Former Spymaster Pulls the Strings of Turkey's Far-Rght MHP, an Ally of the Erdoğan Government

by Abdullah Bozkurt
Nordic Monitor
May 9, 2022

Former Turkish intelligence spymaster Şenkal Atasagun is the mastermind behind Turkey's anti-Western Nationalist Movement Party.

The mastermind behind Turkey's far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which drives an anti-Western agenda in close cooperation with the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has turned out to be Şenkal Atasagun, a former spymaster who ran Turkish intelligence agency MIT for years.

Atasagun, who retired from MIT in June 2005, has been working as the chief advisor to MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli for over a decade now, helping shape the policies of the racist party and framing the narrative and talking points put forward by party leadership. Working in the shadows and barely seen in public for years, Atasagun has played a key role in the radical shift in the Erdoğan government's policies at home and abroad.

His partners in the government are Mehmet Ağar, a former interior minister who is effectively in charge of the police department, and Süleyman Soylu, the current interior minister. The three have been enriching themselves through cuts and kickbacks they get from various criminal enterprises, ranging from drug cartels to organized crime syndicates.

The former intelligence chief has enlisted the help of notorious mafia figures whom he had used as operatives when he was with MIT in the 1980s and '90s. The most notorious figure Atasagun brought to the team was Alaattin Çakıcı, a far-right-linked gangster and hit man who was used by MIT to conduct clandestine operations in Turkey and abroad. Atasagun secured his release from prison through the MHP's influence with the Erdoğan government despite the fact that he was convicted on multiple charges and had been serving a lengthy prison sentence.

Çakıcı, held accountable for the deaths of 41 people, was put in charge of all mafia groups to maintain a climate of fear against opposition and government-critical groups so that Atasagun and his partners in crime in the government could act with impunity and free of public scrutiny. The mobster has been issuing threatening messages to government critics in support of the government.

On November 17, 2020 Çakıcı threatened Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in a handwritten statement released on Twitter. Insulting the politician as an "ignorant informant who serves traitors like a dog," the mafia leader vowed to punish Kılıçdaroğlu with impalement. He defended MHP Chairman Bahçeli as his respected elder and took offense at Kılıçdaroğlu's criticism of the MHP leader.

The enlisting of Çakıcı as an intelligence asset was first done by Atasagun when he was deputy director of MIT's Istanbul branch. When Atasagun became the chief of the intelligence agency on February 16, 1998, he tasked Çakıcı with carrying out an assassination in Europe and gave him a diplomatic passport, issued by the Foreign Ministry for undercover MIT officials. The operation was foiled when he was captured and his links to MIT were exposed by the French police.

Atasagun's background is murky. He suppressed an investigation into nationalist networks after famous assassin Mehmet Ali Ağca shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 and killed famous Turkish journalist Abdi İpekçi in 1979. When he was asked by Korkut Eken, a former officer in the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) Special Operations Department, if MIT was interested in investigating Ağca's connections, Atasagun, who was then deputy director of MIT's Istanbul office, said the agency had no interest in it.

His recruitment by MIT in 1967 was accomplished with help from his father and former general Şahap Atasagun. He had worked in various departments, run covert operations and intelligence-gathering activities and specialized in counterintelligence. He served on assignment in Brussels and London.

The track record of Atasagun as an intelligence official is covered with trail of blood. He was reportedly an important player in the Turkish Resistance Organization (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı, TMT), a paramilitary group set up in Cyprus with support from the Turkish government. The group was involved in extrajudicial killings including false flag murders of Turks to blame Greek Cypriots.

He sanctioned operations that led to the killing of innocent people including Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was shot dead by an ultranationalist teenager in broad daylight on January 19, 2007. Atasagun was the man behind an intimidation campaign targeting the journalist that eventually resulted in his death.

Dink published a news story about Sabiha Gökçen — the adopted daughter of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and Turkey's first female pilot — in his newspaper that suggested Gökçen could be one of the thousands of Armenians who were orphaned in 1915 when Armenians faced a forced displacement that led to many deaths. Furious about the article, Atasagun sent his men to scare the journalist.

In a private meeting held on February 24, 2006 in the İstanbul Governor's Office building, under orders from Atasagun, Özel Yılmaz, deputy regional director of MİT in İstanbul, and Handan Selçuk, another MİT agent, threatened Dink. They warned the journalist about "possible danger if [he] continues to make controversial statements." Less than a year later, Dink was assassinated.

