Current concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in Earth’s atmosphere are unprecedented in human history. But CO₂ levels today, and those that might occur in coming decades, did occur millions of years ago.

Wouldn’t it be useful to go back in time and see what Australia looked like during those periods in the distant past? Well, scientists – including us – have done just that.

These studies, which largely involve examining sediments and fossils, reveal a radically different Australia to the one we inhabit.

The continent was warmer and wetter, and filled with unfamiliar plant and animal species. It suggests Australia may be much wetter, and look very different, in centuries and millennia to come.

Then and now: measuring CO₂

Atmospheric CO₂ is measured in “parts per million” – in other words, how many CO₂ molecules are present in each million molecules of dry air.

The concentration of CO₂ influences Earth’s climate. The more CO₂ present, the warmer it gets.

Right now, atmospheric CO₂ is about 420 parts per million. This concentration last occurred on Earth between 3 million and 5 million years ago – a period known as the Pliocene.

If humanity keeps burning fossil fuels at the current rate, by mid-century CO₂ concentrations will be around 550 parts per million. This level was last approached 14 million to 17 million years ago, in the mid-Miocene period.

In both these periods, Earth was warmer than it is today, and sea levels were far higher.

In the Pliocene, research shows CO₂ was the cause of about half the elevated temperatures. Much of the rest was due to changes in ice sheets and vegetation, for which CO₂ was indirectly responsible.

In the mid-Miocene, the link between CO₂ and warmer temperatures is less certain. But climate modelling does suggest CO₂ was the primary driver of temperature increases in this period.

By examining the plants and animals that lived in Australia during these epochs, we can gain insight into what a warmer Australia might look like.

Obviously, the Pliocene and mid-Miocene far predate humans, and CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere in those periods increased for natural reasons, such as volcanic eruptions. Today, humans are causing the CO₂ increases, and it’s happening at a much faster rate than in the past.

Australia in the Pliocene

The fossil and sediment record from the Pliocene period in Australia is limited. But the available data suggest much of the continent – and Earth generally – was more humid and warm than today. This helped determine the species that existed in Australia.

For example, the Nullarbor Plain, which stretches from South Australia to Western Australia, is today extremely dry. But studies of fossilised pollen show during the Pliocene it was home to Gymea lilies, banksias and angophoras – plants found around Sydney today.

Similarly, the western Murray-Darling Basin is today largely saltbush and grassland. But fossil pollen records show in the Pliocene, it was home to araucaria and the southern beech – rainforest trees found in high-rainfall climates.

And preserved remains of marsupials dating back to the Pliocene have been found near Hamilton in western Victoria. They include a dorcopsis wallaby – the nearest living relative of which lives in New Guinea’s ever-wet mountains.

Hot and moist in the mid-Miocene

A rich fossil and sediment record exists from the mid-Miocene. Marine sediments off WA suggest the west and southwest part of Australia was arid. In contrast, the continent’s east was very wet.

For example, the Riversleigh World Heritage area in Queensland is today a semi-arid limestone plateau. But research has found in the mid-Miocene, seven species of folivorous ringtail possums lived there at the same time. The only place more than two ringtail possum species coexist today is in rainforests. This suggests the Riversleigh plateau once supported a diverse rainforest ecosystem.

Similarly, McGraths Flat, near Gulgong in New South Wales, is today an open woodland. But mid-Miocene fossils from the site include rainforest trees with pointed leaves that help shed water.

And mid-Miocene fossils from the Yallourn Formation, in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, also include the remains of rainforest plants. Before colonisation it supported eucalypt forests and grasslands.

This evidence of rainforest suggests far wetter conditions in the mid-Miocene than exist today.

An uncertain future

You may be wondering, when climate change projections tell us Australia will be drier in future, why we are suggesting the continent will be wetter. We concede there is a real contradiction here, and it requires further research to unravel.

There’s another important point to note. While conditions in the Pliocene or Miocene can help us understand how Earth’s systems respond to elevated CO₂ levels, we can’t say Australia’s future climate will exactly replicate those conditions. And there are lags in the climate system, so while CO₂ concentrations in the Pliocene are similar to today’s levels, Earth hasn’t yet experienced the same extent of warming and rainfall.

