Latest news with #UniversityOfWesternAustralia
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Aussie family find 'much cheaper' option than Sydney after $1 million realisation
A young family has left Sydney for a much 'cheaper' Australian capital and say they can now get a better bang for their buck. Thousands of people moved away from New South Wales last year, with the state losing people faster than any other. Soheil Mokhlesi relocated from Sydney to Perth in January with his wife Rebecca and their 11-month-old son. The 37-year-old told Yahoo Finance they had been actively looking to buy their first property in Rydalmere, in the city's west, but prices kept increasing. 'Unfortunately, each year the prices go up and go up,' he said. RELATED Tough way Aussie couple saved $60,000 to buy first property Centrelink's 'balancing' move could provide cash boost or expose debt Commonwealth Bank's fresh alert for millions over mass text message 'campaign' Mokhlesi, who has a construction painting business and also works as a stock trader, said the couple had a budget of $1 million, but realised this would likely only buy them a unit in the suburb. They began investigating their options outside of Sydney last year and travelled to Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. They ended up settling on Perth, with Mokhlesi also being approved to study a Master's in Applied Finance at the University of Western Australia. Mokhlesi said he has been able to find jobs for his painting business and there is more work available compared to Sydney. His wife, who works as a property manager, has also found a new role in family is renting a four-bedroom house in Heathridge for $700 per week, which is about 20 minutes from the CBD. They were previously spending $650 per week to rent an older three-bedroom house in Rydalmere. 'It's way cheaper. For the property that we have, if we rented it in Sydney, especially in Rydalmere at least, we would have to pay $1,000 per week,' Mokhlesi said. 'I can say that it's cheaper, way cheaper than Sydney.' The couple have also found they will be able to buy a bigger property compared to Sydney at a lower price. 'The property that you can buy here, it can be bigger, three bedroom or four bedroom, compared to Sydney with $1 million we could just go for a unit, especially in Rydalmere,' he said. Sydney is the most expensive rental capital in Australia, with the typical dwelling renting for $796 per week in June. However, CoreLogic found Perth was in second place at $721 per week, followed by Brisbane at $687 per week. Sydney is also the most expensive when it comes to property prices, with average dwellings hitting $1.2 million in June. Perth, in comparison, is sitting at $819,885, which is still a new high. WA the fastest growing state with population surpassing 3 million New research from Muval, which analysed more than 41,000 family moves across Australia over the past six years, found Western Australia was attracting families at more than twice the rate it was losing them. Perth was found to have 1.88 families arriving for every one that leaves. In comparison, Sydney was seeing an exodus, with just 0.31 inbound moves for every family that leaves. Muval CEO and co-founder James Morrell said the online service was seeing more families relocate to more affordable parts of the country. 'Remote work has opened the door for families to rethink where they live. In WA, we're seeing families seize the opportunity to get more for their money, enjoy more space, and simplify daily life, without sacrificing quality or connection,' he said. Australian Bureau of Statistics data released last month similarly found more people were fleeing NSW than any other state. The state lost 28,118 people to net interstate migration, with 112,763 people departing the state. Queensland gained a net 25,940 people, while Western Australia saw a net increase of 12,612 people. Western Australia has the fastest growth rate at 2.4 per cent, with more than 3 million people now living in the west. Tasmania had the slowest growth rate at 0.3 per cent, while New South Wales has a growth rate of 1.3 per cent. 'Within Australia, people are continuing to leave NSW, and to a lesser extent Victoria and the smallest jurisdictions, and head into Queensland and WA,' Housing Industry Association economist Tom Devitt said. 'But even the jurisdictions losing residents interstate are absorbing enough overseas arrivals to see their populations expand.' Family happy to have made the move Mokhlesi said he and his wife are glad they made the move. They are planning to buy a property in Perth in the next eight or so months once they have a better understanding of the suburbs. 'We have lots of opportunities here, so it's best for us to not be rushed,' he said. Mokhlesi said some of his friends back in Sydney were also considering leaving the city. 'It's become harder. I lived in Sydney for around 13 years now. It's become hard,' he in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data
