Ropes, brass, salt, stone: Reinventing jewellery in Kenya

Nairobi (AFP) – Sisal ropes, salt crystals, volcanic rocks and aged brass: award-winning Kenyan designer Ami Doshi Shah has always chosen unlikely materials to make sophisticated jewellery that redefines value in a carat-obsessed industry.

Issued on: 18/03/2024

Kenyan designer Ami Doshi Shah established her brand in 2015

 © Tony KARUMBA / AFP
ADVERTISING

"As a child, I was always finding beauty in unusual things like stones and fossils," Shah, 44, told AFP in an interview at her rooftop studio in Kenya's capital Nairobi, where she crafts her pieces by hand.

Her 2019 collection Salt of the Earth featured ropes, salt crystals and patinated blue-green brass, and was showcased in exhibitions at London's Victoria and Albert Museum and New York's Brooklyn Museum.

But despite earning a university degree in jewellery and silversmithing in the British city of Birmingham and the prestigious Goldsmiths award for best apprentice designer, Shah said it took her years to fully commit to her metier.

A third-generation Kenyan of South Asian origin, she interned at Indian jewellers such as The Gem Palace, whose patrons have included Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Traditional Indian ideas of jewellery as a luxury investment did not resonate with her. And she wasn't wholly sure of how to marry her experimental sensibility with commercial pressures.

So Shah joined an advertising firm and spent the next 12 years there, working in London and Nairobi.

"I knew it wasn't my calling," she said.

She took a sabbatical during her second pregnancy and began a year-long artist residency at the non-profit Kuona Trust in Nairobi in 2014-15.

Shah's vision is to create bold, sculptural pieces that reflect the talismanic role of jewellery in Kenyan culture © Tony KARUMBA / AFP

It was a cathartic period, yet one also "filled with self-doubt", she said.

"I was worried whether people would like my work... it is hard to accept that you might not be a commercial success, especially when you have spent so many years focused on making money."

Personal and political

She established her brand in 2015, with a view to creating bold, sculptural pieces that reflect the talismanic role of jewellery in Kenyan culture, where it is used in rites of passage, for protection and to imbue the wearer with strength.

Her body of work ranges from sisal neckpieces to cuffs inlaid with stones and brass earrings that sway with every movement.

A striking departure from the precious metals and gemstones that dominate traditional Indian jewellery, her design process is driven by materials found in Kenya and every piece is made to order.

Shah's design process is driven by materials found in Kenya and every piece is made to order © Tony KARUMBA / AFP

She uses brass -- which dominates Kenya's jewellery landscape -- but also materials such as leather, mango wood and zoisite, a cast-off from ruby mining in the East African country.

The result is jewellery that is deeply personal and sometimes political, with prices ranging from $75 to $375.

"Not everyone's going to love my work, not everyone's going to understand it and that's ok," she said, emphasising that she approaches jewellery-making as "a labour of love", not a business venture.

Her acclaimed 2019 collection explored salt's dual nature as a life-giving mineral that is also destructive and corrosive.

Shah uses metals like brass -- which dominates Kenya's jewellery landscape -- as well as other materials © Tony KARUMBA / AFP

It also reflected on Britain's colonial past, with punitive salt taxes prompting Mahatma Gandhi to stage a historic protest march in 1930 in the Indian state of Gujarat, where Shah's grandparents emigrated from.

"That was the first time I felt like jewellery could be political, like it could be a thread connecting so many things," she said.
'Tell our own story'

Her latest collection Memento Mori was born out of grief, reflecting on the loss of her father in 2021 and their final days together in the Indian Ocean town of Watamu along Kenya's coast.

"I feel far more Kenyan than Indian," she said, urging her South Asian-origin compatriots to embrace integration, instead of finding safety in self-segregation, decades after the traumatic 1972 expulsion of South Asians from Uganda.

Shah (right) shows a client a display of a previous collection at her Nairobi studio 

© Tony KARUMBA / AFP

With recent forays into furniture, her dream is to build a multi-disciplinary studio with "predominantly Kenyan" designers.

"It's important to be able to tell our own story in our own way instead of having a narrative projected onto us."

© 2024 AFP

STATE-CAPITALI$M

China retail sales show shaky economic recovery

Beijing (AFP) – The performance of China's economy in the first two months of 2024 was mixed, official figures showed Monday, with sluggish household consumption alongside increased industrial production reflecting an uneven recovery.

