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The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Is eating farmed salmon worth snuffing out 40m years of Tasmanian evolution?
Australia is justly famous as a place where ancient species, long extinct elsewhere, live on. After aeons of adversity, Australia's living fossils often survive only in protected habitats: the Wollemi, Huon and King Billy pines, the Queensland lungfish and even the Tasmanian devil (which thrived on the mainland at the same time as the Egyptians were building the pyramids) are good examples. Such species are a source of wonder for anyone interested in the living world and they should serve as a source of hope that, given half a chance, even ancient, slow-changing species can survive periods of dramatic climate change. Australia's largest repository of living fossils is arguably the cool, shallow marine waters off its southern coastline. Despite that fact that most of us enjoy a swim, snorkel or walk on the beach, the biological importance of our shallow temperate seas is almost entirely unrecognised. In 1996 Tasmania's spotted handfish became the first marine fish to be listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Found only around the Derwent River estuary, this 10cm-long Tasmanian has a cute, froggy face and hand-like fins, which it uses to 'walk' across the sea floor. There are only 14 species of handfish, and all are restricted to the cool waters off southern Australia. Most have limited distributions, several are endangered and a few are known from just a single example. But what is truly surprising about handfish is that they were once widespread. A 50m-year-old fossil was unearthed in the Italian alps. So, like the platypus and Huon pine, handfish are relics, clinging precariously to life in Australia's cool southern waters. The Maugean skate, also known as the 'thylacine of the sea', has become famous because it is endangered by salmon farming. It is also a living fossil, found only in the tannin-rich waters of Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania's west coast. The Maugean skate's relatives inhabit shallow marine waters around New Zealand and Patagonia, indicating that the species is a relic from the time, about 40m years ago, when Australia, Antarctica and South America were joined together to form Gondwana. Its predicament is forcing ordinary Australians to ask whether it's right to snuff out 40m years of evolution for a salmon bagel. The bell clapper shell, found only in the shallow waters off Australia's south-west, is a third and most surprising relic. These long and narrow chalky white shells, shaped like the clapper of a bell, remain common enough that you have a fair chance of finding a sea-washed example on a beach walk anywhere between Perth and Esperance. Yet it is a living fossil with a truly exotic history. When workers were constructing the sewers of Paris in the 19th century, they often came across fossil bell clapper shells, some of which were up to a metre long. Right across the world, from Europe to eastern Australia, bell clapper fossils abound. Yet only in Western Australia's south-west can living examples still be seen. Handfish, Maugean skates and bell clapper shells are just three charismatic species among a plethora of smaller and less spectacular marine species that have found refuge in the cool waters off southern Australia. Today the great juggernaut of climate breakdown threatens to extinguish their entire habitat. The heating caused by our emissions of greenhouse gases is not distributed evenly. The oceans are absorbing 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases, and the high latitudes are warming faster than areas closer to the equator. Catastrophic changes are unfolding. Giant kelp once abounded in the shallows off eastern Tasmania. So great is the biodiversity found in groves of giant kelp that Charles Darwin called them the rainforests of the sea. Due to warming waters, in most places it's nothing but a memory. When the kelp vanishes, so does the biodiversity. Problems of simple warming are compounded by the migration of the long-spined sea urchin, which is spreading southwards as waters warm. Without the strongest efforts to eliminate greenhouse gases, it can't be long before the first of southern Australia's marine living fossils wink out. The survival of Australia's living fossils is a source of wonder and hope for me. The fact that platypus, which are little changed for 100m years, continue to survive in creeks and rivers near the largest Australian metropolises helps calm my worst fears about our future. And, while I may never see one in the wild, knowing that spotted handfish continue to walk the bay floor near the Hobart casino brings joy to my soul. I continue to believe that once Australians realise what is at stake, they will act to protect our extraordinary biodiversity. There is no doubt that good climate policy is facing a Trumpian apocalypse. Yet, like our living fossils, some bold initiatives survive, among them Andrew Forrest's 'real zero' target by 2030 for his iron ore mines. If an energy-hungry iron ore miner operating in a remote corner of Australia can abolish all use of fossil fuels in the next five years, why can't we all? Prof Tim Flannery is one of Australia's foremost climate change experts, an internationally recognised scientist, explorer and conservationist. He was named Australian of the Year in 2007 and is chief councillor of the Climate Council. He is also is a board member of Minderoo Foundation, Andrew Forrest's philanthropic vehicle
The Guardian
08-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Jurassic-era trees have grown in Tasmania for millions of years. Now they face their biggest threat: fire