After his retirement in 2005, Atasagun worked as an advisor to the Black Hawk Security firm, a US-based company that was established by Turks to provide what company officials claimed was security in Turkey and Iraq, especially in border areas. The company's partners included former Turkish general Köksal Karabay, former governor Cemil Serhatlı, former consul general Mehmet Nuri Ezen, attorney Günay Hakkı Övünç and several Turkish businessman.

Using political cover provided by the government, Atasagun today continues to resort to violence and commit crimes with zero accountability. Attacks on several journalists who criticized the MHP leader were believed to have been orchestrated by Atasagun, who used mafia figures to suppress critical coverage of Bahçeli. The fact that the assailants were let go after each attack with a slap on the wrist confirms that they were protected by the government.

The former spymaster is afraid that he would fall from grace and be held to account if Bahçeli fails and needs to ensure the MHP leader's survival in politics. The partnership with the Erdoğan government is key in this scheme, and he has insured that the MHP stands by the Erdoğan government despite apparent conflicts in some cases between what the MHP preaches and what the Erdoğan government does.

Rumors in Ankara circles suggesting that Bahçeli has in fact been an MIT employee for decades have gained more credence in the face of close collaboration between him and Atasagun. Alpaslan Türkeş, founder of the MHP, knew Bahçeli, an academic and member of the party, was linked to MIT and even wrote a letter from his hospital bed telling his colleagues to keep Bahçeli away from the party because he was working in intelligence.

Yaşar Okuyan, a former government minister and Türkeş's right-hand man, said several times that he has the original letter and claims Bahçeli was assigned by MIT as a "trustee" to control the MHP. He dared Bahçeli to to sue him for defamation so that the letter could be verified by the court. Despite the serious allegations, Bahçeli never sued Okuyan for his claims of connections to MIT.

Alpaslan Türkeş's letter stating that Devlet Bahçeli worked for the intelligence agency:

Putin Referenda In All Russian Speaking Parts Of Ukraine To Create Peoples Republics Loyal To Moscow – OpEd

By Paul Goble

Many are asking what and how Vladimir Putin hopes to achieve in Ukraine, Mikhail Rostovsky says; but the answers are clear from his actions in 2014, his own comments as long ago as 2018, and the statements of some of his political loyalists in recent days, Mikhail Rostovsky says.
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The Kremlin leader wants to create peoples republics as he did in 2014, he sees this as a way of destroying a united Ukrainian state that the West could use against Russia, and he wants to organize referenda as soon as the guns fall silent in particular regions to achieve that end, the Moskovsky komsomolets commentator says (mk.ru/politics/2022/04/21/s-planov-putina-spolzla-zavesa-tayny-ukrainu-pokroshat-referendumami.html).

As a result of this policy, Rostovsky says, “the number of ‘peoples republics’ can be significantly increased,” although there is a limit, he suggests. “No one in Moscow will want to make a second attempt to ‘re-educate’” Ukrainian speakers in the western oblasts of Ukraine who have shown themselves recalcitrant to all such attempts.

Rostovsky says that at present, of course, this is only one possible scenario for Putin’s actions; but a survey of what the Russian military authorities and the other agencies of Russian power following behind them are doing in areas where the Ukrainian army has been forced out at least for the present provides strong support for his contention.

The Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reports that “the Russian military are preparing a number of pseudo-referenda” to attempt to legitimize their occupation

 (facebook.com/DefenceIntelligenceofUkraine/posts/295027096142051 and graniru.org/Politics/World/Europe/Ukraine/m.285015.html).

According to the ministry, propaganda materials and ballots for such a pseudo-referendum are already being prepared in Kherson. Residents there are convinced that no real voting will occur. The Russian occupiers will limit themselves, they believe, to staged voting in order to make points in Russia and in the international community.

AFRICA
Family of 'Hotel Rwanda' hero sues Rwandan government for kidnapping and torture


DUSTIN JONES

NPR

Paul Rusesabagina, pictured in 2012, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on terrorism charges last September in Rwanda. His family is suing Rwanda for $400 million for kidnapping, torture and unlawful imprisonment.

Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images

Paul Rusesabagina, the man portrayed in the film Hotel Rwanda who saved more than 1,200 people during the nation's 1994 genocide, has been detained in Rwanda for 20 months on terrorism charges that human rights groups call a sham. Now his family is suing the government of Rwanda for $400 million, saying he has been abducted, tortured and illegally imprisoned.

The Rwandan government abducted Rusesabagina, 67, in August 2020 in Dubai. This past September, a Rwandan court sentenced him to 25 years in prison. Rusesabagina is a U.S. permanent resident and holds Belgian citizenship.

