AUSTRALIA

'Orwellian': Coalition accused of planning to open green bank to fossil fuel investments

Angus Taylor introduces bill to give Clean Energy Finance Corporation $1bn for ‘grid reliability fund’

Angus Taylor flanked by Scott Morrison at a Snowy 2.0 press conference. The CEFC’s definition of low-emissions technology would be expanded to include gas under a bill the minister has brought before parliament. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Adam Morton Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 28 Aug 2020

The Morrison government has been accused of planning to open up the taxpayer-owned green bank to fossil fuels investments through a change that explicitly defines gas-fired power as a “low-emissions technology”.

The energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, introduced legislation to parliament on Thursday that would give the Clean Energy Finance Corporation an additional $1bn funding for a “grid reliability fund”.

Taylor said the new fund would be used to encourage private investment in infrastructure needed to balance electricity generation from solar and windfarms – battery and pumped hydro storage, “dispatchable” power plants that can be ramped up as needed, transmission projects and technologies that stabilise the grid.


Methane released in gas production means Australia's emissions may be 10% higher than reported
Read more

It would also allow the CEFC to administer a long-promised underwriting program for new electricity generation announced before last year’s federal election. The government has released a shortlist of 12 projects being considered for support through the controversial program – six renewable energy, five gas and one coal.

Under Taylor’s proposed legislative changes, the CEFC’s definition of low-emissions technology would be expanded to include any projects that “support the achievement of low emission energy in Australia”. An explanatory memorandum says this could include “certain types of gas-fired electricity generation” but coal would not qualify.

The bill would exempt the grid reliability fund from a CEFC requirement that at least 50% of funding must go to renewable energy. The fund would also be freed of a rule that individual CEFC investments have to deliver a return for taxpayers, though it would need to overall.

Taylor told parliament: “To ensure we can continue to be a world leader, we must back more grid reliability investments, such as flexible gas generators or significant pumped hydro projects.”

The Australian Energy Market Operator last month found additional gas-fired power was an option, but not essential, for an electricity grid increasingly based on renewable energy, and gas prices would need to stay at lower levels than expected if it was to compete with pumped hydro, batteries and other alternatives.


Australia's chief scientist rejects experts' letter warning him not to back gas

Labor’s climate and energy spokesman, Mark Butler, said the opposition was yet to form a view on the proposal but criticised the government for previously trying to abolish the CEFC.

“Labor established the CEFC, we have consistently protected the integrity of the CEFC as a renewable energy financing body, and we will continue to do so,” he said.

The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, said the proposal to define gas as low emissions was “Orwellian”.

“This is nothing more than a shameless attempt to bankroll gas corporations with public money meant for renewables,” he said. “The Greens are calling on Labor to join us in the fight against a gas-loving government that is hurtling us towards climate catastrophe.”

The CEFC was created in 2012 under a deal between Labor, the Greens and independents with a mandate to invest in renewable energy, low-emissions technology and energy-efficiency projects that would deliver a return.

Introducing the legislation to create it in 2012, the then climate change minister, Greg Combet, said gas may “technically be eligible for funding as a low-emissions technology” but was not expected to win backing as it had a track record in getting financed.

Gas is often described as having about half the emissions of coal but studies have suggested this could be more due to leakage of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. In addition to being burned to create electricity, gas is used as a feedstock in some manufacturing industries.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, this week told parliament that expanding gas supply was critical to Australia’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. His handpicked National Covid-19 Coordinating Commission has recommended the government underwrite new gas infrastructure.


Large-scale renewable energy investment in Australia falls to lowest level since 2017
Richie Mezian, the climate and energy program director at the Australia Institute, said the proposed amendments would transform the CEFC “from an explicitly profit-making investor of renewable energy projects for the Australia to a potentially loss-making underwriter of fossil fuel projects”.

He said investment in renewable energy was falling dramatically and the government should be doubling down on its mandate to support it. “How the government will justify its amendments that ensure CEFC is no longer obligated to fund at least 50% of its projects from renewable energy is beyond me,” he said.

