Latest news with #whaling
ABC News
13-05-2025
- Science
- ABC News
Lab Notes: The plight of the southern right whales
Southern right whales (Eubalaena australis) were named by whalers because their high oil content made them the "right" ones to kill. In the decades since whaling was banned, southern right numbers increased — but a new study shows that population growth stalled, and might've dropped a bit, despite current numbers still far below what they were in pre-whaling times. So what's going on with the southern rights? Learn more on Lab Notes, the show that brings you the science of new discoveries and current events. Get in touch with us: labnotes@ Featuring: Anne Grundlehner, marine biologist at the University of Tasmania More information: Southern right whale population growth has stalled, scientists say, with a possible 'onset of a decline' The End of an Era? Trends in Abundance and Reproduction of Australian Southern Right Whales (Eubalaena australis) Suggest Failure to Re-Establish Pre-Whaling Population Size Extreme longevity may be the rule not the exception in Balaenid whales This episode of Lab Notes was produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Menang Noongar people.
Telegraph
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Ocean with David Attenborough: A thrilling, ravishing call to action to save the world's seas
David Attenborough turns 99 on Thursday – though his latest film, which opens in cinemas that very day, is a timely release in more ways than one. Next month in France, world governments will convene for the Third United Nations Ocean Conference – at which, his film argues, the futures of the world's undersea habitats and their many inhabitants will be at stake. This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels. It first shows the otherworldly splendour and variegation of our planet's sea life, then sets out the overfishing crisis that mortally threatens it, before suggesting an achievable-sounding rescue plan that can be quickly enacted with enough political will and public support. (Probably in the opposite order.) We've done something similar before, our host reminds us in that unmistakable voice like butter being spread across hot toast. In the 1970s, commercial whaling had reduced the global population of those wondrous mammals to one per cent of its original levels. All hope for their survival seemed lost – until ordinary people became sufficiently moved by the creatures' plight that it suddenly wasn't. Positioning the push to end overfishing as 'the greatest opportunity for humanity in my lifetime', Attenborough, who delivers his narration perched on a groyne on a beach grey enough to be British, enters his 100th year on the planet with an optimistic glow. And it's infectious – thanks in no small part to the eye-widening wonder and patient craftsmanship of the film built around it. Attenborough's oeuvre has featured numerous scenes like the ones in Ocean before. But they're freshened here both by the 4K photography, by turns painterly and crisp, and the sense of scale conferred by the cinema screen itself. A sequence of zooplankton feasting on phytoplankton – which probably occurred within about a thimble's worth of seawater, tops – resembles a pitched battle from a trippy sci-fi epic. A swarm of spindly lobster larvae looks less like a group of actual living beings than their Into the Spider-Verse animated counterparts. Such microscopic spectacles were mysteries until fairly recently – but then our understanding of the oceans overall, Attenborough argues, have altered immeasurably over the course of his career as a naturalist. Directors Toby Nowlan, Colin Butfield and Keith Scholey deftly stitch that shift in perspective into a number of scenes. We've all seen banks of seaweed before, but I'm not sure I've ever seen them photographed in rolling top-down vistas, as if they were forests. (Which, of course, Ocean reminds us, they are.) The sense of mystery about the world beneath the waves is both embraced and dispelled: subaquatic mountain ranges are plotted on maps, recasting these vast empty spaces between continents as landscapes in their own right. Attenborough's narration – poetic, erudite, neat – guides the audience through a number of harrowing scenes, many of which lay bare the destruction wreaked by industrial trawlers on environments formed over centuries, then torn up in seconds by the scrape of a chain-weighted net. Yet the nuance of the argument isn't lost. Fishing and overfishing are different things: the struggle isn't positioned as industry versus conservation so much as humanity versus a far-reaching disaster that's still avoidable, just. For all human parties concerned, more fish in the sea would be good news, and their ecosystem hasn't had its chips quite yet.