New York Times
2 days ago
- Science
- New York Times
How Healthy Are the Oceans? Ask a Whale Shark
On a calm morning in May, Brianna Beaulieu, a master's student in marine biology at the University of Western Australia, and several researchers from around the world boarded two research vessels bound for Ningaloo Reef on Australia's west coast. The scientists have invested months of planning to spend just a few minutes in the water collecting data on one of the ocean's most mysterious animals. Whale sharks are not whales. They are fish, the largest in the sea, and can grow up to 60 feet long. Yet, surprisingly little is known about their life cycle. Researchers still don't know where whale sharks mate, how often they breed or where they go to give birth. Ms. Beaulieu and her colleagues hope to gain at least some insights into these giants. A whale shark can easily be spotted from the air, cruising just below the surface of the crystal-clear waters of the Indian Ocean. In May, whale sharks gather off the reef in numbers so high that, for the half-dozen spotter planes overhead, finding them is simple. For the past 20 years, a team from the University of Western Australia has conducted annual fieldwork at Ningaloo Reef. Ningaloo is one of the world's longest fringing reefs, formed unusually close to shore, and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The reef's shallow, turquoise waters are home to an extraordinary range of marine life. The whale sharks that migrate there each year offer a rare window for scientific study. Mark Meekan has overseen the research since 2004. His work focuses on the biology and ecology of whale sharks – how they grow, how they live and what can be done to protect them. At the reef, the scientists measure the lengths and dimensions of the animals and collect tissue samples for chemical analysis. They also use drones to assess the body condition of the whale sharks: Are they getting fatter? Thinner? 'Whale sharks can live for over 100 years and grow very slowly,' Dr. Meekan said. 'To track that growth, you need long-term monitoring.' One thing that the team has learned over the past two decades is that whale sharks are highly susceptible to the impact of human activities on the oceans.'By monitoring them, we're not just learning about the sharks, we're learning about ocean health more broadly,' Dr. Meekan said. 'These animals travel thousands of kilometers, so each one is like a sentinel or autonomous sampling unit moving across the Indian Ocean and returning to Ningaloo each year to tell the tale.' Much of Ms. Beaulieu's research focuses on measuring the overall health of whale sharks and the impact of manmade threats on them, including boat strikes and 'forever chemicals' in the water. Whale sharks gather at Ningaloo Reef to feed on plankton that appear each year when coral spawn. As Ms. Beaulieu dives into the water, she takes a compact underwater camera to document a whale shark's appearance. Her colleague Sophie Jones often joins her in the water, gripping a yard-long reference pole. The pole provides a crucial scale to help researchers precisely determine the animal's size, while a drone captures the scene from above. The whale shark typically remains relatively calm as Ms. Beaulieu swims beneath it and holds a small ultrasound device above the surface of its skin, just behind the dorsal fin. The data, which measures skin depth and the condition of the animal's muscles, is sent to a veterinarian to assess the whale shark's internal health and reproductive status. The encounter lasts just a few minutes, before the whale shark disappears again into the deep blue. Ms. Beaulieu and the other researchers then swim to the surface and signal for pickup. Then they do it all again. The team repeated the sequence 11 times on that day: spotting, diving, documenting and collecting data. These few minutes with the whale sharks are the culmination of a year's planning, a gigantic logistical effort to shadow a giant. In the 12 days of fieldwork, the researchers documented 101 whale shark encounters — a bumper year. In 2023, after their boat broke down, they only had four. Jessica Strickland, the ship's captain. Researchers have developed tools that allow the public to contribute to whale shark science. Platforms like Shark Guardian and Wildbook for Whale Sharks invite divers, tour operators and marine tourists to upload their photographs of whale sharks, ideally with a clear view of the area just behind the gills, where the spot patterns are most reliable. Sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms then compare these images with an international database of more than 8,000 individual whale sharks, improving the ability of scientists to monitor their movements, residency, growth and health. 'Every day during the season, guides are in the water filming the sharks, and those videos provide us with ID images,' Dr. Meekan said. 'That allows us to track which sharks are resident and which are just passing through.'