Jonathan Moylan, a Greenpeace campaigner, accused the government of trying to give gas an unfair competitive advantage over batteries and renewable energy, despite them being cheaper. “Instead of making money from fossil fuels, the government is seriously considering handing them public money and not expecting anything in return,” he said.

Facebook says Apple censored an update that mentioned the 30% App Store commission for in-app purchases

Isobel Asher Hamilton

Apple CEO Tim Cook (left) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. AP; Francois Mori/AP

Facebook told Reuters that Apple has blocked an update to its iOS app containing a message about the 30% commission Apple takes on in-app purchases.
Facebook said Apple had blocked the update on the grounds it contained "irrelevant" information.
Facebook launched a new tool allowing users to buy tickets to virtual events in-app, and earlier this month asked Apple to waive its usual 30% commission. Apple declined.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Facebook's fight with Apple over the App Store's 30% commission on in-app purchases has reached new heights, after the social media giant accused the iPhone maker of censorship.

Facebook told Reuters on Thursday that Apple had blocked it from issuing an iOS app update that contained a message about the fee Apple charges.

The message was supposed to accompany a new Facebook tool that allows users to buy tickets for online events inside the app. Facebook said the update, which contained a "transparency notice" telling users that 30% of their payment goes to Apple, was rejected by Apple because it contained "irrelevant" information for users.

"Now more than ever, we should have the option to help people understand where money they intend for small businesses actually goes. Unfortunately Apple rejected our transparency notice around their 30% tax but we are still working to make that information available inside the app experience," Facebook said in a statement to Business Insider.

The message on Facebook's app would have looked like this. Facebook/Business Insider.

Apple declined to comment to Reuters, and was not immediately available to comment when contacted by Business Insider.



On August 14, Facebook said it had asked Apple to waive its usual 30% fee for the new tool so that all the money could be passed onto small business owners hosting paid events, but Apple declined.

Facebook isn't the only big company to lock horns with Apple over its in-app purchases levy. The tech giant is in a legal battle with "Fortnite" creator Epic Games after it removed "Fortnite" from the App Store for circumventing its payment system.

The 30% commission is also currently the subject of an antitrust investigation in the EU after music-streaming giant Spotify filed a complaint last year, claiming the fee allows Apple to artificially inflate prices while launching its own competing apps.

Tesla employee bribed with US$1 million helps FBI arrest Russian hackers

Hackers' scheme to hold Tesla's private data for ransom exposed by contact

by DAVID BOOTH | 14 HOURS AGO




The dashboard interior of the semi-autonomous 2018 Tesla Model 3

 Tuesday, April, 2018, at the Consumer Reports Auto Test Track in Colchester, Conn.


There are, it seems, people better than you and I. To wit—

According to Clearance Job, a recruiting agency out of Urbandale, Iowa that specializes in employees with American federal government security clearances, a Tesla employee turned down an offer of US$1 million to help some Russian hackers infiltrate the company’s computer system.

It all started mid-July when Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a 27-year-old citizen of Russia in the United States on a travel visa contacted a Russian-speaking foreign national – the name of the employee has not been divulged – working in Sparks, Nevada. Along the way, the employee was wined, dined and then provided with – shades of CSI – a burner phone for secret communications.


The plan, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, was to get the employee “to introduce malware – i.e., malicious software programs designed to damage or do other unwanted actions on a computer system – into the company’s computer network” that would allow Kriuchkov and his co-conspirators access to the company’s system, letting them download data and threaten to make it public. In other words, a typical ransomware scam.

Instead, the employee went directly to Tesla, who subsequently alerted the FBI. Wearing a wire – are we sure this isn’t going to be made into a movie? – the employee was able to record their interactions with Kriuchkov, and on August 22, he was arrested as he attempted to flee from the Los Angeles airport. He was charged, according to the American DOJ, with “one count of conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer.”

RELATED

Motor Mouth: Hackers have weaponized a Tesla

Motor Mouth: Hacking a car is far easier than you might think

What’s possibly most interesting about this subterfuge is that despite all the hoopla about susceptibility of automobile companies to over-the-air hacking, this is yet another “denial of service” exploit that (would have) required hands-on intervention to succeed. Like the famous case of Jeep hacking by Charlie Miller and Chris Velasek, Kriuchkov needed a physical connection to the main computer before he could start spoofing the network.