"The Rwandan government has openly admitted that it planned an elaborate operation inside the United States to track Paul Rusesabagina and use its agents to trick him into traveling — with false promises of contractual work in Burundi— from his home in the United States to Rwanda," lawyers for the family say in court documents. "He was drugged and taken to Rwanda where President Paul Kagame's security agents forcibly abducted him, tortured him, and forced him into illegal imprisonment."

Rusesabagina has been a harsh critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, accusing the president of war crimes and human rights violations. The family says the government targeted him in response.

Rusesabagina is best known for his heroism in 1994 as the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, chronicled in the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda. He gave safe haven to over 1,200 people during extermination efforts that claimed some 800,000 lives.

He received multiple humanitarian awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2005.

AFRICA

As the war in Ukraine continues, a look back at the 1994 Rwandan genocide

In the late 2000s, Rusesabagina and his wife, Taciana, moved to the United States, settling down as legal residents in San Antonio, Texas. But the Rwandan government spent years trailing, spying on and harassing Rusesabagina and his family, the family's lawyers say.

On Aug. 27, 2020, Rusesabagina was traveling from the U.S. to Burundi for contractual work. But his family said he went missing during a layover in the United Arab Emirates. The Rwanda Investigation Bureau announced four days later that they had captured Rusesabagina, who they accused of being involved in terrorism.

Rusesabagina co-founded the opposition Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change, which has an armed wing called the National Liberation Forces. The NLF has claimed responsibility for multiple deadly attacks in Rwanda's Southern Province in recent years, according to Human Rights Watch.

Rusesabagina was convincted on charges related to those attacks and was sentenced to 25 years in prison in September 2021.

Human Rights Watch called the trial "flawed" and "emblematic of the government's overreach and manipulation of the justice system." The U.S. State Department said it was "concerned" about Rusesabagina's "lack of confidential, unimpeded access to his lawyers and relevant case documents and his initial lack of access to counsel."

Booker blasts Vilsack’s food justice efforts

• Hans Nichols, author of Axios Sneak Peek

Sen. Cory Booker. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) had a tense back-and-forth with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack during a closed-door lunch last Thursday over the Biden administration’s efforts to address nutrition in minority communities, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.

Why it matters: The heated exchange, which left some senators stunned, is an indication Booker — who, like Joe Biden, ran for president in 2020 — isn’t going to be shy about challenging Biden officials on issues about which he feels strongly.

• The confrontation also reflects a level of frustration some Democrats have with the administration's efforts to address food deserts and the prevalence of junk food in inner cities, tribal lands and rural America.
• "Sen. Booker appreciated the opportunity for a robust discussion with Secretary Vilsack and looks forward to continuing his work with the administration on these critical issues,” Maya Krishna-Rogers, Booker's press secretary, told Axios.
• “Sen. Booker believes that access to affordable, nutritious food should not be dictated by your race, income or ZIP Code," she said. "He also knows that corporate agriculture consolidation is driving small farmers and ranchers out of business while pushing prices up for American families."
• A Vilsack spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Driving the news: Vilsack, a close Biden confidant and former Iowa governor, was invited to the weekly Democratic Policy and Communications Committee lunch.

The discussion was largely focused on corporate consolidation in the agriculture industry and how Democrats can improve their appeal in rural communities.

• Booker, a passionate vegan, appeared to catch Vilsack off-guard when he questioned what the department was doing to reform agribusiness and help provide healthier food to poorer Americans.
• Vilsack responded, in part, that consumers sometimes prefer unhealthier foods — triggering an even stronger response from Booker.
• Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who chairs the DPCC, tried to calm the tensions, but the meeting ended without Booker and Vilsack resolving their differences.

Go deeper: Booker, who chairs the Agriculture Subcommittee on Food and Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Organics and Research, has made access to quality food a signature issue.

• “Too many Americans are overfed but undernourished,” he said during a subcommittee hearing last November.
• “Despite being the wealthiest nation in the world, we have created a food system that relentlessly encourages the overeating of empty calories.”
• “The risk of diabetes, for example, is 77% higher for Black people in America,” he said. “And, we are twice as likely to die from diabetes.”

Anger at remarks
Sports writers body ‘sorry’ after women’s walk-out

By a Daily Business reporter | May 9, 2022

Eilidh Barbour: felt unwelcome

An organisation representing sports writers in Scotland has apologised after a number of females walked out of an awards evening complaining they felt distressed by sexist, racist and homophobic remarks at the event.

