Darius Carnahan

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Articles by Darius Carnahan

Climate change is loading up for its next shots on the Great Barrier Reef. But while so many reefs are suffering from mass bleaching events, the Ribbon Reefs, the Swains, and Pompey Reefs are curiously evading severe bleaching. As for how these reefs manage to consistently evade climate change’s shots, the CSIRO’s new research shows these reefs curiously evade bleaching because of cold water from the deep.
Water Anoles – a type of semi-aquatic lizard that lives in the forests of Costa Rica – have found a way to escape predators by jumping into the water and producing a special bubble around their nostrils. Lindsey Swierk, a professor at Binghamton University, New York, first saw these lizards when she was walking near streams in the mountains of Costa Rica.
In 1980, Mount St. Helen, in southwest Washington State, erupted, killing 57 people. Three years later, scientists brought two pocket gophers into an enclosed space on the northern side of the mountain. These two pocket gophers were not happy being moved from their home of Butte Camp to the northern side of the mountain. After their helicopter trip, the two grumpy gophers were released to do what they wanted to do, which, for gophers, is digging. After one day of the grumpy gophers’ digging, the places where the gophers had dug exploded with new life.
In 2023, there were  6.5 million Dengue Fever cases. Now the number of cases has almost doubled. There are two culprits. Firstly, mosquitoes. Dengue Fever is a disease spread by two types of mosquitoes: the yellow fever mosquito and the tiger mosquito. These mosquitoes bite humans and transmit the disease to them. But these mosquitoes have always been buzzing around, biting people, so what’s caused the number of dengue cases to double to 12.7 million?
We Australians might be accustomed to sulphur-crested cockatoos squawking in our backyards, but have you heard of gang-gang cockatoos? Gang-gangs are an endangered type of cockatoo that predominately lives in parts of the eastern coast of Australia, and there are at least two living near a storm-water drain in the inner south of the ACT!