I’m not enough of a computer geek to know whether that is comforting at all, but I can say it frightens the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of me to know the safety of our networks may depend on people being righteous enough to turn down a million-dollar bribe.

Effectiveness of cloth masks depends on type of covering

by American Institute of Physics


 

Schlieren images of coughs with varying degrees of face covering. Credit: Padmanabha Prasanna Simha, Indian Space Research Organisation

Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a mask while out in public has become the recommended practice. However, many still question the effectiveness of this.


To allay these doubts, Padmanabha Prasanna Simha, from the Indian Space Research Organisation, and Prasanna Simha Mohan Rao, from the Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research, experimentally visualized the flow fields of coughs under various common mouth covering scenarios. They present their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.

"If a person can reduce the extent of how much they contaminate the environment by mitigating the spread, it's a far better situation for other healthy individuals who may enter places that have such contaminated areas," Simha said.

Density and temperature are intricately related, and coughs tend to be warmer than their surrounding area. Tapping into this connection, Simha and Rao utilized a technique called schlieren imaging, which visualizes changes in density, to capture pictures of voluntary coughs from five test subjects. By tracking the motion of a cough over successive images, the team estimated velocity and spread of the expelled droplets.

Unsurprisingly, they found N95 masks to be the most effective at reducing the horizontal spread of a cough. The N95 masks reduced a cough's initial velocity by up to a factor of 10 and limit its spread to between 0.1 and 0.25 meters.

An uncovered cough, in contrast, can travel up to 3 meters, but even a simple disposable mask can bring this all the way down to 0.5 meters.

"Even if a mask does not filter out all the particles, if we can prevent clouds of such particles from traveling very far, it's better than not doing anything," said Simha. "In situations where sophisticated masks are not available, any mask is better than no mask at all for the general public in slowing the spread of infection."

Some of the other comparisons, however, were striking.

For example, using an elbow to cover up a cough is typically considered a good alternative in a pinch, which is contradictory to what the pair found. Unless covered by a sleeve, a bare arm cannot form the proper seal against the nose necessary to obstruct airflow. A cough is then able to leak through any openings and propagate in many directions.

Simha and Rao hope their findings will put to rest the argument that regular cloth masks are ineffective, but they emphasize that masks must continue to be used in conjunction with social distancing.

"Adequate distancing is something that must not be ignored, since masks are not foolproof," Simha said.


Explore furtherYes, face mask protection helps slow the spread of COVID-19
More information: "Universal trends in human cough airflows at large distances," Physics of Fluids (2020). DOI: 10.1063/5.0021666
Journal information: Physics of Fluids


Provided by American Institute of Physics

A new chess film: Critical Thinking
by André Schulz

8/27/2020 –
A new chess film will be released soon: Critical Thinking. The film tells the story of the Miami Jackson High School chess team, which was the first inner city team to win the US National Chess Championship despite incredible adversity, motivated by a dedicated teacher. It was directed by John Leguizamo.


Based on a true story

John Leguizamo was born July 22, 1964, in Bogotá, Colombia, to Luz and Alberto Leguizamo. He was four when his family emigrated to the United States. He was raised in Queens, New York, attended New York University and studied under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg for only one day before Strasberg passed away. The extroverted Leguizamo started working the comedy club circuit in New York and first appeared in front of the cameras in an episode of Miami Vice (1984).

In 1998, he made his Broadway debut in John Leguizamo: Freak, a “demi-semi-quasi-pseudo-autobiographical” one-man show, which was filmed for HBO by Spike Lee.
Excerpt from “Freak


Fast-talking and feisty-looking John Leguizamo has continued to impress film audiences with his versatility: he can play sensitive and naive young men, such as Johnny in Hangin' with the Homeboys (1991); cold-blooded killers like Benny Blanco in Carlito's Way (1993); a heroic Army Green Beret, stopping aerial terrorists in Executive Decision (1996); and drag queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995). Arguably, not since ill-fated actor and comedian Freddie Prinze starred in the smash TV series Chico and the Man (1974) has a youthful Latino personality had such a powerful impact on critics and fans alike.