The uncertainty comes down to the complexities of the climate system. Some components, such as air temperature, respond to increased CO₂ levels relatively quickly. But other components will require centuries or millennia to fully respond. For example, ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica are kilometres thick and as big as continents, which means they take a long time to melt.

So, even if CO₂ levels remain high, we shouldn’t expect a Pliocene-like climate to develop for centuries or millennia yet. However, every day we add CO₂ to Earth’s atmosphere, the climate system moves closer to a Pliocene-like state – and it cannot be easily turned around.

Tim Flannery, Honorary fellow, The University of Melbourne; Josephine Brown, Senior Lecturer, The University of Melbourne, and Kale Sniderman, Honorary Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You go to the gym, eat healthy and walk as much as possible. You wash your hands and get vaccinated. You control your health. This is a common story we tell ourselves. Unfortunately, it’s not quite true.

Factors outside our control have huge influence – especially products which can sicken or kill us, made by companies and sold routinely.

For instance, you and your family have been exposed for decades to dangerous forever chemicals, some of which are linked to kidney and testicular cancers. You’re almost certainly carrying these chemicals, known as PFAS or forever chemicals, in your body right now.

And that’s just the start. We now know exposure to just four classes of product – tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods and fossil fuels – are linked to one out of every three deaths worldwide. That is, they’re implicated in 19 of the world’s 56 million deaths each year (as of 2019). Pollution – largely from fossil fuels – is now the single largest environmental cause of premature death. Communities of colour and low-income communities experience disproportionate impacts. Over 90% of pollution related deaths occur in low middle income countries.

This means the leading risk factor for disease and death worldwide is corporations who make, market and sell these unhealthy products. Worse, even when these corporations become aware of the harms their products cause, they have often systematically hidden these harms to boost profits at the expense of our health. Major tobacco, oil, food, pharmaceutical and chemical corporations have all applied similar techniques, privatising the profits and spreading the harms.

Profit and loss statements

When companies act to conceal the harm their products do, they prevent us from protecting ourselves and our children. We now have many well-documented cases of corporate wrongdoing, such as asbestos, fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides sugar, silica, and of course tobacco. In these instances, corporations intentionally manufactured doubt or hid the harms of their products to delay or prevent regulation and maintain profits.

Decades of empirical evidence shows these effective tactics have actually been shared and strategically passed from one industry or company to the next.

For instance, when large tobacco companies Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds bought food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco in the 1980s, tobacco executives brought across marketing strategies, flavouring and colourings to expand product lines and engineered fatty, sweet and salty hyperpalatable foods such as cookies, cereals and frozen foods linked to obesity and diet-related diseases. These foods activate our reward circuits and encourage us to consume more.

Or consider how ‘forever chemicals’ became so widespread. A team of scientists (including this article’s co-author) investigated previously secret internal industry documents from 3M and DuPont, the largest makers of forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS.

The documents showed both 3M and DuPont used tactics from the tobacco industry’s playbook, such as suppressing unfavourable research and distorting public debate. Like Big Tobacco, 3M and DuPont had a financial interest in suppressing scientific evidence of the harms of their products, while publicly declaring in-demand products such as Teflon were safe.

For decades, forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS have been used to make Teflon pans, Scotchgard, firefighting foam and other non-stick materials. By the early 2000s, one of these, PFOS, ended up in our blood at 20 times the level its manufacturer, 3M, considered safe.

As early as 1961, the chief toxicologist at DuPont’s Teflon subsidiary reported the company’s wonder-material had “the ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses”, and recommended the chemicals be handled “with extreme care”. According to a 1970 internal memo, the DuPont-funded Haskell Laboratory found the chemical class C8 (now known as PFOA/PFOS) was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested”.

Both 3M and DuPont did extensive internal research on the risks their products posed to humans, but they shared little of it. The risks of PFOA including pregnancy-induced hypertension, kidney and testicular cancers, and ulcerative colitis was not publicly established until 2011.

Now, 60 years after DuPont first learned of the harms these products could cause, many countries are facing the human and environmental consequences and a very expensive cleanup.

Even though the production of PFOA and PFOS is being phased out, forever chemicals are easily stored in the body and take decades to break down. Worse, PFOA and PFOS are just two of over 15,000 different PFAS chemicals, most of which are still in use.

