to be a success."

News doesn't always have to be bad - indeed, the relentless focus on confrontation, disaster, antagonism and blame risks convincing the public that the world is hopeless and there is nothing we can do.

This series is an antidote, an attempt to show that there is plenty of hope, as our journalists scour the planet looking for pioneers, trailblazers, best practice, unsung heroes, ideas that work, ideas that might and innovations whose time might have come.

Readers can follow up with our Further Reading guides and can also recommend other projects, people and progress that we should report on by contacting us at theupside@theguardian.com

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He said the team had cleaned 13m kg of debris from the beach in the past two years and are still going, though their campaign was briefly abandoned in November because of "administrative lethargy" and harassment of volunteers.

India has some of the most polluted waterways and beaches in the world due to rapid, unplanned urbanisation, overpopulation and neglectful attitudes, including to public littering.

"There has been a loss of a sense of belonging," Shah said. "You can have laws, policies, regulations in place, but if the community doesn't have a sense of belonging, you can see what happens."
This article is part of a series on possible solutions to some of the world's most stubborn problems. What else should we cover? Email us at theupside@theguardian.com Topics

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Mumbai beach goes from dump to turtle hatchery in two years

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Hatchlings from a vulnerable turtle species have been spotted for the first time in decades on a Mumbai beach that was rejuvenated in the past two years by a massive volunteer cleanup operation.

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A battle is under way to force the global shipping industry to play its part in tackling climate change.

A meeting of the International Maritime Organisation in London next week will face demands for shipping to radically reduce its CO2 emissions.

If shipping doesn't clean up, it could contribute almost a fifth of the global total of CO2 by 2050.

A group of nations led by Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, Panama and Argentina is resisting CO2 targets for shipping.

Their submission to the meeting says capping ships' overall emissions would restrict world trade. It might also force goods on to less efficient forms of transport.

This argument is dismissed by other countries which believe shipping could actually benefit from a shift towards cleaner technology.

The UK's Shipping Minister Nusrat Ghani told BBC News: "As other sectors take action on climate change, international shipping could be left behind.

"We are urging other members of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to help set an ambitious strategy to cut emissions from ships."

Trade and prosperity

The UK is supported by other European nations in a proposal to shrink shipping emissions by 70%-100% of their 2008 levels by 2050.

Guy Platten from the UK Chamber of Shipping said: "We call on the global shipping industry to get behind these proposals - not just because it is in their interests to do so, but because it is the right thing to do.

"The public expects us all to take action, they understand that international trade brings prosperity, but they rightly demand it is conducted in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. We must listen to those demands, and the time for action is now."

The problem has developed over many years. As the shipping industry is international, it evades the carbon-cutting influence of the annual UN talks on climate change, which are conducted on a national basis.

Instead the decisions have been left to the IMO, a body recently criticised for its lack of accountability and transparency.

The IMO did agree a design standard in 2011 ensuring that new ships should be 30% more efficient by 2025. But there is no rule to reduce emissions from the existing fleet.

The Clean Shipping Coalition, a green group focusing on ships, said shipping should conform to agreement made in Paris to stabilise the global temperature increase as close as possible to 1.5C.

Tangible goals

A spokesman said: "The Paris temperature goals are absolute objectives. They are not conditional on whether the global economy thinks they are achievable or not."

So the pressure is on the IMO to produce an ambitious policy. The EU has threatened that if the IMO doesn't move far enough, the EU will take over regulating European shipping. That would see the IMO stripped of some of its authority.

A spokesman for the Panamanian government told BBC News his nation supports the Paris Agreement.

"But", he said, "Panama, as a developing country that depends on the maritime sector for its progress, and aware that the welfare of its population relies on shipping, believes in the necessity of a well though-out and studied strategy that allows sustainable and efficient reduction of emissions.

"To haste into an uncalculated strategy that aims to reduce emissions to zero by the year 2050 does not take into account the current state of technology."

A recent report from the International Transport Forum at the rich nations' think tank the OECD said maximum deployment of currently known technologies could achieve almost complete decarbonisation of maritime shipping by 2035.

A spokesperson for another of the nations resisting targets told BBC News: "My country pushed very hard to get the deal in Paris. But you will notice that many of the countries opposing the restrictions on CO2 are developing countries that are distant from some of their markets."

