Latest news with #PeterRose
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Aussie 'ghost fish' species once thought to be extinct is making a 'quiet comeback'
An Aussie species once thought to be extinct is making a 'quiet comeback' in a farm dam in rural Victoria. Over the past 50 years, climate change and river regulation has decimated the population of flat-headed galaxias — a native animal that once thrived in the southern Murray Darling Basin but has since earned the nickname 'ghost fish' partially due to its declining numbers. The critically endangered 'floodplain specialist fish' used to be prevalent in NSW, Victoria and South Australia, thriving in wetlands and billabongs, but has now 'basically become extinct' in the latter, North Central Catchment Management Authority (CMA) project manager, Dr Peter Rose, told Yahoo News Australia this week. 'It's only been found in one spot in NSW since 2012 and it's only been found at a handful of sites in Victoria in the last 20 years,' he said. 'They were last seen in Victoria in 2016 in a creek that had since completely dried out, hence our concern.' Hoping to bring the species back from the brink, the CMA and the Arthur Rylah Institute began surveying dozens of sites in 2022, using eDNA testing — a process that allows scientists to identify genetic material in water — to identify any remaining populations. 'When we started working on them, we weren't even sure whether they were still around anywhere, and we urgently needed to get out and assess whether the species still occurred in Victoria and where the remnant populations might be,' Dr Rose recalled. Luckily, researchers were able to collect ghost fish from four areas in the state's northeast, which were then translocated to the farm dam to breed. Given ghost fish struggle to reproduce in captivity, Dr Rose said he wasn't sure the surrogate site would be successful, yet much to everyone's delight, when experts returned months later they were able to catch 50 juveniles, which were then moved to other secure bodies of water. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Goulburn Broken CMA (@goulburnbrokencma) 🎣 Banning of 'morally outrageous' fishing trap a major win for elusive animal 🐠 Young Aussies flock to river to return fish 'missing for more than a century' 🔥 Growing $157 billion problem Australia can't afford to fix As of June this year, a total of four surrogate sites are housing ghost fish populations. 'We just need to secure them, and then once we've got the numbers, we can start trying to put them back into into wild sites where they've become locally extinct,' Dr Rose told Yahoo. And while they 'haven't boomed as much' as other species bred using the same method, including the southern purple-spotted gudgeon fish, positive results are emerging. 'We captured one that was 161mm — that's larger than previously recorded. And I guess it shows just how healthy these fish are and that they're thriving in these surrogate habitats,' the project manager said. 'This species, along with another five fish species — we call them the magnificent six — are declining right across the southern Murray Darling Basin. These fish are really important food sources for larger fish and water birds, and they play a really important role in the ecosystem as well. 'So to have these species on the brink of extinction is a real worry, and we really need to rehabilitate the wetlands and bring these fish back in.' Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@ You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.
Business Post
26-04-2025
- Health
- Business Post
Technology that responds to material reality
Sometimes it seems like everything is connected to the internet: from doorbells to fridges, more and more devices in our home want to phone home. In some cases the benefits are clear, while in others the utility is marginal at best. However, the internet of things (IoT) isn't really about gadgets, and in the commercial and industrial space it represents both a continuation of the implementation of automation and a significant leap forward. Industrial IoT applications are now well beyond pilot projects: smart sensors, data analytics, and interconnected machinery are providing actionable insights, optimising operations, and, as a result, bolstering the bottom lines of forward-thinking enterprises. However, nothing stands still, and Peter Rose, group chief technical director of TEKenable, said that IoT devices amounted to much more than consumer electronics or factory equipment. Indeed, TEKenable is working on a number of projects that highlight the innovative ways IoT is being applied to solve complex problems. 'The first one is in healthcare, where we're working with a company that develops a product to improve the quality of life for nursing home residents,' he said. The device sits behind the bed of a resident and if they have been incontinent, it will pick up on this and send a message to the cloud-based server, saying they need attention. 'That message also makes its way to a mobile app used by the staff, so the resident gets the attention quickly. That's up and running, it's in trial now,' Rose said. However, there is more to the product than sensors and apps. Given the computational power available today the system also has predictive abilities, meaning it can help to avoid the patient experiencing incontinence. 'AI analytics are performed on the data to predict an event before it happens, so we can improve the quality of life for the resident,' he said. This is a good example of information technology today moving away from rigid procedure-following, resulting in significant improvements in how devices respond to their users and surroundings. AI models are learning how to optimise the machinery and process the orders as efficiently as possible 'We don't always know [when we start] what the data points are that you need to capture, but, in this case, it is supplemented with feedback from the nurses' data, captured by the mobile app. That's used, in this project, to tune the device and decide what is a problem and what only seems like a problem,' he said. Another current TEKenable project, which will be announced formally soon, is deploying IoT technology in a food component production company. Rose said that the company makes ingredients for foodstuff with Microsoft Business Central as its core application, but its factory is IoT and SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] enabled. 'What we're doing is managing the production schedules and optimising them on the ingredient mix going in, orders coming in, and so on. The raw materials can come in at different times and the processing – all of this being done from a finance package,' he said. This gives the company the ability to manage complexity. For example, if a large amount of wet material comes in, the software will know how long it takes to dry it. As a result, it can inform the decisions downstream, stopping the factory from being idle. 'Normally this is done from the manufacturing system, but in this case the optimisation is done by AI models – and the AI models are learning how to optimise the machinery and process the orders as efficiently as possible,' he said. For Rose, the meeting of real world events and conditions with our ability to perform calculations is key: real value emerges when the vast amounts of data generated by connected devices are intelligently analysed. 'Once you have the data you have the ability to get really useful insights'.