How can we prevent corporate injury to our health?

My co-author and I work in the field known as commercial determinants of health, which is to say, the damage corporations can do to us.

One of the key ways companies have been able to avoid regulation and lawsuits is by hiding the evidence. Internal studies showing harm can be easily hidden. External studies can be influenced, either by corporate funding, business-friendly scientists, legal action or lobbying policymakers to avoid regulation.

Here are three ways to prevent this happening again:

1) Require corporations to adhere to the same standards of data sharing and open science as independent scientists do.

If a corporation wants to bring a new product to market, they should have to register and publicly release every study they plan to conduct on its harms so the public can see the results of the study.

2) Sever the financial links between industry and researchers or policymakers.

Many large corporations will spend money on public studies to try to get favourable outcomes for their own interests. To cut these financial ties means boosting public health research, either through government funding or alternatives such as a tax on corporate marketing. It would also mean capping corporate political donations and bringing lobbying under control by restricting corporate access and spending to policymakers and increasing transparency. And it would mean stopping the revolving door where government employees or policymakers work for the industry they used to regulate once they leave office.

3) Mandate public transparency of corporate funding to researchers and policymakers.

In 2010, the United States introduced laws to enforce transparency on how much medical and pharmaceutical companies were spending to influence the products doctors chose to use. Research using the data unearthed by these laws has shown the problem is pervasive. We need this model for other industries so we can clearly see where corporate money is going. Registries should be detailed, permanent and easy to search.

These steps would not be easy. But the status quo means corporations can keep selling dangerous or lethal products for much longer than they should.

In doing so, they have become one of the largest influences on our health and will continue to harm generations to come – in ways hard to counter with yoga and willpower. And your health is more important than corporate profits.

Nick Chartres, Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Medicine & Health, University of Sydney and Lisa Bero, Chief Scientist, Center for Bioethics and Humanities and Professor of Medicine and Public Health, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In winter 2021, Australia’s frogs started dropping dead. People began posting images of dead frogs on social media. Unable to travel to investigate the deaths ourselves because of COVID lockdowns, we asked the public to report to us any sick or dead frogs.

Within 24 hours we received 160 reports of sick and dying frogs, sometimes in their dozens, from across the country. That winter, we received more than 1,600 reports of more than 40 frog species.

We needed help to investigate these deaths. We asked people across New South Wales to collect any dead frogs and store them frozen until travel restrictions eased and we could pick them up for testing. Hundreds of people stepped up to assist.

What could be causing these deaths? Aside from the obvious suspect, disease, many people wondered about pesticides and other chemicals. One email we received pondered:

Maybe a lot of these Green Frogs that are turning up dead have in fact died from chemicals.

Another asked:

Is there any relationship between chemicals being used to control the current mice plague in Eastern Australia and effects on frogs?

In our newly published research, we detected pesticides in more than one in three frogs we tested. We found a rodenticide in one in six frogs.

Pesticides have been shown to be a major cause of worldwide declines in amphibians, including frogs and toads. In the case of the mass deaths in Australia, we don’t believe pesticides were the main cause, for reasons we’ll explain.

What did the research find?

As soon as travel restrictions eased, we drove around the state with a portable freezer collecting these dead frogs. We began investigating the role of disease, pesticides and other potential factors in this awful event.

We tested liver samples of 77 frogs of six species from across New South Wales for more than 600 different pesticides. We detected at least one pesticide in 36% of these frogs.

Our most significant discovery was the rodenticide Brodifacoum in 17% of the frogs. This is the first report of rodenticides – chemicals meant to poison only rodents – in wild frogs.

We found it in four species: the eastern banjo frog (Limnodynastes dumerilii), green tree frog (Litoria caerulea), Peron’s tree frog (Litoria peronii) and the introduced cane toad (Rhinella marina).

How did these poisons get into frogs?

How were frogs exposed to a rodenticide? And what harm is it likely to be causing? Unfortunately, we don’t know.

Until now, frogs weren’t known to be exposed to rodenticides. They now join the list of non-rodent animals shown to be exposed – invertebrates, birds, small mammals, reptiles and even fish.