John Leguizamo makes his directorial feature film debut with a story that hits close to his heart. Set in 1998, Critical Thinking tells the true story of Cuban-American teacher Mario Martinez and his national championship winning chess team at Miami Jackson High School.

The school is hardly supported and the team has to manage without adequate financial support. Nevertheless, the team participates in the municipal school championships hoping to perhaps qualify to the US National School Chess Championship. The students come mostly from socially disadvantaged families, but are passionately motivated by dedicated teacher Mario Martinez, played by John Leguizamo himself. On the way to success, the team has to break with numerous conventions.

Let endgame expert Dr Karsten Müller show and explain the finesses of the world champions. Although they had different styles each and every one of them played the endgame exceptionally well, so take the opportunity to enjoy and learn from some of the best endgames in the history of chess.


Mario Martinez, played by John Leguizamo

The film is based on a true story and takes place in 1998. The people on which the story was based were involved in the production of the film as consultants.


André SchulzAndré Schulz started working for ChessBase in 1991 and is an editor of ChessBase News.

Chess: Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen to meet for first time in 16 years


Kasparov, 57, and Carlsen, 30, will compete at random chess in the 10-player St Louis Champions Showdown, their first encounter since 2004

3686: Oscar Panno v Garry Kasparov, Buenos Aires 1992. All-time legend Kasparov defeated Argentina’s top player. Can you visualise Black’s winning sequence, several moves deep but virtually all forced?


Leonard Barden
Fri 28 Aug 2020
Garry Kasparov will make a rare cameo appearance when the legend, now aged 57, takes on the reigning champion, Magnus Carlsen, in the 10-player Champions Showdown invitation organised by St Louis from 11-13 September.

This will be an historic clash, even though it is only online random chess. The two world champions, widely considered the best players of all time, have faced each other in only one previous official event. That was at rapid and blitz chess in 2004 in Reykjavik, when Carlsen was aged 13 and Kasparov 41, a year before his retirement.


Chess: Carlsen fights back from brink to overcome Nakamura in 38-game epic
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Carlsen, understandably nervous, was crushed in the first and second games but was pressing in the drawn third.

There is more history between the two icons of modern chess. In summer 2009 the Russian briefly became the Norwegian’s coach but owing to a personality clash between Carlsen’s laid-back attitude and Kasparov’s intensity they soon parted ways. They played several informal blitz games then, which were ultra-competitive. As Carlsen put it: “Neither of us likes losing, him especially.”

Since 2017 the 1985-2000 world champion has taken part only in games using FischerRandom, also known as Chess960 or Chess9LX, where a computer makes a random choice of the back row starting array.

Besides Kasparov and Carlsen, the field includes America’s world No 2, Fabiano Caruana, who defeated Kasparov 5-1 at blitz in 2019, the US champion, Hikaru Nakamura, whose match with Carlsen last week drew record audiences, and the prodigy Alireza Firouzja, 17, who Kasparov has never met.

China, the 2018 Olympiad double gold medallists and tournament favourites for the current 163-nation online version, were knocked out 7-6 by Ukraine on Thursday after a match that will leave their team selectors with some serious questions to answer in Beijing.

The knockout format was a double round six board match where a 6-6 tie would be broken by a single Armageddon game. China were lucky to score 3-3 in the first round where Natalia Zhukova drew by perpetual check in a winning position against the world woman champion, Ju Wenjun.

For the second round China dropped both Ju and the world No 1, Hou Yifan, their replacements scored only half a point, the match went to 6-6 and Ukraine won the Armageddon game. Earlier, Hungary v Germany also went to Armageddon and the German lost on time with the Hungarian having just three seconds left. In Armageddon, White has five minutes on the clock to Black’s four but a draw on the board counts as a win for Black in the scores.

Results: Hungary 7-6 Germany. Ukraine 7-6 China, Armenia 8-4 Greece, Poland 7.5-4.5 Bulgaria. Friday’s quarter-finals: Russia v Hungary, United States v Ukraine, India v Armenia, Azerbaijan v Poland.