Steve Leonard finds it hard when he goes bushwalking in Tasmania's high country these days. 'I look at a stand of pencil pine and I wonder: 'how long will you be there?'' The ecologist is just back from a rapid survey of the cost to ancient trees of the latest lightning-strike fires across the island's drying landscapes. Among the losses he found near the overland track, an alpine walking trail through central Tasmania, were groves of pencil pine. 'We saw a couple of stands that were quite severely burned,' says Leonard, from the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service. 'Others where the fires had taken out single trees.' This wizard-bearded scientist spoke the fears of many: that tree-by-tree natural antiquity is being consumed. Only found in Tasmania, pencil pine dates back to the late Jurassic, 140 million years ago. It is from the small Athrotaxis genus, with King Billy pine and a third species that crosses between them called the Lax-leaf. If allowed, these trees can live a thousand years. Unlike eucalypts, they are hypersensitive to fire; if burned around the trunk, they die. And Tasmania is in a new age of fire. Pencil pine has an absorbingly varied character which reflects its landscape, shaped by wind, ice and snow. The bark is soft and yielding, its waxy leaves kind to running fingers. I have seen it outlined at sundown, making a trail along a watercourse like a clan on a centuries-long journey. Marvelled on a mountain plateau where the trees' windward stems have been ice-stripped of bark, yet shelter stems of new life. And I've been held spellbound on a glacial shelf where a pine crawls up a boulder, live branchlets rising barely a hand's breadth above the rock. I have imagined pencil pines sculptural groves offering permanence through generations of Palawa who have lived on the island for thousands of years, the shelter across riskier altitudes they would have offered. After invasion it was regarded as so 'remarkably handsome' that its first colonial name was pine of Olympus. Woodlands of pencil pine are now rare. The tree persists in rock-guarded fortresses like the walls of Jerusalem and the labyrinth; a reminder of what once stood before wide-scale burning. Mostly now pencil pines live as remnants, finding just enough nourishment to huddle in fireproof boulder fields or to edge wet shorelines. A century ago the poet Marie Pitt, who lived through bushfire on a mountain mining hamlet, wrote of people unleashing 'A gallop of fire': I loose the horses, the wild, red horses I loose the horses, the mad, red horses And terror is on the land. The burning was to clear Tasmanian land for access and prospecting, and later to encourage livestock grazing. Pitt's words stand eerily today as a description of the red horses of global heating, which have brought lightning-started fires across whole Tasmanian landscapes in 2013, 2016, 2020, and now in 2025. These latest fires, now burning into a fifth week, are again exceeding our ability to protect these ancient trees. A tree like Huon pine, renowned for its long-lasting scented timber, can more often be found today confined to pockets of landscape that are less likely to burn: south-facing hillsides, for example, sheltered from the predominant northerly wind-blown fires. In his 21 February helicopter survey, Leonard flew west to the Harman River, where deep concern was held for a Huon pine stand that included a tree ring counted to 2,500 years of annual growth – not including its rotten centre, which might have held another 500 rings. Fire had burned to the edges of this stand in a steep river valley. 'It's a tall, single stem tree. It sticks up out of the canopy in the rainforest. It's a really nice looking tree. It was unharmed.' Other, big, Huon further downriver did burn, leaving a ghastly catalogue for Rob Blakers, a nature photographer, to record. Touchstones from the deep past such as the Huon and pencil pines give each of us pause to contemplate our own temporary existence. I was drawn to these trees during my recovery from stage 4 metastatic lung cancer, our joint struggles for life an inspiration to me. I have the medical breakthrough of immunotherapy to thank for my second life. Surely human ingenuity can be turned to protect this rich heritage of trees too. On the afternoon of 3 February, 1,227 lightning strikes hit the ground in a sweep across the island. Nineteen fires lit up within hours in the north-west but one in the south of the state didn't. It stayed smouldering near Mount Picton for a few days, then burst into flame. Within minutes its smoke was reported by a remote AI-trained camera set on a nearby mountaintop; a little swarm of Fire Boss water bombers flew out to it and began dumping. Helicopters followed and winched down remote area firefighters. Together they stopped the burn at a few hectares. But this is just a hopeful sign. The 2025 fires have left a patchwork of burnt ground across 98,500 hectares of wild country. Richard Dakin, the deputy incident controller with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, says the fire which took out the pencil pine near the overland track was nearly held back by Fire Bosses – fire fighting float planes – skimming water out of nearby Lake St Clair. Lakes and coastal bays are on the side of the ancients. But Tasmania is an island in the southern ocean. Strong winds and cloud are usual, and the skimmers could not hold the fire's perimeter. Instead, the fire headed north toward more rich flora, including a very old King Billy pine forest and – in the distance – Cradle Mountain itself. 'We had to throw everything at it,' Dakin sais. NSW fire service large air tankers dropped a 2.5km fire-retardant line; water bombers campaigned from the lakes; and remote firefighters worked at arduous, grimy 'old-school' firefighting, flailing and digging at the perimeter. 'The combination of the three led to success,' Dakin says. Their campaign rolls on, the full losses of the ancients yet to be tallied. But already we know for certain that after millions of years on Earth, and living only in Tasmania, these trees will need our help if they are to have a place in a heated future. Andrew Darby is the author of The Ancients, published by Allen & Unwin and available now
