For more than 60 million years, venomous snakes have slithered across Earth.
These ancient, chemical weapon-wielding reptiles owe their evolutionary success in part to the effectiveness of their bite, which they deliver at an astonishing speed before their prey can escape.
Now, a study I coauthored reveals, in astonishing detail, exactly how these bites work. Published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology, it is the largest study of its kind to-date, and uses advanced video techniques to show how various snake species have evolved very different strategies to deliver their deadly bites.
Thousands of snakes on Earth
There are approximately 4,000 species of snake on Earth – about 600 of which are venomous.
Scientists started visually recording the strikes of these snakes to better understand them in the 1950s, when high-speed photography and cinematography were first developed.
Since then, these technologies have improved dramatically, allowing scientists to capture and study the action of venomous snake bites in much greater detail. For example, past research has shown there are clear differences between strikes to capture prey, versus those used for defence.
But most recent studies that have examined snake bites have been limited by a number of factors.
Firstly, they have captured the bites using only one camera. This means we only get a side-on view, whereas the snakes can slither in all directions. Secondly, the recordings have been of a relatively low resolution – in large part because they were made in the field with low lighting conditions. Thirdly, they have often focused on a single snake species or a limited number of species. This means we miss out on seeing how many other species may behave differently, or strike faster.
Experimental setup for snake strikes. Silke Cleuren
Welcome to Venomworld
For our new study, my colleagues and I studied the bites of 36 different species of venomous snakes. These species were from the three main families of venomous snakes: vipers, elapids and colubrids. They included western diamondback rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox), blunt-nosed vipers (Macrovipera lebetinus) and the rough-scaled death adder (Acanthophis rugosus).
All the snakes we studied were housed at an institution in Paris, France, called Venomworld. There, we built a small experimental arena consisting of plexiglass panels lined with a cardboard floor, in which we placed the individual snakes.
We presented the snakes with a simulated food source – a cylindrical hunk of medical gel, heated to 38 degrees so it resembled prey for those that can detect heat.
Two high-speed cameras, placed nearby at different angles, automatically captured the snakes striking the gel at 1,000 frames per second.
Using the footage from these two different views, we recreated the strike in 3D to investigate, in detail, its various components such as its duration, acceleration, angle, and how fast the snake’s jaw opened.
In total, we captured 108 videos of successful strikes – three for each of the species included in the study.
Striking and slashing
There were major differences between the strikes of the snakes we studied.
Vipers struck the fastest, moving at speeds of more than 4.5 metres per second before sinking their needle-like fangs into the fake prey. Sometimes they would quickly remove and reinsert their fangs at a better angle. Only when the fangs were comfortably in place did the snakes shut their jaws and inject venom.
Some 84% of the vipers included in the study reached their prey in less than 90 milliseconds. This is faster than the average response time for a startled mammal – the preferred prey of many vipers in the wild.
On the other hand, elapid snakes, such as the Cape coral cobra (Aspidelaps lubricus), crept towards the fake prey before lunging and biting it repeatedly. Their jaw muscles would tense, releasing venom.
Colubrid snakes, such as the mangrove snake (Boiga dendrophila), which have fangs farther back in their mouths, lunged towards the prey from further away. With their jaws clamped over it, they’d make a sweeping motion from side to side. In doing so, they tore a gash in the gel to inject the maximum amount of venom.
Our previous research highlighted how the shape of snakes’ fangs is closely tied to prey preference. We can now show how they use these deadly weapons in the blink of an eye – and why they have been able to survive for so long on Earth.
Alistair Evans receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Monash University, and is an Honorary Research Affiliate with Museums Victoria.
Between the end of a summer that had been going on too long and the beginning of a too-warm autumn that would crank up my climate change anxiety to ten, I joined a tai chi class.
I had noticed a sign when I was out walking. Immediately, I went online, paid some money and put my name down for the first available session. Looking back, I wonder why I thought this evening class, held in a suburban community centre, might soothe the assorted anxieties I was carrying. Signing up was an impulsive act, prompted by some deep, yet inarticulate knowing that the way I was feeling would not be eased by words; something different was needed, something physical.
I’d had two big bereavements: first my mother, then a beloved aunt. They had been the two most important women in my life, and suddenly they were gone. Meanwhile, I was under ongoing surveillance following surgery for cancer, caught in that uneasy post-treatment period that tests one’s nerve – because there is nothing to be done but wait.