Issued on: 18/03/2024 - 
Industrial production in China was up 7.0 percent year-on-year in January and February © STR / AFP
ADVERTISING


The highly anticipated comeback after Beijing lifted stringent Covid control measures in late 2022 was less robust than expected, and the world's second-largest economy now grapples with turbulence in the property sector, high youth unemployment and flagging consumption.

In January and February combined, retail sales -- the main indicator of household consumption -- increased 5.5 percent year on year, China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

But the figure was down from December, which saw an increase of 7.4 percent, and was slightly below the result anticipated by a Bloomberg survey of analysts, who had predicted a rise of 5.6 percent.

The recording period included China's major Lunar New Year holiday -- this year falling in early February -- which generally drives a consumption spike in the preceding weeks.

Industrial production, meanwhile, was up 7.0 percent year on year in January and February, NBS data showed, beating the 6.8 percent rise in December and the 5.2 percent predicted by Bloomberg.

China typically releases combined data for the first two months of the year, due to the Lunar New Year holiday.

Fixed asset investment was up 4.2 percent year on year during the period.

The figure is a key indicator for spending on real estate, infrastructure, equipment and machinery -- sectors in which Beijing has sought to stimulate activity of late.

Investments specifically in property development, however, were down nine percent year on year, the NBS said.

The property sector -- long a vital growth engine for China's economy -- is now under unprecedented pressure, with several major developers on the verge of bankruptcy and falling prices dissuading investment in real estate.

The country's urban unemployment rate rose slightly to 5.3 percent in January and February from 5.2 percent in December.

The figure was 14.6 percent for the 16-24 age bracket, according to a new criterion that excludes students, introduced after a record high was notched last year.

Beijing has set a target of five percent annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) this year -- among the slowest official goals in decades.

China's economy emerged from deflation in February for the first time in six months.

© 2024 AFP

END THE EMBARGO!

Rare protests erupt in Cuba over food and electricity shortages

Cubans staged rare street protests Sunday over food and electricity shortages as the country suffered long outages that left parts of the island without power for up to 14 hours a day.


Issued on: 18/03/2024 -

Elderly people queue to buy bread at a bakery in Havana, Cuba on March 8, 2024. 

© Yamil Lage, AFP

By NEWS WIRES

"People were shouting 'food and electricity'," a 65-year-old resident, who asked not to be named, told AFP by phone from the island's second-largest city of Santiago de Cuba, 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of the capital Havana.

Electricity was restored to the city later in the day and "two truckloads of rice" were delivered, the witness said.

Social media platforms were filled with images of protests in Santiago de Cuba, a city of 510,000 people located in the east of the island. There were also images of protests in another large city, Bayamo.

Cuba has been experiencing a wave of blackouts since the start of March due to maintenance works on the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, the island's largest.

But this weekend, the situation was worsened by a shortage of fuel needed to generate the electricity.

The outages left some areas such as Santiago de Cuba without power for up to 14 hours a day.

"Several people have expressed their dissatisfaction with the electricity situation and food distribution," Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on X, warning that "enemies of the Revolution" aimed to exploit the situation.

There are "terrorists based in the United States, whom we have denounced on several occasions, who are encouraging actions that go against the internal order of the country," he added.

The US embassy in Havana said on X that it was aware of reports of "peaceful protests" in Santiago, Bayamo and other parts of Cuba. It urged the Cuban government to "respect the human rights of the protestors and address the legitimate needs of the Cuban people."

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez responded on X, urging Washington not to "interfere in the country's internal affairs".

Cuba's power comes from eight old thermoelectric power plants, generators and eight floating electricity plants leased from Turkey, which were also affected by the fuel shortage.

The cash-strapped island nation imposed a more-than 400 percent fuel price hike earlier this month as part of an economic recovery plan.

Soaring petrol prices in Cuba are a cause of great concern for Havana residents

The nation of 11 million is experiencing its worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s due to fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the recent tightening of US sanctions and structural weaknesses in the economy.

According to official estimates, the Cuban economy shrank by two percent in 2023, while inflation reached 30 percent. Independent experts say this is likely an underestimation.

There are chronic shortages of fuel and other basics, and the government subsidizes almost all of the goods and services consumed by Cubans.

(AFP)

THE MYSTERY CONTINUES

Bitcoin not invented by computer scientist Wright: court

Agence France-Presse
March 14, 2024 

 A collection of Bitcoin (virtual currency) tokens are displayed in this picture illustration taken December 8, 2017. 

REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo

Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not "Satoshi Nakamoto", the pseudonym used by the creator of the cryptocurrency bitcoin when it launched in 2008, a UK court ruled Thursday.

The decision follows a trial in London's High Court after the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a nonprofit organization set up to keep cryptocurrency technology free from patents, sued Wright.

Wright, 53, has claimed since 2016 that he was Satoshi Nakamoto and the author of a white paper that unveiled what would grow to be the world's most popular cryptocurrency -- and which Thursday reached a record high.

But in his ruling handed down Thursday, judge James Mellor dismissed Wright's claims, calling the evidence for his decisions "overwhelming".

"Dr Wright is not the author of the bitcoin white paper," Mellor said.

"Dr Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011."

The judge added: "Dr Wright is not the person who created the bitcoin system... he is not the author of the initial versions of the bitcoin software."

Wright, an enigmatic programmer who has described himself as "creator of bitcoin" on social media platform X, had initiated a number of lawsuits over the issue but faced legal action brought by COPA on this occasion.

The organization brings together heavyweights in the industry, including the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and Block, which specializes in digital payments.

Wright had yet to react publicly to the ruling.

'Win for truth'

"This decision is a win for developers, for the entire open-source community, and for the truth," a COPA spokesperson said in a statement.

"For over eight years, Dr Wright and his financial backers have lied about his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto and used that lie to bully and intimidate developers in the bitcoin community.

"That ends today with the court's ruling that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto," it added.

The ruling could impact another lawsuit pitting Wright against 26 developers -- including Coinbase -- for allegedly infringing upon his intellectual property rights.

Earlier in the day, bitcoin struck a new record high at $73,797.

It later traded at $70,646, highlighting the volatile nature of cryptocurrency that has triggered warnings from regulators and central banks aimed at small investors.

Bitcoin has soared this year on several factors, notably being made more accessible for trading.

The launch of a new investment vehicle -- bitcoin-indexed exchange traded funds (ETFs) in the United States -- has opened up the sector to a wider public by allowing investors to bet on bitcoin's price without owning it directly.

Specialized companies such as Grayscale and Wall Street giants such as asset manager BlackRock are among those now investing in the digital token.

Haven investment?

The soaring price is also due to an impending technical four-yearly phenomenon known as halving -- the next round of which is due for next month.

This involves cutting in half the reward for "mining" bitcoin, slowing the rate at which units are created and restricting their supply.

Bitcoin is often viewed as a haven investment, helping it benefit in times of dollar weakness, such as in recent weeks with traders expecting the Federal Reserve to soon start cutting US interest rates as inflation cools.

The bitcoin rally comes at a time when cryptocurrency is struggling to restore its image after the collapse of several leading players in the sector, not least the bankruptcy of the FTX exchange platform in November 2022.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of embezzling billions of dollars in customer deposits without their permission and bitcoin's price collapsed in the aftermath of the case, reminiscent of previous cycles of the cybercurrencies' booms and busts.

Some commentators argue that bitcoin is the work of such scope and complexity that its creation must be the result of a group of people, rather than a single developer.

Salty foods are making people sick − in part by poisoning their microbiomes

The Conversation
March 12, 2024 

Salt Robert Guenther/dpa







People have been using salt since the dawn of civilization to process, preserve and enhance foods. In ancient Rome, salt was so central to commerce that soldiers were paid their “salarium,” or salaries, in salt, for instance.

Salt’s value was in part as a food preservative, keeping unwanted microbes at bay while allowing desired ones to grow. It was this remarkable ability to regulate bacterial growth that likely helped spark the development of fermented foods ranging from sauerkraut to salami, olives to bread, cheese to kimchi.

Today, salt has become ubiquitous and highly concentrated in increasingly processed diets. The evidence has mounted that too much salt – specifically the sodium chloride added to preserve and enhance the flavor of many highly processed foods – is making people sick. It can cause high blood pressure and contribute to heart attacks and stroke. It is also associated with an increased risk of developing stomach and colon cancer, Ménière’s disease, osteoporosis and obesity.

How might a substance previously thought worth its weight in gold have transformed into something many medical institutions consider a key predictor of disease?

Salt lobbyists may be one answer to this question. And as a gastroenterologist and research scientist at the University of Washington, I want to share the mounting evidence that microbes from the shadows of your gut might also shed some light on how salt contributes to disease.