ABC News
20-07-2025
- Health
- ABC News
WA's flu season tipped to be second-worst in past decade as cases surge
It feels like every year we're told this is one of the worst flu seasons on record. But this time around, doctors really mean it. We're only part-way through July and the rate of infections is already nearing full-year figures for previous years. It's worrying experts, including the Australian Medical Association, whose president said West Australians should buckle up for a "difficult couple of weeks ahead". Professor Yuben Moodley is a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Western Australia, and said he expected this year to be the second-worst flu season in the last decade. "The virus evolves and mutates every flu season and the aim of the virus is to avoid our immune response and to then infect cells more efficiently," he said. "There's certain times and certain flu strains which are more effective in doing that than others. That does not necessarily mean the flu is getting more severe, however. "What happens though is that we have an increasing ageing population who are becoming more susceptible to the flu," Professor Moodley said. "The flu in a young, healthy person is not going to have major consequences, but if you have much more aged people, it certainly will result in more hospitalisations than previously. "So an increase in the ageing population will result in increased presentations to the doctor or to hospital." It comes as national data showed a 50 per cent increase in hospital admissions over a fortnightly period due to the winter surge. Those increased presentations have been blamed for increased pressure on hospitals, as shown by ambulance ramping figures. Ambulances are considered "ramped" when they spend more than half-an-hour waiting outside a hospital to hand over a patient. The average hours paramedics have spent ramped each day has been increasing significantly in WA since May, and is currently sitting just shy of records set at the peak of the pandemic. Premier Roger Cook said it was not surprising the system would be under pressure at this time of year. He also denied St John Ambulance struggling to meet its response time targets showed there needed to be extra capacity in the health system. "We need to make sure that we deploy taxpayers' funds in an efficient manner, so you don't want to have too much extra capacity, you don't want to have too little extra capacity," he said. "It's a matter of balance. "But [the system's] performing well … and we'll continue to look at how we can improve hospital services." Cook's view is in stark contrast to medical groups, including the Australian Medical Association, who suggest the state is at least 1,000 hospital beds short of being able to meet demand. "While demand on our hospitals is high, it is being managed and pausing elective surgeries is not something that is being considered," Health Minister Meredith Hammat said during the week. Compounding issues is that WA's flu season started earlier than usual. "This year in particularly, possibly because of increased travel over the last six months, we have seen a worse flu season earlier than we expected," WA Health Director General Shirley Bowen told budget estimates earlier in July. "Normally in Western Australia we might see a flu peak in July, August or September, often more in the August period. "This year we saw new cases in January. That is sort of an overflow from the situation in the UK and Europe." The solutions, of course, seem simple: vaccination and staying home when sick. Actually getting people to do either of those things is much more difficult. Western Australia's flu vaccine coverage was 25.4 per cent at the end of June — one per cent behind the national average and tied for second-last with Queensland. Asked on Friday if she was happy with the uptake of the vaccine, Seniors Minister Simone McGurk would only the say the government was "sending a very, very strong message that we want people to be vaccinated" by making it free. Professor Moodley thinks more needs to be done. "I think it is important to address vaccine scepticism a little more strongly,"he said. "Perhaps we can actually improve our outreach to people and to educate people better. Preventative Health Minister Sabine Winton said earlier this month apathy was an issue. "I am told the rate is about two per cent better than the case last year," she said. "I do not want anyone to be complacent. We need to be doing much better than that to really have an even better impact on keeping people healthy and out of hospitals." Like anything in health, that's likely to be expensive and take a long time. It means at this stage, as cases continue to grow, there's little to do but stick to the basics and manage the pressures that result.
ABC News
19-06-2025
- Science
- ABC News
The polyphagous shot-hole borer kills trees. Why is it so lethal, how is it treated, and can it spread across Australia?