Carol Lefevre. Affirm Press
At certain moments, usually in the middle of the night, a niggling voice would whisper that the cancer might be gone but it could return, that even as I lay there in the dark trying to sleep, some small, festering body part might be plotting treason. Sometimes the voice was that of the naturopath I’d consulted, who’d warned since my body had made a cancer, I needed to avoid the conditions that had allowed that to happen. Which, of course, I would – if only I knew what they may have been.
It was a time when at least once a day I would find myself on the verge of crying; sometimes, inconveniently, the tears broke through. It could happen anywhere – when I was out walking, or in the supermarket; sometimes it happened when I was driving, and I’d have to pull over until I was able to quieten my thoughts enough to drive on.
Inconvenient weeping
I’d almost progressed to feeling tearful about being tearful, when I came across the first of Deborah Levy’s trilogy of autobiographical writings, Things I Don’t Want to Know. In it, Levy documents her bouts of inconvenient weeping. It was riding on escalators at train stations that set off Levy’s tears, especially the upward escalator. She writes: “By the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing.”
I recognised that effortful feeling of trying to control the sobs. Like Levy, I also knew something had to change. Her solution had been to book a flight to Palma, Majorca, where she was met at the airport by a taxi driver with white clouds floating in both his eyes. On arrival, Levy had bought Spanish cigarettes with the intention of taking up smoking again and when the driver abandoned her on the road to her hotel, she sat on a rock and lit the first cigarette.
It was also somewhat comforting to read, in Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That, how as a young woman in New York, she had found herself crying in elevators and taxis and Chinese laundries. There were certain parts of the city she had to avoid, including Times Square in the afternoons, or the New York Public Library at any time, for any reason.
Her solution was to get married. But I was sorry to learn her crying continued even after her marriage to fellow writer John Gregory Dunne. Didion cried, she writes, “until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not”. It was a year in which, she tells us, she understood the meaning of the word “despair”. A doctor expressed the opinion she appeared to be depressed. He wrote down the name and number of a psychiatrist for her, but Didion did not go.
A friend had given me the name of a psychologist who she said had helped her, but I had given up on psychology. Or at least, the psychologists I had consulted when things had been going badly in the past had left me poorer without improving matters.
Now, everything was conspiring to cast me low, including that ever since the cancer surgery, my hair had been shedding – hair I had patiently nurtured through the transition from chemical dyes to natural health, hair I had joyously grown halfway down my back for the first time since childhood. My hair was everywhere in the house and in the car; it even migrated into our food. I knew I had been fortunate to have avoided chemotherapy, with its side serve of hair loss, but now it appeared I was to lose it anyway, albeit more slowly.
I read that both surgery and stress can contribute to thinning hair, and concluded although I had been anaesthetised when surgeons re-sectioned my colon, my body had been present and remained deeply shocked.
In signing up for the tai chi class, I was throwing myself upon the mercy of the universe.
A kind of poetry
The only time I had ever actually seen tai chi involved one of those surreal moments that occasionally occur in life. About five years earlier, I had been driving along the southern terrace that borders Adelaide’s parklands and the car radio was playing a piece of classical music by a Japanese composer.
The sound was spare and melancholy, and when I glanced across to the park I saw a tai chi class in progress. That was not in itself unusual – people use the parklands all the time for various fitness activities. What made time swerve to a halt was that the slow movements of the tai chi people were perfectly in time with the music coming out of my radio.
I had stopped the car to watch. The group practising tai chi couldn’t hear the music, of course, but the synchronicity of movement and sound produced a kind of poetry. Perhaps, then, when I saw the sign advertising “tai chi for health and wellbeing” outside my local community centre, it was this memory of the unexpected beauty I’d witnessed that had nudged me over the hump of my inertia to join.
Tai chi is a form of mind-body exercise that originated in China. Its history is somewhat shadowy, with contributions attributed to various monks and masters reaching back as far as the 12th century, and possibly beyond. In T’ai Chi Ch’uan and I Ching: a choreography of body and mind, Da Liu, a tai chi master, credits the most complete foundations of tai chi to a famous Taoist, Chang San-feng, an ardent follower of Confucius who was known as “The Immortal”.
Da Liu writes that Chang San-feng famously observed a fight between a crane and a snake, and from the way the two animals moved he realised “the value of yielding in the face of strength”. He studied the behaviour of wild animals, clouds, water and trees moving in the wind and “codified these natural movements into a system of exercise”. Da Liu concedes: “We owe the present forms of T’ai Chi to numerous masters […] over many centuries.”