Blood pressure cookers

Sodium’s role in blood pressure and heart disease results largely from its regulating the amount of water inside your blood vessels. In simple terms, the more sodium in your blood, the more water it pulls into your blood vessels. This leads to higher blood pressure and subsequently an increased risk for heart attack and stroke. Some people may be more or less sensitive to the effects salt has on blood pressure.

Recent research suggests an additional way salt may raise blood pressure – by altering your gut microbiome. Salt leads to a decrease in healthy microbes and the key metabolites they produce from fiber. These metabolites decrease inflammation in blood vessels and keep them relaxed, contributing to reduced blood pressure.


Extra salt may contribute to high blood pressure. 

Jupiterimages/Stockbyte via Getty Images

With the exception of certain organisms that thrive in salt called halophiles, high levels of salt can poison just about any microbe, even ones your body wants to keep around. This is why people have been using salt for a long time to preserve food and keep unwanted bacteria away.

But modern diets often have too much sodium. According to the World Health Organization, healthy consumption amounts to less than 2,000 milligrams per day for the average adult. The global mean intake of 4,310 milligrams of sodium has likely increased the amount of salt in the gut over healthy levels.

Salt of the girth

Sodium is connected to health outcomes other than blood pressure, and your microbiome may be playing a role here, too.

High sodium diets and higher sodium levels in stool are significantly linked to metabolic disorders, including elevated blood sugar, fatty liver disease and weight gain. In fact, one study estimated that for every one gram per day increase in dietary sodium, there is a 15% increased risk of obesity.

A gold-standard dietary study from the National Institutes of Health found that those on a diet of ultraprocessed foods over two weeks ate about 500 more calories and weighed about 2 pounds more compared with those on a minimally processed diet. One of the biggest differences between the two diets was the extra 1.2 grams of sodium consumed with the ultraprocessed diets.

A leading explanation for why increased salt may lead to weight gain despite having no calories is that sodium increases cravings. When sodium is combined with simple sugars and unhealthy fats, these so-called hyperpalatable foods may be linked to fat gain, as they are particularly good at stimulating the reward centers in the brain and addictionlike eating behaviors.


Many people could do with a pinch less of salt. 

Skynesher/E+ via Getty Images

Salt may also connect to cravings via a short circuit in the gut microbiome. Microbiome metabolites stimulate the release of a natural version of weight loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, the gut hormone GLP-1. Through GLP-1, a healthy microbiome can control your appetite, blood sugar levels and your body’s decision to burn or store energy as fat. Too much salt may interfere with its release.

Other explanations for salt’s effect on metabolic disease, with varying amounts of evidence, include increased sugar absorption, increased gut-derived corticosteroids and a sugar called fructose that can lead to fat accumulation and decreases in energy use for heat production.

Desalin-nations

While many countries are implementing national salt reduction initiatives, sodium consumption in most parts of the world remains on the rise. Dietary salt reduction in the United States in particular remains behind the curve, while many European countries have started to see benefits such as lower blood pressure and fewer deaths from heart disease through initiatives like improved package labeling of salt content, reformulating foods to limit salt and even salt taxes.

Comparing the nutrition facts of fast-food items between countries reveals considerable variability. For instance, McDonald’s chicken nuggets are saltiest in the U.S. and even American Coke contains salt, an ingredient it lacks in other countries.



Some fast foods have more salt than others.

Peter Dazeley/The Image Bank via Getty Images

The salt industry in the U.S may have a role here. It lobbied to prevent government regulations on salt in the 2010s, not dissimilar from what the tobacco industry did with cigarettes in the 1980s. Salty foods sell well. One of the key voices of the salt industry for many years, the now-defunct Salt Institute, may have confused public health messaging around the importance of salt reduction by emphasizing the less common instances where restriction can be dangerous.

But the evidence for reducing salt in the general diet is mounting, and institutions are responding. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued new industry guidance calling for a voluntary gradual reduction of salt in commercially processed and prepared foods. The Salt Institute dissolved in 2019. Other organizations such as the American Frozen Food Institute and major ingredient suppliers such as Cargill are on board with lowering dietary salt.

From add-vice to advice

How can you feed your gut microbiome well while being mindful of your salt intake?

Start with limiting your consumption of highly processed foods: salty meats (such as fast food and cured meat), salty treats (such as crackers and chips) and salty sneaks (such as soft drinks, condiments and breads). Up to 70% of dietary salt in the U.S. is currently consumed from packaged and processed foods.