Campaigners say huge improvements in CO2 emissions from existing ships can be easily be made by obliging them to travel more slowly. They say a carbon pricing system is needed.

International shipping produces about 1,000 million tonnes of CO2 annually - that's more than the entire German economy.

The meeting runs from Tuesday.

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A battle is under way to force the global shipping industry to play its part in tackling climate change. A meeting of the International Maritime Organisation in London next week will face demands for shipping to radically reduce its CO2 emissions.

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DEFA suspend licence for three months

A vessel from Kirkcudbright in Scotland has been caught violating the Island's fishing laws.

The Kingfisher BA810, owned by West Coast Sea Products Ltd, was found fishing for king scallops within three nautical miles of the Manx coast, despite not having permission.

Master of the vessel, Anthony John True, and a WCSP representative John Wilson King pleaded guilty to the offence last week, and were fined £12,000 and £5,000 respectively.

The Department for Environment, Food and Agriculture has decided to suspend the Kingfisher's fishing licence for three months, in what it terms a 'zero-tolerance' approach.

The suspension policy was introduced last month, after the Manx government backed down on implementing daily catch checks at Island ports.

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Scottish vessel prosecuted for illegal fishing

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DEFA suspend licence for three months A vessel from Kirkcudbright in Scotland has been caught violating the Island's fishing laws. The Kingfisher BA810, owned by West Coast Sea Products Ltd, was found fishing for king scallops within three nautical miles of the Manx coast, despite not having permission.

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The amount of plastic in the ocean is set to triple in a decade unless litter is curbed, a major report has warned.

Plastics is just one issue facing the world's seas, along with rising sea levels, warming oceans, and pollution, it says.

But the Foresight Future of the Sea Report for the UK government said there are also opportunities to cash in on the "ocean economy".

They say this is predicted to double to $3 trillion (£2 trillion) by 2030.

The report says much more knowledge is needed about the ocean. The authors say the world needs a Mission to "Planet Ocean" to mirror the excitement of voyaging to the moon and Mars.

The Foresight reports are written by experts to brief ministers on medium and long-term issues of significance. This one has been signed off by ministers from four different departments as the authors emphasise the need for a joined-up oceans policy.

One of the authors, Prof Edward Hill from the UK National Oceanography Centre told BBC News: "The ocean is critical to our economic future. Nine billion people will be looking to the ocean for more food. Yet we know so little of what's down there.

"We invest a lot of money and enthusiasm for missions to space - but there's nothing living out there. The sea bed is teeming with life. We really need a mission to planet ocean - it's the last frontier."

Another of the authors, the chief scientist for the UK government's environment department Ian Boyd, agreed: "The ocean is out of sight, out of mind," he said.

He told BBC News: "There's a continuous process of exploring for new things to exploit in the oceans, and that's happening faster than we scientists can keep up with. My suspicion is legislation is also struggling to keep up - and obviously there are risks in that."

He said offshore wind farms, oil industries and mining firms were spreading into unexplored areas. "Scientists need to get in there faster than the commercial people or at least at the same time - to put proper regulation in place to govern those industries."

The report highlights many concerns, including the current worry about ocean plastic litter, which it forecasts will treble between 2015 and 2025.

But it stresses that the ocean is being assailed from many different types of pollution - including run-off pesticides and fertilisers from farms, industrial toxins like PCBs, and pharmaceuticals.

The authors say if governments can identify ways of protecting biodiversity in the seas, there are riches to be harvested - including nodules of metals and possibly even cures for cancer.

They predict that the biggest industrial growth in the seas will come from offshore wind, followed by marine aquaculture and fish processing. The report also projects an increase in industrial capture of wild fish.

This latter suggestion alarmed Rachel Jones, a marine expert from London Zoo, ZSL. She told BBC News: "Given that 90% of global fisheries are either at or in excess of sustainable catch levels, I can't really see how they are going to expand capture fisheries."

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The amount of plastic in the ocean is set to triple in a decade unless litter is curbed, a major report has warned. Plastics is just one issue facing the world's seas, along with rising sea levels, warming oceans, and pollution, it says.

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Chile has created a new law protecting the waters along its 6,400km (4,000 mile) coastline.

The outgoing president, Michele Bachelet, signed the decree, which creates nine marine reserves.