Tai chi has been influenced by Confucian thought, and by traditional Chinese medicine, but its roots lie deep in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, which emphasises the natural balance in all things. In Taoist thinking, everything is composed of two opposite but complementary elements: yin and yang. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote eloquently of the principles of yin and yang in his famous work the Tao Te Ching.
In tai chi, the polarities of yin and yang are expressed through the form’s shifts of weight and balance, through hardness yielding to softness, tension releasing to relaxation, and moving the body in ways that expand and contract. Gentler and more meditative than the Chinese martial arts it evolved from, its slow, dance-like postures flow into one another, combining concentration, physical balance, stretching and relaxation, with natural, peaceful breathing.
Chang San-feng codified the natural movements of wild animals, clouds, water and trees moving in the wind into a system of exercise, in the 12th century. Gisling/Wikipedia, CC BY
There are different schools of tai chi. Chen, Yang, Wu and Sun styles are named after the Chinese families who developed them, and the skills are passed orally through the generations.
The form I was learning had been developed by a Taoist monk, Master Moy Lin Shin. The tai chi he brought to the West is a modified version of Yang style’s 108-move set. Its elements are borrowed from the Chinese internal arts of XingYi (a bare-handed fighting form), Bagua (a complex system of eight trigrams, which in tai chi relate to movement and body parts), and Liuhebafa, or “water boxing”, a form characterised by its flowing, fluid movements.
Taoist tai chi has been criticised for these modifications, which are sometimes seen as a dilution of classical tai chi. Criticism focuses on the fact Master Moy removed the “fighting” aspects from his form in favour of emphasising its health benefits. His decision was most likely influenced by the health difficulties of his own early years, as well as by the needs of the people he trained after he emigrated to Canada.
Lou Reed, legendary musician, songwriter and founding member of rock band the Velvet Underground, credits tai chi with saving him after years of self-destructive substance abuse. Reed began a martial arts practice in the 1980s; he came to love the fighting aspect of Chen style, but he was also in awe of tai chi’s power to heal. In a letter published by The New York Times in 2010, Reed wrote:
I wish I could convince you to change your life and save your body and soul. I know it sounds too good. But truly: Tai Chi – why not?“
A lesson in humility
My first class was a lesson in humility. Never a sporty type, never even an adequate dancer, awkward hardly does justice to the feeling of finding myself in the centre of a group of people who, at the instructor’s command, began a series of complex moves they seemed to know by heart. Later, I would learn ushering beginners into the middle is a kindness; it means when they turn, there is someone they can follow.
At the halfway point of that first class, Chinese pu’erh tea was served in tiny porcelain cups. Brewed from the leaves of a variety of tea plant native to Yunnan Province, pu’erh tea goes through a complex fermentation process and is reputed to have many health benefits. After the tea break, it was back to the centre of the floor for more repetitions of the move we’d been working on.
That night, we were practising move 18: Carry Tiger to Mountain. It evolves out of move 17, Cross Hands, which even I could manage. The body turns with the arms bent as if cradling a heavy bundle. Yes, I thought, this sorrow and anxiety I’d been holding was my tiger; a creature burning bright with memories that had become too painful, a body darkly striped with grief.
It felt as wild and dangerous in its way as a real live tiger, but if I could only master the correct way to carry it to the mountain, perhaps I would be able to leave it there and move on.
Tai chi requires complete focus, making it almost impossible to think about anything else. So when I came across American beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s poem about tai chi, it struck me as a somewhat inaccurate portrayal of what happens during tai chi practice. Ginsberg is in his kitchen in New York, the only place in his apartment with enough space to do tai chi, but his moves are interspersed with domestic concerns:
the Crane spreads its wings have I paid the electric bill?
White Crane Spreads its Wings is one of tai chi’s most subtly exhilarating moves. It involves a simultaneous rising and turning, a spine-expanding stretch that, for me, somehow generates a feeling of hope. What it doesn’t do is allow any room for thoughts of “the electric bill”. What was Ginsberg up to, I wonder, as his white crane spread its wings in his kitchen? I can only conclude his electricity bill was a pressing matter in his life at that particular moment.
Studies have shown tai chi can modulate the regions and networks in the brain associated with depression, with mood regulation and processing emotions, and with stress and distress.
A focus on life force
Of the Chinese martial arts, tai chi belongs to the internal arts known collectively as neijia. The focus is on mental, spiritual and “qi” (chi) – or life-force – aspects, rather than the physiological nature of the external martial arts.