Instead, focus on foods low in added sodium and sugar and high in potassium and fiber, such as unprocessed, plant-based foods: beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Fermented foods, though often high in sodium, may also be a healthier option due to high levels of short-chain fatty acids, fiber, polyphenols and potassium.

Finally, consider the balance of dietary sodium and potassium. While sodium helps keep fluid in your blood vessels, potassium helps keep fluid in your cells. Dietary sodium and potassium are best consumed in balanced ratios.

While all advice is best taken with a grain of salt, your microbiome gently asks that it just not be large.

Christopher Damman, Associate Professor of Gastroenterology, School of Medicine, University of Washington

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

Redwood trees are growing almost as fast in the UK as their Californian cousins – study

The Conversation
March 13, 2024 

Redwood forest in Muir Woods National Park. California's so-called Grove of Titans, a patch of parkland near the Oregon border, is home to some of the planet's tallest trees. Yuval Helfman/dpa

What can live for over 3,000 years, weigh over 150 tonnes and could be sitting almost unnoticed in your local park? Giant sequoias (known as giant redwoods in the UK) are among the tallest and heaviest organisms that have ever lived on Earth, not to mention they have the potential to live longer than other species.

My team’s new study is the first to look at the growth of giant sequoias in the UK – and they seem to be doing remarkably well. Trees at two of the three sites we studied matched the average growth rates of their counterparts in the US, where they come from. These remarkable trees are being planted in an effort to help absorb carbon, but perhaps more importantly they are becoming a striking and much-admired part of the UK landscape.

To live so long, giant sequoias have evolved to be extraordinarily resilient. In their native northern California, they occupy an ecological niche in mountainous terrain 1400 – 2100 metres above sea level.

Their thick spongy bark insulates against fire and disease and they can survive severe winters and arid summers. Despite these challenges these trees absorb and store CO₂ faster and in greater quantities than almost any other in the world, storing up to five times more carbon per hectare than even tropical rainforests. However, the changing climate means Californian giant sequoias are under threat from more frequent and extreme droughts and fires. More than 10% of the remaining population of around 80,000 wild trees were killed in a single fire in 2020 alone.
Tree giants from the US

What is much less well-known is that there are an estimated half a million sequoias (wild and planted) in England, dotted across the landscape. So how well are the UK giant sequoias doing? To try and answer this, my team used a technique called terrestrial laser scanning to measure the size and volume of giant sequoias.


Sequoia national park in California, USA. My Good Images/Shutterstock

The laser sends out half a million pulses a second and if a pulse hits a tree, the 3D location of each “hit” is recorded precisely. This gives us a map of tree structure in unprecedented detail, which we can use to estimate volume and mass, effectively allowing us to estimate the tree’s weight. If we know how old the trees are, we can estimate how fast they are growing and accumulating carbon.

As part of a Master’s project with former student Ross Holland, and along with colleagues at Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, we measured giant sequoias across three sites - Benmore botanical gardens in Scotland, Kew Wakehurst in Sussex and Havering Country Park in Essex. These sites span the wettest (Benmore) and driest (Havering) climates in the UK, enabling us to assess how rainfall affects growth.

The fastest-growing trees we measured are growing almost as fast as they do in California, adding 70cm of height and storing 160kg of carbon per year, about twice that of a native UK oak. The trees at Benmore are already among the tallest trees in the UK at 55 metres, the current record-holder being a 66 metre Douglas Fir in Scotland. The redwoods, being faster growing, are likely to take that title in the next decade or two. And these trees are “only” around 170 years old. No native tree in the UK is taller than about 47 meters. We also found significant differences in growth rates across the UK. They grow fastest in the north where the climate is wetter.

So how did these trees get here? Exotic plant collecting was big business in the 18th and 19th centuries, in large part as a display of wealth and taste. Giant sequoias were first introduced in 1853 by Scottish grain merchant and keen amateur collector Patrick Matthew, who gave them to friends. Later that same year commercial nurseryman William Lobb brought many more from California, along with accounts of the giant trees from which they came.

Giant sequoias quickly became a sensation and were planted to create imposing avenues, at the entrances of grand houses and estates, in churchyards, parks and botanic gardens. The letters about these trees helps us to accurately age planted trees, enabling us to calculate their growth rates.

Normally, you need to take samples from a tree’s core to get an accurate age estimate but that can damage the tree.

Imagine their potential

UK sequoias are unlikely to grow as tall as their Californian counterparts, which tend to grow in forests, due to lightning strikes and high winds – always a risk when you’re the tallest thing in the landscape rather than one among many. More recently, there has been a resurgence in planting giant sequoias in the UK, particularly in urban settings. This is because of their carbon storage potential and perhaps because people seem to really like them.