Following their reaction, the Scottish Football Writers’ Association has pledged to review the format of its annual dinner.

Eilidh Barbour, who reports for Sky Sports News and BBC Sport, took to Twitter to say that she had “never felt so unwelcome in the industry I work in than sitting at the Scottish Football Writers Awards (SFWA).

“A huge reminder there is still so much to do in making our game an equal place #callitout #equalgame.”

Her comments did not identify the source of her discomfort but others, including Gabriella Bennett, co-chair of Women In Journalism Scotland (WIJS), complained of jokes in poor taste.

Ms Bennett told the Daily Record: “After the first couple of jokes I leant over to the person I was there with and said, ‘I really don’t like this.’ It wasn’t even funny. Just really poor taste.

“It’s passed off as banter, or we’re told it’s only a joke, and a lot of people were laughing last night, which was disappointing.

“My table stood up to leave, and I saw Eilidh Barbour and people on her table start to leave.”

In a joint statement, anti-racism group Kick It Out and Women in Football condemned the SFWA.

They said: “We have been made aware of sexist, racist and homophobic remarks made at the Scottish Football Writers’ Awards last night, during an after-dinner speech.

“Events that celebrate talent in our game should be a time to focus on the positives and all the people who have played their part in pushing football forward.

“It should not be used as a platform to share derogatory and discriminatory comments and make groups and communities feel excluded and insulted.

“We expect better and we demand better.”

In a statement, the SFWA said: “The Scottish Football Writers’ Association apologises to anyone offended or upset by material from one of our after-dinner speakers at last night’s annual awards dinner.

“We have agreed unanimously that this will act as a catalyst to review and improve the format of our future events to make it an enjoyable and inspirational event for all.”

A Women in Journalism Scotland spokesperson said: “Women in Journalism Scotland (WiJS) stands with all those who walked out in the middle of an offensive after-dinner speech at the Scottish Football Writers’ Association awards dinner last night.

“It is a matter of great concern to us that it is still deemed acceptable to behave and speak in such a disparaging manner towards women. This is not banter for the minority groups who are the butt of the jokes.

“Sports journalism appears to be among the last bastions of misogyny within journalism.

“In a recent survey carried out at the end of last year, WiJS discovered that of around 95 sports desk staff jobs at Scottish newspapers, just three were filled by women.

“There are no female sports editors, which shows the lack of career path available to women in this sector, especially when you consider that many of our current newspaper editors rose through the ranks via sports desks.

“Dark corners of our industry still exist, where outdated attitudes – which wouldn’t be acceptable elsewhere – are still condoned.

“Members tell us about derisory attitudes towards women who report on sport, all-male voices in morning news conferences, sexist jokes in actual and virtual rooms, an intimidating atmosphere in the football press box and more.

“Disturbingly, we also hear stories that when women are offered jobs writing about sport, it is often on lower salaries than male counterparts, with fewer promotions offered and little flexibility.

“As a result, fewer women are attracted to the sector and those who do go into it, leave because of what they find.

“It’s time to call time on the sexist shame of the beautiful game.”

6-year-old finds megalodon tooth on UK beach

The rare megalodon tooth was 4 inches long.

By Patrick Pester 

published about 5 hours ago

A computer-generated image of a megalodon with its mouth open. (Image credit: Gil Cohiba/Shutterstock)

A 6-year-old boy was looking for shells and fossils with his father on a U.K. beach when he picked up a rare tooth belonging to a megalodon — the biggest shark that has ever lived.

Sammy Shelton discovered the megalodon tooth on Bawdsey Beach in Suffolk on the east coast of England, as first reported by the Great Yarmouth Mercury, a news outlet covering Great Yarmouth in the neighboring county of Norfolk, where the boy is from. The tooth measured 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, according to The Mirror, a British news website.

"We knew what it was but not how rare it was," Peter Shelton, the boy's father, told the Great Yarmouth Mercury.

The beach is a popular site for fossil hunters, who told the Sheltons that finding a megalodon tooth there is rare.

Megalodon teeth are quite common in some places, including off the East Coast of North America and off the coast of Morocco. However, they are "extremely rare" in the U.K., according to the Natural History Museum in London.

Related: The megalodon spent tens of millions of years honing its lethal, knife-like teeth

Megalodon (Otodus megalodon) ruled the oceans at the top of the food chain, chomping down large prey such as whales and dolphins, until it disappeared from the fossil record by the end of the Pliocene epoch about 2.6 million years ago. Scientists are still debating megalodon's exact size, but the giant sharks likely reached at least 49 feet (15 meters) long and may have been as big as 65 feet (20 m) long, Live Science previously reported.