England were at full strength and scored a shock win over the strong Armenians, but finished only sixth in their group as they lost 5-1 to Russia, Bulgaria and Croatia while struggling to beat weaker teams. The women’s boards did well, though three of the four juniors had minus scores overall while the normally reliable Michael Adams and Luke McShane dropped points in critical matches.


Chess: England aim for place in top group as 163-team Olympiad begins
Read more

Some of the best Olympiad moments have been where strong grandmasters won elegantly against lesser lights. One such creative performance came from Alexey Shirov, author of the classic Fire on Board, who qualified for a world title match with Kasparov in 1998 but missed out due to lack of financial support. Shirov’s attacking play is a pleasure to watch.

Wolfgang Uhlmann, who died on Monday aged 85, was the former East Germany’s best player and a world title candidate in 1971. His opening repertoire was strikingly narrow for a top grandmaster. As Black, he almost always used the French 1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 and the King’s Indian Nf6 g6 and Bg7.

A vintage Uhlmann performance came in 1958 when the biennial Olympiad was held in Munich, then in West Germany, and Uhlmann led his young GDR team to a 3.5-0.5 victory over the host nation. I was present in the playing hall that day and remember the stunned silence from the large patriotic audience. True to himself, Uhlmann won against Wolfgang Unzicker with a classically styled King’s Indian.

3686 1...Re1+ 2 Kf2 Qh4+ 3 g3 Qxh3 4 Rxe1 Qh2+ 5 Kf1 Qh1+ 6 Qg1 Rxe1+ and wins.

Will automation eliminate data science positions?
Michael Li@tianhuil / 1:00 pm MDT•August 27, 2020

Image Credits: Westend61 (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Michael LiContributor

Tianhui Michael Li is founder of The Data Incubator, an eight-week fellowship to help PhDs and postdocs transition from academia into industry. Previously, he headed monetization data science at Foursquare and has worked at Google, Andreessen Horowitz, J.P. Morgan and D.E. Shaw.
More posts by this contributor

What’s different about hiring data scientists in 2020?
Five building blocks of a data-driven culture

“Will automation eliminate data science positions?”

This is a question I’m asked at almost every conference I attend, and it usually comes from someone from one of two groups with a vested interest in the answer: The first is current or aspiring practitioners who are wondering about their future employment prospects. The second consists of executives and managers who are just starting on their data science journey.

They have often just heard that Target can determine whether a customer is pregnant from her shopping patterns and are hoping for similarly powerful tools for their data. And they have heard the latest automated-AI vendor pitch that promises to deliver what Target did (and more!) without data scientists. We argue that automation and better data science tooling will not eliminate or even reduce data science positions (including use cases like the Target story). It creates more of them!

Here’s why.

Understanding the business problem is the biggest challenge

The most important question in data science is not which machine learning algorithm to choose or even how to clean your data. It is the questions you need to ask before even one line of code is written: What data do you choose and what questions do you choose to ask of that data?

What is missing (or wishfully assumed) from the popular imagination is the ingenuity, creativity and business understanding that goes into those tasks. Why do we care if our customers are pregnant? Target’s data scientists had built upon substantial earlier work to understand why this was a lucrative customer demographic primed to switch retailers. Which datasets are available and how can we pose scientifically testable questions of those datasets?

Target’s data science team happened to have baby registry data tied to purchasing history and knew how to tie that to customer spending. How do we measure success? Formulating nontechnical requirements into technical questions that can be answered with data is amongst the most challenging data science tasks — and probably the hardest to do well. Without experienced humans to formulate these questions, we would not be able to even start on the journey of data science.
Making your assumptions

After formulating a data science question, data scientists need to outline their assumptions. This often manifests itself in the form of data munging, data cleaning and feature engineering. Real-world data are notoriously dirty and many assumptions have to be made to bridge the gap between the data we have and the business or policy questions we are seeking to address. These assumptions are also highly dependent on real-world knowledge and business context.