It’s possible large frogs are eating rodents that have eaten a bait. Or frogs could be eating contaminated invertebrates or coming into contact with bait stations or contaminated water. Whatever the impact, and the route, our findings show we may need to think about how we use rodenticides.

Two pesticides detected in frogs were organochlorine compounds dieldrin and heptachlor. A third, DDE, is a breakdown product of the notorious organochlorine, DDT.

These pesticides have been banned in Australia for decades, so how did they get into the frogs? Unfortunately, these legacy pesticides are very stable chemicals and take a long time to break down. They usually bind to organic material such as soils and sediments and can wash into waterways after rain.

As a result, these pesticides can accumulate in plants and animals. It’s why they have been banned around the world.

We also found the herbicide MCPA and fipronil sulfone, a breakdown product of the insecticide fipronil. Fipronil is registered for use in agriculture, home veterinary products (for flea and tick control) and around the house for control of termites, cockroaches and ants. MCPA has both agricultural and household uses, including lawn treatments.

What are the impacts on frogs?

There’s very little research on the impact of pesticides on frogs in general, particularly adult frogs and particularly in Australia.

However, from research overseas, we know pesticides could kill frogs, or cause sub-lethal impacts such as suppressing the immune system or malformations, or changes in growth, development and reproduction. Pesticides are considered a threat to almost 700 amphibian species.

Unfortunately for them, frogs do have characteristics that make them highly likely to come into contact with pesticides.

Most frog species spend time in both freshwater systems, such as wetlands, ponds and streams (particularly at the egg and tadpole stage), and on the land. This increases their opportunities for exposure.

Second, frogs have highly permeable skin, which is likely a major route for pesticides to enter the body. Frogs obtain water through their skin – you’ll never see a frog drinking – and also breathe through their skin.

Our findings are a reminder that frogs are sensitive indicators of environmental health. Their recognition as bioindicators, or “canaries in the coalmine”, is warranted.

Frogs and other amphibians are the most threatened group of vertebrates on the planet. More research is needed to determine just how our use of pesticides is contributing to ongoing population declines in frogs.

So, were pesticides the major driver of the mass frog deaths in 2021? We don’t believe so.

We didn’t detect pesticides in most frogs and the five pesticides detected were not consistently found across all samples. It’s certainly possible they contributed to this event, along with other factors such as disease and climatic conditions, but it’s not the smoking gun.

Our investigation, with the help of the public, is ongoing.

Chris Doyle, from the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, contributed to this article.

Jodi Rowley, Curator, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation Biology, Australian Museum, UNSW Sydney and Damian Lettoof, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Wildlife Ecotoxicology, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As Australia’s rapid renewable energy rollout continues, so too does debate over land use. Nationals Leader David Littleproud, for example, claimed regional areas had reached “saturation point” and cannot cope with more wind and solar farms and transmission lines.

So how much land is needed to fully decarbonise energy in Australia? When we switch completely to solar and wind, do we have the space for all the panels, turbines and power lines?

I’ve . All we need is 1,200 square kilometres. That’s not much. The area devoted to agriculture is about 3,500 times larger at 4.2 million square kilometres. The area of land that would be taken away from agriculture works out at about 45 square metres per person – about the size of a large living room.

We can ditch fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse emissions with negligible impact on agriculture. And in many cases, farmers can be paid for hosting renewable energy infrastructure while continuing to run sheep and cows or grow crops.

The challenge of the energy transition

Electricity consumption in Australia is currently about .

Decarbonising Australia’s economy will require electrifying many technologies that currently derive their power from burning fossil fuels. Then we need to ensure the electricity grid runs entirely on renewables.

When we electrify transport, heating and industry, annual electricity consumption per capita doubles. But we will need even more electricity to decarbonise aviation and shipping. So it’s reasonable to assume electricity consumption must triple if we are to complete decarbonisation, to 30MWh per person per year.

This would logically be achieved in three stages, starting with the easiest to achieve:

Stage 1: Solar and wind displace coal and gas from the electricity system. The federal government target of 82% renewable electricity by 2030 puts us firmly on track to decarbonise electricity. This trend is already well underway as shown by the graph below.

Stage 2: Clean electricity is used to electrify transport (electric vehicles), heating (electric heat pumps) and industrial heat (electric furnaces). This off-the-shelf technology could largely replace petrol and gas within a decade with negligible impact on the cost of running vehicles and heating homes.