The largest megalodon teeth can reach more than 7 inches (17.8 cm) in length, which is more than twice as long as the teeth of the biggest great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), according to the Kentucky Geological Survey at the University of Kentucky.

Sharks shed and grow new teeth throughout their lifetimes, so shark teeth are continuously falling to the seafloor where they may become fossilized. The sheer number of shark teeth that have been shed throughout their history helps increase the chances that some are preserved and found by humans after millions of years.

The 2018 sci-fi movie "The Meg" pits a massive megalodon against actor Jason Statham, who coincidentally lived in Great Yarmouth when he was young, according to The Guardian

Originally published on Live Science.

8,500-year-old stone houses are the oldest known structures in the UAE

The remains of Neolithic buildings were found on the island of Ghagha.

By Emily Staniforth 

published 1 day ago

The remains of the Neolithic stone structures (Image credit: DCT Abu Dhabi)

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest structure ever found in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — the remains of a building that may be 8,500 years old.

The structure, which dates to the Neolithic period, was found by archaeologists on on the island of Ghagha off Abu Dhabi.

An analysis of carbon isotopes, or versions of carbon, within charcoal fragments from the site show that the structure is 500 years older than any structures found before in the UAE, according to a February statement from the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi). Previously, the oldest structure found was on the island of Marawah.

The Neolithic stone structures on the island of Ghagha (Image credit: DCT Abu Dhabi)

"These archaeological finds have shown that people were settling and building homes here 8,500 years ago," Mohamed Al Mubarak, the chairman of DCT Abu Dhabi, said in the statement.

The find highlights the historical connection between the people of the UAE and the sea. Before this discovery it was believed that people settled in the area which is now the UAE later in the Neolithic period as people expanded long-distance maritime trade routes, Al Mubarak said.

However, the new discovery shows that Neolithic settlements existed before the evolution of trade in the area.

The structures found on Ghagha are believed to have been houses for a small community who lived on the island year-round. The rounded rooms have stone walls, the remains of which measure 3 feet (1 meter) high. Archaeologists also found artifacts, such as stone arrowheads, at the site. These would likely have been used for hunting, with the inhabitants of the island also relying on the sea for resources.

The stone arrowheads found at the site on Ghagha. (Image credit: DCT Abu Dhabi)

Archaeologists don't know exactly how long the settlement was inhabited, but the burial of a person at the site 5,000 years ago, after the settlement was abandoned, illustrates that the structure was an important cultural and historical aspect of the island. Burials from this period are a rare find on the Abu Dhabi islands, according to the statement.

When Neolithic people lived on Ghagha and Marawah, these islands weren't "arid and inhospitable," but a "fertile coast," according to the statement. "This evidence recasts Abu Dhabi's islands within the cultural history of the broader region."

Originally published on Live Science.

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CTHULU STUDIES

'Mind-boggling' scrambled genome found in octopus and squid. It could explain their smarts.

Cephalopods have been breaking the rules with their genomes.

By Stephanie Pappas 

A Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) hunting at night at a coral reef in Curaçao. (Image credit: Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Squid, octopus and cuttlefish have scrambled-up genomes that may help explain how these cephalopods evolved the most complicated nervous systems of any invertebrate.

New genetic sequencing reveals that these animals' genes are mixed up, arranged in strange orders not seen in other, non-cephalopod species. This DNA mixing and matching may have given evolution a new sandbox to play in, study co-author Caroline Albertin, a biologist at the University of Chicago Marine Biological Laboratory, told Live Science.

"A hypothesis is that these new gene arrangements resulted in new expression patterns and that means these genes could be used in a new place or in a new way," Albertin said, referring to the process of a gene being "expressed" or activated to create proteins that do some type of work in the body.

Those new opportunities, in turn, could explain some of squid and octopuses' incredible abilities, such as advanced vision or arms that have their own "brains."

Scientists have long suspected that strange things are going on in the cephalopod genome. In 2015, when Albertin and her colleagues sequenced the first octopus genome, they expected to see a pattern of genetic evolution similar to many vertebrates: duplication. During the long history of life on Earth, all vertebrates with jaws have copied their genomes twice, meaning that mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and sharks have all accumulated four copies of the original genome. Some of those copied genes have since been lost, but many have been borrowed by evolution to take on new roles.

"It opens up a whole genomic playground for evolution to act on," Albertin said. "[M]aybe one of those four genes can go off and start to do something else."