In the Target example, data scientists had to make assumptions about proxy variables for pregnancy, realistic time frame of their analyses and appropriate control groups for accurate comparison. They almost certainly had to make realistic assumptions that allowed them to throw out extraneous data and correctly normalize features. All of this work depends critically on human judgment. Removing the human from the loop can be dangerous as we have seen with the recent spate of bias-in-machine-learning incidents. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of them revolve around deep learning algorithms that make some of the strongest claims to do away with feature engineering.

So while parts of core machine learning are automated (in fact, we even teach some of the ways to automate those workflows), the data munging, data cleaning and feature engineering (which comprises 90% of the real work in data science) cannot be safely automated away.
A historical analogy

There is a clear precedent in history to suggest data science will not be automated away. There is another field where highly trained humans are crafting code to make computers perform amazing feats. These humans are paid a significant premium over others who are not trained in this field and (perhaps not surprisingly) there are education programs specializing in training this skill. The resulting economic pressure to automate this field is equally, if not more, intense. This field is software engineering.

Indeed, as software engineering has become easier, the demand for programmers has only grown. This paradox — that automation increases productivity, driving down prices and ultimately driving up demand is not new — we’ve seen it again and again in fields ranging from software engineering to financial analysis to accounting. Data science is no exception and automation will likely drive up demand for this skillset, not down

Repeating radio signal from space fires back up on predicted schedule
By Michael Irving
August 25, 2020

A strange repeating radio signal from space has now been found to have a cycle
Kristi Mickaliger

Back in June, astronomers discovered a hidden pattern within seemingly-random radio signals from space. Based on years of data, it was predicted that the next bursts of activity should flare up around August – and now those signals have come through, right on schedule. The discovery could help us unravel the mystery of these Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

FRBs are pulses of radio signals that throw off incredible amounts of energy within milliseconds, often as one-off events. But a select few have been found to repeat at random – or at least, we thought it was random.

Earlier this year, astronomers discovered a periodic pattern hidden within the rumblings of a repeating radio source called FRB 121102. By analyzing 32 bursts from this repeater over four years, a team found that FRB 121102 follows a 157-day cycle: it flares up into a 90-day period of activity before falling silent for 67 days.

In May when this previous study was published, FRB 121102 was in the quiet phase of this cycle, and the researchers predicted that, based on their data, its next active phase should be between June 2 and August 28, 2020.


And lo and behold, the FRB has sprung back to life, right on schedule. Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China, astronomers observed the location of the signals regularly between March and August. No detections were made until August 17, when FRB 121102 gave off at least 12 bursts in the space of two hours.

This new finding does lend weight to the idea of periodicity in FRB 121102’s emissions, but the exact details of its cycle are still hazy. By combining data from several studies, the team suggests that its cycle actually runs for 156.1 days, with the source active for 99 of those days. Following this new schedule, the team predicts that the object should "turn off" again around August 31 to September 9.

If it continues to fire off bursts after that time, the researchers say this could suggest that the period has either evolved, or wasn’t “real” in the first place.


Other scientists have come to different conclusions about FRB 121102’s periodicity. A team led by Marilyn Cruces at the Max Planck Institute found that the cycle lasts around 161 days, and the source should be active between July 9 and October 14, 2020. After that, it should remain quiet until December 17, when it enters a new active phase that lasts until March 24, 2021.

Time – and future observations – will tell which, if any, of these predictions come true. Either way, FRB 121102 will be watched closely over the next few months, in the hopes that it could give up new clues to what might be behind these strange signals.

Cruces' team's work is available in pre-print on ArXiv.

Source: The Astronomer’s Telegram via Science Alert

Invasive jellyfish turn up in tiny Saanich lake

Darron Kloster / Times Colonist

AUGUST 27, 2020

Craspedacusta, a freshwater jellyfish that is about the size of a thumbnail, can be found in Killarney Lake. The jellyfish are are not harmful to humans and are only visible in lakes a few months of the year. FLORIAN LUSKOW, UBC

A tiny lake in Mount Work Regional Park in Saanich is literally under the microscope today, as scientists from the University of British Columbia study an outbreak of freshwater jellyfish.