We urgently need to understand how UK trees will fare in the face of much hotter, drier summers, stormier winters and with increased risks of fire. Global trade is also increasing the spread of disease among plant life. More work is needed to consider the impact of planting non-native species like giant sequoias on native habitats and biodiversity but our work has shown that they are apparently very happy with our climate, so far.

More importantly, we have to remember that trees are more than just stores of carbon. If we value trees only as carbon sticks we will end up with thousands of hectares of monoculture, which isn’t good for nature.

But these giant sequoias are here to stay and are becoming a beautiful and resilient part of our landscape.

Mathias Disney, Reader in Remote Sensing, Department of Geography, UCL

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

With bites rare, experts want sharks to shed scary reputation

Agence France-Presse
March 15, 2024 

SHARK SMILE

Great White Shark (Wikimedia Commons)

As the northern hemisphere edges toward spring and millions flock to the beach, headlines have dubbed the southeastern US state of Florida the world's most likely place to be bitten by a shark.

They're right, but, at the same time, shark bites are exceedingly rare overall -- a fact scientists wish more people knew, especially amid declining shark populations desperately in need of conservation.

"When the sharks in the water are targeting the fishes that they normally feed on, once in a while, people get in the way and the sharks make a mistake," said Gavin Naylor, coauthor of a recent report tallying last year's shark attacks.

According to data he gathered for the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File, Florida was home to a quarter of last year's shark attacks -- a scary statistic, if taken on its own.

And yet that only amounts to 16 unprovoked attacks, out of 69 total worldwide -- and millions of swimmers flocking to Florida's coast each year.

If sharks wanted to attack us, "people are very easy to target. They are a bit like floating sausages," Naylor told AFP.

"So we know that they must be avoiding them."

- Shark attack 'capital' -

Florida's subtropical latitude means many sharks move through the waters of its continental shelf, which are rich in nutrients and therefore in fish to feed them.

And miles of beaches attract huge numbers of tourists to the Sunshine State -- 135 million last year, according to Florida statistics.

Yet despite the long odds of a shark bite, the predators still carry an outsized reputation -- one probably not helped by their rows of razor sharp teeth, or fictional movies about killer sharks like "Jaws" and the decades-long US cable television phenomenon known as "Shark Week."

New Smyrna Beach, located in Volusia County -- home to half of Florida's shark bites last year -- is inauspiciously known as the "shark bite capital of the world."

Surfers often flock to its coast, where the murky waters reduce sharks' visibility, and increase the chance they will bite a human by mistake.

Bites are like an "airplane crash" -- shocking but rare, said New Smyrna Beach resident Bruce Adams, who remembers close encounters with sharks of his own during his surfing days.

"It's sensational, it sells a lot of T-shirts," he told AFP, lamenting the creatures' bad reputations.


- Swimming with sharks -

In fact, most of us have probably been in the water alongside sharks -- we just didn't know it, said report coauthor Joe Miguez.

"They don't really want anything to do with us," he told AFP.

Some humans meanwhile are seeking out sharks.

In Jupiter, some 90 miles (150 kilometers) north of Miami, Jonathan Campbell has done more than 500 dives with a coterie of enthusiasts, all there to swim with sharks.

"You see sharks in movies and they are scary monsters. But in the water, they are actually shy puppy dogs," he said.


In fact, amid crashing shark populations -- there has been a 70 percent worldwide decline since 1970, according to a recent study -- what the world might need is more sharks.

"We should be more focused on conserving these animals than just going out and saying that they're out to get us," said Miguez.

Whale menopause sheds light on human evolutionary mystery

Agence France-Presse
March 13, 2024 

A beluga whale, one of the very few other animals that experience menopause, which remains an evolutionary puzzle

 Olivier MORIN AFP


Why do humans experience menopause? It's a question that some women going through the symptoms might have asked themselves more than once.

Scientists are also baffled. From an evolutionary perspective, animals generally take every chance they can get to have as many offspring as possible to boost their odds of survival.

So why have some species evolved to have menopause, in which females live many years after they stop being able to reproduce?

That there are so few other examples in the animal kingdom only deepens the mystery.

Out of 5,000 mammals, just five species of whales with teeth -- including killer whales, beluga whales and narwhals -- are the only others known to have females that regularly live long after they stop reproducing.