President Bachelet, who is ending her term of office this week, said that Chile needed to establish the basis on which it would conserve its marine territory for the future.

This year Chile also signed into law a vast network of nature parks.

"Who we are and who we can be, is inevitably tied up with our 6,400-kilometre coast. This is why it is so important to understand that the sea is vital for our national development," President Bachelet said.

The new legislation will increase the area of sea under Chilean state protection from 4.3% to 42.4 %, and protect marine life in around 1.4 million square kilometres of sea.

One of the new reserves covers the area around the Diego Ramírez Islands, home to sea lions, kelp forests and whales. Another covers the island around the Juan Fernández Islands.

In September last year, Chile opened a huge marine park around Easter Island, which is home to species only found there.

The reserve is about the size of Chile itself and will be co-administered with the indigenous population, who will continue to be allowed to fish there.

During her administration, Mrs Bachelet also signed a deal to create the largest network of natural parks in South America, in Patagonia, after a large private land donation.

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Chile has created a new law protecting the waters along its 6,400km (4,000 mile) coastline. The outgoing president, Michele Bachelet, signed the decree, which creates nine marine reserves. President Bachelet, who is ending her term of office this week, said that Chile needed to establish the basis on which it would conserve its marine territory for the future.

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A section of sea wall in Ramsey was damaged during Storm Emma which also destroyed a large part of an area of special scientific interest.

The damage penetrated an older section of wall on Queen's Promenade in Ramsey, resulting in undermining of the walkway and its subsequent partial collapse.

Chairman of Ramsey Commissioners Andy Cowie said: 'I was shocked at the extent of the damage caused to the Mooragh promenade.

'Our staff took steps to secure the site immediately to keep our residents safe and contacted the Department of Infrastructure. We have been in close contact with the DoI subsequently and I am pleased that they are taking this damage very seriously.

'The DoI team has already assessed the damage and produced detailed repair plans and I am confident that they will ensure the damage is repaired rapidly, it is also good to see that the section that was repaired previously has withstood the force of the storm successfully.

'We are seeing more frequent weather events on our island and need to consider our future plans to ensure our town has robust protection for the future.'

Following the damage to the section of wall and walkway on Queen's Promenade, the DoI has opted to replace a 90 metre section of wall, similar to the repair work done in April 2015 that Mr Cowie said survived the recent storm.

It is believed this work will cost the taxpayer about £180,000.

Also damaged was the Mooragh Promenade's area of special scientific interest (ASSI), which as our pictures show has lost a significant portion of land to the sea.

The ASSI site however, despite being badly damaged by the storm probably helped to protect the surrounding area.

A spokesman for the Manx Wildlife Trust explained: 'Having good condition habitats like Mooragh ASSI can help protect structures, things like salt marsh are natural sea defences and actually decrease the costs and need for hard engineered sea defences.

'Also from some damage the site will recover, its just a question of how healthy it was to start with, the coastal sites are used to storms and inundation, so if they're good quality, they bounce back.'

This area was designated an ASSI in part due to being the location where the Isle of Man cabbage was first described back in the 1660s by the botanists John Ray.

Storm Emma also led to a surprise discovery in Ramsey, that of a mystery pipeline.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Environment, Food and Agriculture said: 'We are extremely disappointed that a second chunk of Ramsey Mooragh Shore Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) has been washed away in Storm Emma this past weekend.

'This ASSI is important for its habitats including; vegetated shingle, vegetated strandline, semi-fixed dune and coastal grassland which support several rare or uncommon plants

'We are aware that the DoI will need to make repairs to the prom in the near future and we will be giving consideration to the long term effect of beach dynamics in the area.'
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A section of sea wall in Ramsey was damaged during Storm Emma which also destroyed a large part of an area of special scientific interest. The damage penetrated an older section of wall on Queen's Promenade in Ramsey, resulting in undermining of the walkway and its subsequent partial collapse.

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Microscopic plastic beads, fragments and fibres are littering riverbeds across the UK - from rural streams to urban waterways.

This is according to a study that analysed sediments from rivers in north-west England.

Scientists from the University of Manchester tested river sediments at 40 sites throughout Greater Manchester and found "microplastics everywhere".

There is evidence that such small particles can enter the food chain.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, are the first from a "systematic basin-wide" study, the researchers say.