Stage 3: The chemical industry is decarbonised. Clean electricity is used to make ammonia, iron, steel, plastics, cement, and synthetic aviation and shipping fuel.

Where will this clean power come from?

Virtually all new generation capacity in Australia over the past decade has been in solar and wind. Together, solar and wind have risen from about 6% of electricity generation in 2014 to 33% today. Solar and wind provide the cheapest electricity.

Most solar power in Australia today comes from rooftop solar panels. These panels don’t require any extra land. But the area of rooftop is limited. In coming years, ground-mounted solar farms will become ever more important.

We’ll also need more wind farms. Each wind farm contains dozens of turbines and spans dozens of square kilometres. But only a small fraction of the land is lost to farming.

And it’s best to spread the solar farms and wind farms throughout the settled areas of Australia, to reduce the effect of local cloud and wind lulls.

Most solar and wind farms are located on sheep and cattle farms inland from the Great Dividing Range. Here there is plenty of sun and wind, and it’s not too far away to transmit electricity to the cities via high-voltage power lines.

So how much land do we need?

Typically, is actually lost to farming. In most cases, farmers run livestock or continue cropping around the turbine towers and access roads.

Similarly, because solar panels are spaced apart, the area spanned by a solar farm is often two to three times the actual area of the panels themselves.

The panels are typically spaced to avoid losses from shading. As an added bonus, it means rain and sunlight can fall between them, allowing grass to grow and livestock to graze and shelter.

About 10,000km of new transmission lines will also be required for the energy transition. This sounds like a lot but amounts to just 37 centimetres per person.

Again, the area of land that would be taken away from agriculture for wind turbine towers and access roads is relatively small.

A further small area of land will be dedicated to new storage such as pumped hydro power and batteries.

The total area spanned by the solar farms, wind farms and all the other infrastructure is about 22,000 square km (mostly the land between the turbines in windfarms). But agriculture could continue largely as normal on most of this land.

, the total area taken away from agriculture to power a 100% renewable energy (zero fossil fuel) economy is about 45 square metres per person. Considering Australia’s total population of 27 million people, that means the total land area required is 1,200 square km. The area currently devoted to agriculture is about 3,500 times larger than this.

Farmers can earn extra income

Mining companies are often permitted to mine land without the consent of the landowner.

Solar and wind farm developers do not have the same rights. They must agree on lease fees with landowners before gaining access to land. These fees are typically tens of thousands of dollars per year per turbine.

In the case of transmission lines, hosts in Victoria are paid A$200,000 per kilometre over eight years.

The transition to renewable energy has attracted opposition from some residents living near proposed infrastructure. But this can be overcome.

Successful solar and wind farm companies gain community acceptance through genuine transparency, particularly early in the project, to ensure no information vacuum is created and then filled with misinformation.

Paying neighbours as well as the renewable energy host farm, and establishing community funds, is also helpful.

Plenty of land to share

The expansion of renewable energy infrastructure will be concentrated in Australia’s regional areas. But we can also expect new energy capacity from elsewhere, such as expanded rooftop solar and new offshore wind farms, which reduces the amount of land needed for the energy transition.

The location of good areas for solar and wind farms is shown in the Australian National University’s renewable energy heatmaps, which takes account of the solar and wind resources, proximity to transmission lines, and protected land. Farmers in areas coloured red can command higher prices for leasing land to solar and wind farm companies.

In short, Australia has far more than enough land to host the solar farms and wind farms required for the renewable energy revolution.

Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In less than eight years, white sharks in South Africa have all but disappeared from their historical hotspots in False Bay and Gansbaai, on the Western Cape coast. These areas were once known as the “white shark capital of the world” and were home to a flourishing ecotourism industry. One possible explanation for this change would be a declining white shark population.

We are part of an international research team with expertise in shark ecology, genetics, fisheries and conservation, researching sharks for more than 20 years. This has included tagging sharks and monitoring their activities in the area.

We have published numerous papers on the species. These have included research into conservation plans for sharks in South Africa, white shark cage diving, and the importance of coastal reef habitats for white sharks.