Killarney Lake, about a kilometre south of the Hartland Landfill and frequented by swimmers and paddleboarders in summer, has a thriving population of craspedacusta, a freshwater jellyfish considered an invasive species.

The small jellyfish, about the size of a thumbnail, are not harmful to humans and are only visible in lakes a few months of the year, usually from August to September, says Florian Lüskow, a graduate student and marine biologist at UBC.

Lüskow and another researcher collected samples at Killarney Lake on Sunday after a tip from a local resident, launching a small boat loaded with scientific equipment that drew attention from local swimmers.

“They couldn’t believe jellyfish are living in the lake. Most think they live in the ocean,” said Lüskow.

He said there have been several reports of craspedacusta jellyfish in Killarney as well as other lakes and ponds in southern B.C. since 1990.

Lüskow said craspedacusta is a non-indigenous species and likely originates from the Yangtze River catchment area in China.

He said the jellyfish has been recorded on all continents, except for Antarctica.

It is almost impossible to prove how the jellyfish ended up in a lake such as Killarney, said Lüskow.

The invasion could have happened in several ways, he said, including from plant materials,birds’ feet, paddleboards, ballast water from boats, or in containers used to stock lakes with fish.

There have been other reports of the jellyfish in Saanich waterways, including Maltby Lake, two kilometres south of Killarney, in the summer of 2018.

It isn’t known how widespread the jellyfish are in the area. The Capital Regional District parks department did not immediately return calls for comment.

Lüskow said little is known about the jellyfish’s effects in ecosystems. There is no evidence of fish consuming freshwater jellyfish, but they might compete for food resources, Lüskow said in an email.

“As research on this invasive species heavily depends on voluntary observers, only a handful of studies addressed their predation impact.”

Lüskow said for most of the year, jellyfish populations only exist in the form of polyps attached to submerged rocks and tree trunks.

He said freshwater jellyfish are an indication of high water quality. “When lakes and ponds are cooling in the autumn, the free-swimming jellyfish disappear, leaving planktonic larvae that settle onto hard substrates and become polyps,” he said. “When the water warms up, polyps asexually reproduce many free-swimming medusae, which are the sexually reproducing life stage, with a short life span closing the annual jellyfish life cycle.”

Lüskow said a pilot study to understand the distribution and impacts on lake ecosystems in B.C. is underway at UBC.

He said researchers are currently studying another site, Hotel Lake near Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast.

He’s asking anyone who sees them in other lakes, ponds or creeks to send him an email at flueskow@eoas.ubc.ca.

I’m Melting!

POLLUTION DISSOLVED THIS SHARK’S TEETH AND SKIN, RESEARCHERS SAY


Scientists recently found a new victim of climate change and pollution: a blackmouth catshark that had its teeth, skin, and other features dissolved away from swimming in contaminated water.

It’s the first time that scientists have seen such extensive environmental damage on a shark, according to The Evening Standard. The team of University of Cagliari scientists aren’t exactly sure what caused the degradation — it could have been climate change-related ocean acidification, chemical pollution, or both — but it’s a stark reminder of the destruction that human activity is wreaking on the delicate ocean ecosystem.

Toxic Avenger

Thankfully, the shark was able to survive, or at least it did up until last July when it was caught by commercial fishers and promptly turned over to the scientists for study.


The team expected that such extensive damage to the shark’s skin and teeth would be fatal. But they found 14 different sea creatures inside its stomach, according to research published in the Journal of Fish Biology. That suggests that the shark was still able to hunt and swallow prey whole, since its teeth had completely dissolved away.
Extreme Case

This shark is the first known to science with such an extreme level of skin and tooth damage, but scientists have long known that ocean acidification was hurting shark populations.

In fact, previous research found that spending just nine weeks in acidic water ate away nine percent of a shark’s denticles, the tiny scales that line their bodies.


READ MORE: Shark found without skin or teeth in Sardinia ‘fell victim to contaminated waters and climate change’ [The Evening Standard]

More on ocean acidification: Our Acidic Oceans Are Eating Away at Sharks’ Skin