It stood to reason that cephalopod evolution involved the same duplication process. But when they started to dig into the octopus genome,, Albertin and her colleagues found no evidence that cephalopods had done this genetic copy-paste. Now, the team has gone deeper, using next-generation sequencing technologies to piece together chromosome-level readouts of two squids — the Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) and the longfin inshore squid (Doryteuthis pealeii) — and one octopus — the California two-spot octopus (Octopus biamaculoides).

In papers published in the journal Nature Communications on April 21 and May 4, the researchers used three different genome sequencing methods to decode the genomes, including state-of-the-art long-read sequencing that can read out thousands of DNA base-pairs at one time. (The rungs of the ladder-like molecule of DNA are made up of pairs of nitrogen bases.) If the genome were a book, or, more accurately, a very long series of books — the Hawaiian bobtail squid has 5.5 billion base-pairs in its genome — long-read sequencing lets scientists read pages instead of paragraphs, Albertin said.

Mixed up genes, complex brains?

The results showed that cephalopods' genomes have been churned and scrambled. Albertin's study co-authors ​Hannah Schmidbaur and Oleg Simakov of the University of Vienna and their colleagues compared the cephalopod genes to thousands of similar genes found across a wide array of animal species. They found 505 blocks of three or more genes that co-occurred in the squids and octopus but were not found together in other animals. If genes A, B and C are typically found close together on Chromosome 5 in snails and fish and fruit flies, for example, they'll often be scattered across three separate chromosomes in cephalopods.

The finding is "mind-boggling," Albertin said, because gene order usually stays the same, even among species that are far apart on the evolutionary tree.

"That, to evolutionary biologists, suggests there is a reason you keep that gene order," she said. "And cephalopods seem to be breaking these rules."

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It's not clear how the cephalopods pulled off this genetic disobedience. The gene-scrambling took place over many generations of cephalopods and hundreds of millions of years, Albertin said, and it may have relied on "jumping genes," also known as transposable elements, which are DNA sequences that can hop around the genome.

The researchers examined which genes were active in cephalopod tissues and found that many of the unique cephalopod gene groupings were busy in the nervous tissue, hinting that these special sequences could have played a role in the evolution of cephalopod smarts.

"This is really pointing to an exciting new perspective on how novel features arise in evolution," Albertin said.


Originally published on Live Science

 

Satellite Tracking Reveals Threat To Biggest Fish In Sea

Tuesday, 10 May 2022, 9:55 am
Press Release: University of Auckland

Lethal collisions of whale sharks with large ships may be vastly underestimated, potentially helping to explain why the biggest fish in the sea is in decline, according to new research.

“Collision risk with marine vessel traffic is only starting to be recognised as a serious threat that may require mitigation efforts, and it’s important that New Zealand take this seriously,” says Dr Mark Erdmann, of the University of Auckland and Conservation International, who was a co-author of the study led out of the UK. “There are plans to start a whale shark tagging program to better understand this endangered species’ movements in Aotearoa’s coastal waters.”

Whale sharks are slow-moving ocean giants which feed on microscopic animals called zooplankton. Their numbers have been declining around the world.

Scientists from international research institutions and universities tracked 348 satellite-tagged whale sharks in research led by the Marine Biologicial Association of the UK and the University of Southampton in the UK.

Tags recorded cases of whale sharks moving into shipping lanes and then sinking slowly to the seafloor hundreds of metres below, the ’smoking gun’ of a lethal ship strike.

“Our results point to potential high levels of undetected or unreported ship strikes, which may explain why whale shark populations continue to decline despite protection and low fishing-induced mortality,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “Collision mitigations in high-collision-risk areas appear necessary to help conserve this iconic species.”

New Zealand’s whale sharks couldn’t feature in the study because none were satellite tagged, said Dr Erdmann. (Dr Erdmann’s team from Conservation International, a nonprofit environmental organisation, contributed tracking data on more than 20 whale sharks tagged in South-East Asia.)

“We really know almost nothing about where New Zealand’s whale sharks move or spend most of their time.

“Based on sightings from fishers and boaties, we know that there is a population of whale sharks off the eastern coast of the North Island, from Bay of Plenty to North Cape.

Slowing ships would cut the threat of lethal collisions, reduce sound pollution that harms underwater creatures, and lessen greenhouse gas emissions, according to the paper’s authors.

The journal article, entitled “Global collision-risk hotspots of marine traffic and the world’s largest fish, the whale shark,” is being published in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
 

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