However plenty of other toothed whales, such as dolphins, do not experience menopause.

By looking at the differences between these two groups, a UK-led team of researchers sought to discover why some whales evolved to get menopause -- and what this could tell us about ourselves.

Despite our many differences, humans share a "convergent life history" with these ocean giants that led to the independent evolution of menopause, the researchers concluded in a study published in Nature on Wednesday.

Their results tied together several existing hypotheses. The first piece of the puzzle involving lifespan.

The grandmother hypothesis

Females of the five species that have menopause live roughly 40 years longer than other similar-sized whales, the researchers found.

These female whales also easily outlive males of their own kind.

Female killer whales "regularly live into their 60s and 70s, but the males are all dead by 40," lead study author Samuel Ellis of the UK's University of Exeter told an online press conference.

This supports what is known as the "grandmother hypothesis" -- that older females care for their grandchildren, therefore helping their species survive in a different way.

Female killer whales regularly live into their 60s and 70s, but the males are all dead by 40, the researchers said

 © Olivier MORIN / AFP/File


But why would it be an evolutionary advantage for these grandmothers to stop having offspring?

"The second part of this story is about competition," study co-author Darren Croft said.

When killer whale "mothers and daughters try and breed at the same time, the calves of the older females" have a significantly lower survival rate as they compete for resources, he said.

"So they have evolved a longer lifespan while keeping a short reproductive lifespan," Croft added.

"This is just the same pattern of life history we see in humans."

Though we walk on land and they swim through the ocean, the similarities between human and whale social structures is "absolutely striking", Croft said.

The importance of matriarchy

"Older matriarchs" play an important role within both societies, he said.

For example, the experience older females have gathered over their lives helps the whale families get through hard times such as environmental challenges or a lack of food.

But just having a matriarchal society is not enough. Older female elephants, for example, look after their offspring but keep reproducing until the end of their lives.

Narwhals are technically a toothed whale but they only have one tooth -- a tusk that can be as long as three metres

 © Carsten Egevang / Groenlands Naturinstitut/AFP/File

The key difference could be that older whale mothers keep looking after their sons, Croft said. Young male elephants, however, leave the family group.

Both sons and daughters sticking around could even be a unique trait to the five whales -- and humans -- that get menopause, he speculated.

Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary demographer and anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine not involved in the study, cautioned that this could not "provide definitive answers to the question of why menopause evolved".

Whales are incredibly difficult to study, and a lot of the data used for the research was from unnatural events such as mass strandings, she commented in Nature.

Meanwhile, there has been increasing criticism that menopause in human women remains badly under-researched due to a long-standing male-skewed bias in medical research.

"Human grandmothers, like whale grandmothers, are important in the lives of their adult children and grandchildren, but older women are too often ignored in policy circles and public health research," Sear said.

© 2024 AFP

Whale of a tail: Scientists track unique humpback 'fingerprint'

Agence France-Presse
March 15, 2024 

Humpback whale (Shutterstock)

In Antarctica, a scientist waits patiently for two frolicking humpback whales to poke their tails out of the icy waters so she can take a photographic "fingerprint" of the unique colors and patterns that allow researchers to identify individuals of the species.

Andrea Bonilla, a Colombian scientist at Cornell University in the United States, has been working with a team of researchers since 2014 to catalog humpback whales from a visual analysis of their tails -- or flukes.

"What we are doing is tracking the history of each individual," Bonilla told AFP onboard the ARC Simon Bolivar during a scientific expedition by the Colombian navy.

Over the years, the team has identified 70 whales, and hopes to see some of them again to record any physical changes that could provide clues to their migratory patterns, population sizes, health and sexual maturity.

On the tail, "the coloration and patterns that each whale has is unique, it is like a fingerprint, so what we do is look at the different marks they have, the different scars" to identify an individual, said Bonilla.

Global populations of humpbacks have bounced back after once being decimated by commercial whaling, but the ocean giants remain under threat from vessel strikes, illegal fishing, pollution and underwater noise.

Today there are about 84,000 adult specimens in the world, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The importance of tail identification was highlighted in a study published last month in the Royal Society Open Science journal which showed the number of humpback whales in the North Pacific had plummeted 20 percent in less than a decade.

Tracking some 33,000 whales through photos of their flukes, scientists noted the steep decline which they speculate was due to starvation because of marine heat waves.

- 'Accumulating energy' -

Photo identification is common in the study of marine mammals, although the use of fluke identification is most used with humpbacks both because of their unique markings, and their habit of raising their tails out of the water while diving.