Our most recent tracking data on white sharks tells a worrying story: 18 of 21 white sharks tagged since 2019 with internal 10-year transmitters in Mossel Bay by the Oceans Research Institute have disappeared. This represents the loss of nearly 90% of the tracked white sharks in less than four years. They have not been detected moving to the Eastern Cape or elsewhere: they vanished.

Furthermore, nowadays, white sharks larger than 4 metres in length, the big breeders, are rarely sighted. Combined with the known low genetic diversity of this population, it is an indication that the white shark population is likely not stable in South Africa.

Based on this, we urge the South African government to take a precautionary approach to white shark conservation. Otherwise, South Africa could go down in history not only as the first country to protect white sharks, but also the first country to knowingly lose its white sharks.

What’s known

As far back as 2011, between 500 and 1,000 individual white sharks were estimated to be left in South Africa. Today, we barely see any larger white sharks. This in itself is a sign of a population not doing well, because the fewer adult sharks there are, the greater the decline will be.

Although white sharks have been a protected species since 1991, large numbers are legally killed every year by shark nets and drumlines (anchored hooks with large baits) operated by the KwaZulu Natal Sharks Board. This is based on an outdated 70-year-old idea that sharks should be culled to reduce the chances of encounters with humans.

Between 1978 and 2018, drumlines and shark nets captured 1,317 white sharks, of which 1,108 died. So, on average, 28 white sharks were killed every single year for the last 40 years.

We have estimated that even if tens of white sharks were killed per year, this would drive the white shark population into decline.

White sharks have also been affected by the demersal shark longline fishery. Boats use fishing lines fitted with thousands of hooks that can be kilometres long. The fishery is permitted to target and kill endangered and critically endangered small sharks. But as the smaller sharks get caught on the lines, so do larger predators chasing them, including white sharks.

This fishery is conservatively estimated to have killed an average of 40 white sharks a year, mainly from 2008 to 2019. Photographer Oliver Godfrey observed three white sharks being caught and killed by this fishery while he was on one of their boats. He confirmed dead white sharks were discarded at sea and not reported to authorities. Three white sharks killed in 10 weeks by one vessel equates to 40 white sharks killed by an average of 4 vessels operating for only 3 weeks per month, 10 months of a year (all conservative figures).

Nevertheless, South Africa’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment has no official records of any of those because it relies only on the records supplied by the same fishery. The lack of records should raise concerns within the department as it knows that during a test run of this fishery, its scientists set three longlines, caught two white sharks and killed one.

What’s in dispute

A recent study claimed that the population of white sharks in South Africa was stable. The study suggested that the sharks had simply relocated eastward, fleeing from a pair of shark-eating orcas. According to the authors of the study, the stability of the white shark population was “encouraging” and “reassuring”.

But our review of that study found that their results could not demonstrate a stable white shark population, nor that the sharks had relocated. Our analysis found several discrepancies between the results and conclusions.

The main discrepancies included the fact that the declines of white sharks in the Western Cape began before the appearance of the shark-eating orcas in 2015 as reported. And at present there is no evidence of any location with the same large numbers of white shark comparable to the numbers found 10-15 years ago in the Western Cape. If the sharks had only relocated, their numbers should be found elsewhere.

There have been only eight confirmed white shark deaths by orcas since 2017 but possibly a few more unrecorded. Nevertheless, the permitted nets, drumline and longline fishery have together probably been responsible for at least eight times more white shark deaths, every single year.

Next steps

South Africa is still permitting unsustainable shark fishing operations in its waters. This ought to stop.

We also advocate for a discussion on new approaches to bather safety that don’t kill sharks, as also advocated in Australia. Tethered drones, shark spotters, and “smart drumlines” that send alerts to quick response teams when sharks are caught are among available technologies to protect swimmers and surfers without culling sharks.

The journal article that this article was based on was co-authored by Chris Fallows, Monique Fallows and Matias Braccini.

Enrico Gennari, Research Associate at the Department of Ichthyology and Fisheries Science and Shark Scientist and Founder Oceans Research Institute, Rhodes University; Neil Hammerschlag, Courtesy Faculty, Oregon State University, Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences Department, University of Oregon, and Sara Andreotti, Postdoctoral Researcher in management and conservation of white sharks, Stellenbosch University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.