The Western Australian government yesterday announced that it would stop trying to eradicate an invasive pest that's killing trees in and around Perth and start managing it instead. The pest, the polyphagous shot-hole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus), is a tiny beetle native to South-East Asia that has been silently spreading in the Perth metropolitan area for at least four years. The only approved treatment for the sesame-seed-sized pest is to chop down plants it has infested and chip them into tiny pieces. It's something that local councils have been forced to do to hundreds of trees, including dozens of huge, old Moreton Bay figs, to try to stop the beetle's spread. Last year, a $41 million plan was approved to wipe the pest from Australia's shores, but the WA state government this week said eradication was now no longer feasible. So why is this particular pest so problematic, and if it can't be eradicated, are there other treatments on the horizon? The beetle drills tunnels into tree trunks and branches, leaving distinctive "shot holes" in the bark. But despite being adept at chewing through wood, the polyphagous shot-hole borer doesn't eat it. Wood is mostly made of cellulose which, while plentiful, is incredibly hard to digest. "No animal has evolved the capacity to do this on its own — they always do it with a microbial friend," Theo Evans, an entomologist at the University of Western Australia, said. "With termites, for example, they have a range of bacteria and protozoa. In the case of these wood-boring beetles, they use a fungus," Dr Evans said. The fungus eats the wood, and the beetle eats the fungus. And it's the fungus — not the beetle, nor its tunnels — that ends up killing the tree. Once inside a branch or trunk, the growing fungus needs water, so it sends out filaments to tap into the tree's circulatory system. These fungal filaments can block those vessels, and essentially starve the tree of water and nutrients. The pest was first detected in WA in East Fremantle in August 2021 when a resident noticed two box elder maples in her garden looked unwell, and had shot holes in their bark. It was soon confirmed that the infestation was the polyphagous shot-hole borer, a pest that had been wreaking havoc in places like California, Israel and South Africa for more than a decade. But while this was the first confirmed report of the beetle in the state (and Australia more broadly), it would not have been the site of the first infestation, Dr Evans said. "Those trees were dying, so the beetles must have been in those trees for a minimum of two years, and possibly three or four because it takes that long … for the fungus to spread through the tree and clog its vascular system." It's also unclear how the beetle reached WA in the first place. What seems likeliest is the pest hitched a ride on wood used as packaging or filler around large, heavy items such as farm machinery, Dr Evans said. This wood filler, called dunnage, is supposed to be treated to kill any pests inside, but sometimes that doesn't happen. The beetle can survive in cut wood for up to seven months. Being a beetle, the polyphagous shot-hole borer has wings, but "it's a terrible flyer", Dr Evans said, capable of only flying around 30 metres at a time. "When you're only 1.5 millimetres long and you spend most of your life living inside a tree, you're not going to be an acrobat." Nor does it get transported on the wind. The minute a breeze picks up, the beetle retreats into a tunnel until it dies down again. It's thought the pest spread across the Perth metropolitan area in plant prunings. For instance, affected branches lopped off by arborists to protect power lines could've been unwittingly transported kilometres away. Chipping infested wood to under 2.5 centimetres results in a shot-hole borer death rate of more than 99 per cent. But "if it's a mature tree and it's got literally tens of thousands of beetles in it, that's still hundreds of beetles that survive", Dr Evans said. The shot-hole borer attacks WA native forest trees, including the marri (Corymbia calophylla) and karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor). "These are important trees, not just for the WA bush, but there are close relatives throughout the bush across Australia," Dr Evans said. "Now we don't know how badly affected the trees are going to become, because normally when the beetles are found infesting the trees, they get cut down and chipped. "So we don't see if the tree can survive a long time with the beetle … but it could end up being quite bad." Nor do we know exactly how the shot-hole borer might affect orchard trees in Australia. There is some information from fruit trees grown in Perth backyards, but nothing from commercial operations outside of the city. One lesson learnt from growers overseas is in avocados. The fruit seems to be highly susceptible to the polyphagous shot-hole borer, but the beetle tends to attack branches rather than the trunk. "With some careful pruning, which obviously costs more money and it does lower productivity of the tree a little, people in Israel