Different populations of humpback whales live across the world's oceans, carrying out mammoth migrations from warmer breeding spots to feeding grounds in polar waters.


"They take advantage of this great biomass of food that is here (in Antarctica) and for several months they are simply accumulating energy," said Bonilla.

Using photographs, the scientist draws reproductions of the details of the tails of the enormous marine mammals, which can reach up to 18 meters (59 feet) long and weigh about 40 tons.

On a computer, she zooms in on the details of the flukes, which can reveal attacks from other animals, "if there is some type of skin disease" or information about their diet.

The inventory allows scientists to track the movement of specific whales, which is crucial for conservation initiatives.

"If a whale always comes to the same area to reproduce, it is important to protect those areas. If they cease to exist or are disturbed, that whale will have nowhere to go," warned Bonilla.

Darwin's Galapagos island species, protected yet still at risk

Agence France-Presse
March 16, 2024 

A marine iguana, one of the more than 3,000 species found in the Galapagos Marine Reserve

(Ernesto BENAVIDES/AFP)

Industrial fishing boats hover menacingly on the edges of Ecuador's Galapagos Marine Reserve, where schools of multicolored fish and hammerhead sharks frolic in the protected Pacific waters.

The reserve is a haven for the flurry of creatures and plants living in the waters around the Galapagos Islands where naturalist Charles Darwin found the inspiration for his theory of natural selection.

But outside its boundaries, not delineated by any physical barrier, there is no protection on the high seas where these same species also venture.

The sharks, turtles, iguanas, sea lions and fish that thrive in the Galapagos "don't understand political boundaries," Stuart Banks, a senior marine scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, told AFP on board Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise research vessel.

"So they're going to be moving between different territories and that's when they're most at risk, particularly to things like industrial fishing and bycatch."

The solution, according to Greenpeace, is to secure a much larger area of ocean by creating the first-ever marine protected area on the high seas bordering the Galapagos Marine Reserve.

But for this to happen, at least 60 countries must ratify the High Seas Treaty adopted by United Nations member states last June. Only two have done so to date.

- Like a jigsaw puzzle -

AFP accompanied an Arctic Sunrise scientific mission to the area this month to investigate the threats posed to the Galapagos Marine Reserve, which Greenpeace describes as "probably the best conservation project carried out in the oceans."

The reserve of nearly 200,000 square kilometers (some 77,000 square miles) is one of the world's largest and most biodiverse with more than 3,000 species, many of them found nowhere else.

Biologist Paola Sangolqui explained she was testing water samples to analyze "which marine species have been in this area and have left some kind of DNA trace."

For his part, Daniel Armijos was in charge of underwater video monitoring of fish numbers and prevalence.


"It is kind of like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle because everything is integrated in some way," explained Banks.

"And if you're looking to prioritize the most important regions to start working, to know where those corridors are (along which species migrate), you need to use genetics so you can start to look at how particular populations are connected from one region to another."

- Hammerhead haven -

From the Arctic Sunrise, scientists also descended a robot to explore the coral reefs that serve as key feeding and breeding grounds for many fish, said expedition leader Sophie Cooke, for whom "the abundance of marine life in this national park is simply staggering."

Marine reserve employee Eduardo Espinoza, in charge of day-to-day monitoring, told AFP the archipelago is a rare sanctuary for hammerhead sharks, whose fins are a delicacy in some Asian countries.

Hammerheads were at particular risk of "overfishing and illegal fishing," Espinoza said as he fixed an identifying label to a young specimen.


"In the Galapagos, hammerhead sharks are always abundant. They have a refuge here to reproduce, from where they move throughout the Pacific," he added.

- Free species worth more -

Cooke said the Galapagos was an important migratory stop for many species, which is "why we need to connect all these different marine protected areas and protect these reserves: so the migration routes of these species can be kept safe."

The Galapagos Islands are designated a UNESCO Natural World Heritage site.

Another reason to protect the area is its attraction for tens of thousands of visitors every year, like American diver Ryan Doyle, 24.

"In comparison to Florida, where I'd also dive recreationally, there's so much life here," Doyle told AFP. "There's so many sharks and everything looks so healthy. So you can kind of like see the conservation" at work.

Diving instructor Anthony Gavilanes, 30, said locals like himself nowadays "live off tourism" more than fishing, as before.

"For us, species swimming freely in the water are worth more than they are on a plate served at a table."