In a first round of tests, just one of the sites - in the upper reaches of the River Goyt, which is one of the tributaries of the River Mersey - contained no plastic. But when the researchers returned to that site to repeat their test, that area had become contaminated.

"I think that it is likely that there are even higher concentrations in some of the large rivers passing through global megacities," said lead researcher Dr Rachel Hurley.

"We just need to get out there and see. We still don't know the full scale of the microplastic problem," she told BBC News.

"Wherever you have people and industry, you will have high levels of micro plastic," added Prof Jamie Woodward, from Manchester University's School of Geography.

'Plastic hotspots'

To analyse river sediments, researchers isolated patches of riverbed and measured the concentration within those patches. Some urban "hotspots" contained hundreds of thousands of plastic particles per square metre. This included a site at the River Tame in Denton - a downstream, suburban stretch of river - that contained more than half a million plastic particles per square metre.

"According to our literature search on microplastics in the ocean, in sediments on beaches, in lakes - and the small amount of data on rivers elsewhere - this is currently the highest concentration found anywhere," said Prof Woodward.

The scientists now want to investigate the specific sources of the plastic fibres, microbeads and fragments they found.

One recent study in the US linked wastewater treatment plants with the release of plastic into the environment. And the scientists think that wastewater is likely to make a large contribution - particularly of microfibres from synthetic clothing and microbeads.

"We welcomed the ban on microbeads in personal care products introduced earlier this year," said Prof Woodward. "And we want to monitor the effect of that ban.

"But microbeads are also used in industrial processes - in the moulding of larger plastic products. So there are likely to be multiple sources.

"In urban environments, microplastics may come from wastewater and sewer systems, from plastic litter that is broken up and fragmented, and even from the air. Sources may not be active all of the time, so they are difficult to track - but we are working on it!" said Dr Hurley.

Flushed by flooding

The researchers carried out their first set of samples prior to the winter floods of 2015 and 2016. That extreme flooding was particularly severe in their river system - when weeks of heavy rain wreaked havoc in northern England, Northern Ireland and parts of Wales.

The team returned to the sites to see if the levels of plastic had changed. This revealed that the floods had "flushed out" approximately 70% of the microplastics stored on these river beds, equivalent to almost a tonne of plastic, or nearly 50 billion particles. It also eradicated microbead contamination at seven sites.

So the rivers are able to "cleanse themselves", the researchers explained. But, as Prof Woodward pointed out, "all of that will all ultimately end up in the ocean".

Dr James Rothwell added that, since many of the particles this study detected were so small, they would simply slip through the filtration nets that are used, as standard, to sift microplastics out of the ocean.

"The implications of that are that we might well be underestimating by several orders of magnitude how much microplastic is in the oceans that has been delivered by rivers - flushed out during flood events," he said.
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Microscopic plastic beads, fragments and fibres are littering riverbeds across the UK - from rural streams to urban waterways. This is according to a study that analysed sediments from rivers in north-west England. Scientists from the University of Manchester tested river sediments at 40 sites throughout Greater Manchester and found "microplastics everywhere".

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Plans to increase the cost of commercial fishing in the Irish Sea are being considered by the Isle of Man government.

The proposals could see the introduction of a "tiered system" based on boat size and species fished.

It would affect any fishing boat working in Manx territorial waters.

Smaller boats could be charged hundreds of pounds more than the current flat rate of £301, while boats of more than 20 meters could pay thousands more.

A government spokesman said the "fair and balanced" changes would mean each vessel would pay a "base fee" and a "species licence".

"The Isle of Man Territorial Sea produces some of the most productive fishing grounds for king and queen scallops, crab, lobster, nephrops, whelk and herring," he said.

"Those who benefit the most should contribute the most towards the costs of managing and protecting this valuable natural resource."

About 230 commercial fishing vessels are currently licenced to fish in Manx waters.

About 50% are from Northern Ireland, 29% from the Isle of Man, 14% from Scotland, 6% from England, 1% from Wales and 2% from Jersey.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "Our fishermen have a long history of working in Isle of Man waters and we will discuss these proposals with them as we consider the consultation and formally respond in due course."

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Plans to increase the cost of commercial fishing in the Irish Sea are being considered by the Isle of Man government. The proposals could see the introduction of a "tiered system" based on boat size and species fished. It would affect any fishing boat working in Manx territorial waters.