and parts of the US have found that it's not a particularly bad problem," Dr Evans said. That said, when avocado trees were introduced into Australia, we managed to avoid bringing any pest species with them. So if the polyphagous shot-hole borer gets into local avocado orchards, "it will actually be quite a big problem, because growers don't have to think about those sorts of insect pests [at the moment]", he added. And just because the pest has behaved a certain way abroad does not mean it will act the same way here. The beetle has attacked Moreton Bay fig trees in Perth, but has had less of an impact on figs overseas. "So there's obviously local variation, probably a combination of the climate, the soil type, and water availability that changes the susceptibility of the plants," Dr Evans said. It's hard to say, Dr Evans said. Unsurprisingly, the beetle seems to thrive in climates similar to its native home. So while it might not do too well in relatively chilly Tasmania, it may well get a foothold along the east coast, especially from Brisbane up. Annual long, hot summers and wet winters may make plants more susceptible to the pest too. During punishingly dry summers, water-stressed plants may simply have very little capacity to fend off the beetle and fungus combination, and simply succumb to infestation. Trials mostly in the US have tested a handful of insecticides against the shot-hole borer with very little success — mostly because they were sprayed chemicals that might've landed on the bark of the tree, but couldn't get to the beetle inside its tunnel. So researchers, including Dr Evans, are trialling a combination of insecticide (to kill the beetle) and fungicide (to kill the fungus), which can be administered inside the tree. While he can't comment on his findings yet, "the results are very promising", he said. "We'll never get rid of [the need to] chop and chip. I think there are going to be some trees that are just too far gone and chop and chip is the only option. "But for trees that are early in the infestation, I think some of these methods are going to work and they're going to save the tree." For more on the polyphagous shot-hole borer, check out the full episode of Lab Notes.
The Independent
21-05-2025
- Science
- The Independent
Rarely seen ‘supergiant' deep-sea cousin of woodlice is actually quite common, study finds
A rarely spotted 'supergiant' crustacean related to woodlice is actually a common inhabitant of the sea floor, a new study finds. The deep-sea creature, Alicella gigantea, which can grow up to 34cm long, is the largest-known species of the amphipods. Amphipod is among the most diverse group of crustaceans, with over 10,000 extant species, including woodlice, shrimps, and lobsters. Amphipods are known to inhabit all aquatic environments worldwide. Alicella gigantea, commonly known as the 'supergiant amphipod', has long attracted attention due to its gigantism. It was first filmed in the 1970s at a depth of over 5,300m in the North Pacific but no records of the species were made for nearly two decades after, signifying low population densities. Infrequent sightings only served to buttress the belief that the giant crustacean was rare. There have been only seven studies so far detailing the DNA sequence data of the species. The latest study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, analyses nearly 200 records of Alicella gigantea from 75 locations on the seabed, spanning the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Researchers from the University of Western Australia now suggest the species may well be inhabiting over half the world's deep oceans. The study notes the crustacean thrives at extreme depths in 59 per cent of the world's oceans, indicating that it is far more widespread than previously thought. The research examines 195 records of the supergiant species, including genetic data from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, from 75 locations worldwide to map its distribution and evolutionary history. It concludes that while the creature is rarely collected, it is 'remarkably widespread'. 'There is an ever-growing body of evidence to show that A gigantea should be considered far from rare,' the research says. Although the crustacean's population density may be relatively low compared to other deep-sea amphipods, it inhabits an extraordinarily large geographical range, researchers say. 'Our results show that this species may occupy around 59 per cent of the world's oceans, indicating that the infrequently collected supergiant isn't 'rare' but instead represents a widely distributed deep-sea amphipod with an exceptional global range,' they write. The findings also point to insufficient research of creatures inhabiting the ocean at depths greater than 5,000m. This is in line with another recent study finding that humans have observed less than 0.001 per cent of the deep seafloor. 'We need a much better understanding of the deep ocean's ecosystems and processes to make informed decisions about resource management and conservation,' study lead author and marine explorer Katy Croff Bell says.