The Eight Methods are qi, bone, shape, follow, rise, return, retain, conceal. At this early stage of my study of tai chi, they remain a mystery. But the principles of the Six Harmonies are evident in a muted way in the class teachings, where emphasis is placed on movement with intent, and on developing an awareness of what one is feeling during the moves – internally as well as externally.
For those of us who lose touch with what our bodies are doing and feeling, neglecting to pay attention until they threaten our wellbeing, or even our lives, this fusing of mind and body, spirit and movement, intent and qi, feels like an important survival skill.
For example, every year almost 7,000 women in Australia are diagnosed with a gynaecological cancer. These cancers are characterised by low survival rates and are notoriously difficult to detect. Something like ovarian cancer can show up in many different ways and spread quite widely before being correctly diagnosed.
Increased awareness of our bodies could help us bring the information to our doctors that might assist in earlier diagnoses and better outcomes for these and many other conditions.
In 2020, tai chi was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. There have been claims for the practice’s beneficial effects on people living with Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis: conditions that come with a debilitating loss of coordination and balance.
One year-long study of women with MS, carried out between 2019 and 2020, showed measurable improvements in the areas of their balance, gait, mood, cognition – and also in their quality of life.
Tai chi brings increased awareness of our bodies – which could help us bring important information to our doctors. Khan Do/Unsplash
Cancer as betrayal
My experience of cancer has been that it feels like a betrayal. For decades, my body has carried me through every kind of weather, both actual and emotional. It has reliably bounced back from every health breakdown. No words can adequately describe the sense of loss engendered by a cancer diagnosis, even one that is not yet deemed terminal.
I was fortunate to be diagnosed early, but I was still blindsided by my body’s deceitfulness, its silent treachery; even after surgery, it was a shock to realise the bounce-back appeared provisional. Was this payback for all the times I’d wished for a different physiology – longer legs, straighter hair, slimmer hips? Or for the times I’d just plain hated the way I looked, hated my own clumsiness in the world so much I’d mistreated my closest ally?
Tai chi asks us to turn our awareness to the body with gentleness and precision; to become better at hearing what it has to say. I have felt let down, so when tai chi’s difficult “separations” sequence requires the whole of my weight to be supported by one ankle, one foot, five toes, I ask my body: Will you hold me? Will you keep me from falling? Can I count on you effortlessly as I once did, as a child, as a young woman?
And each time I do not wobble, or have to save myself from falling, it feels like a baby step in a gradual rebuilding of trust, perhaps even of finding forgiveness for the betrayal, a re-bonding with the self at a profound level.
The Taoist Tai Chi logo is the circular yin and yang symbol, with the light and dark sections reversed. It is said to symbolise tai chi’s ability to reverse bad habits and the ageing process, and thus to promote good health. During practice, I hope to reverse the conditions, whatever they may have been, that prompted my body to turn against itself.
But I understand it is a gradual process, as slow and continuous as the movement and pace of tai chi itself, sometimes compared to pulling a silk thread from a cocoon. Pull it too quickly and it breaks; pull it too slowly and it won’t unwind. Slow and gentle doesn’t equate to “weak” or “ineffectual”. Fundamental to tai chi is the concept of “effortless effort”, in which relaxation enables the important inner work to take place.
In tai chi, relaxation helps important inner work to take place. Monica Leonardi/Unsplash
Less inclined to tears
For me, two months into the practice, my emotions felt more under control; I was less inclined to tears. Week by week, I was discovering that grief and loss are not only held in the heart and mind, but also in the body; muscles and tendons, all the complex systems of nerves and blood and lymph that circulate our distress, are open to being soothed by the language of movement.
As winter set in, I began taking extra classes, going two or three times a week. Pitching up at draughty memorial halls in outlying townships where huge stages were framed by crimson curtains, and where in one case, rows of two-bar electric heaters high up on the walls appeared to be the only heating.
Physically, I found the constant shifting of weight, the expansion and contraction of parts of the body, the striving for a sense of flow, the need to focus, all generated a tangible feeling of wellbeing – though I still felt like an awkward beginner.
In Taoist Tai Chi’s 108-move “set”, some moves – like White Crane Spreads Wings, and Hands Like Clouds – occur multiple times. Learning involves sharpening one’s observational skills, as each move is demonstrated three times by the instructor.
Another subtle aspect of the art is being helped by following those around you who are more skilled, and by their patience in “treading water” for a time while beginners settle in. In this way, tai chi becomes both an individual and a communal endeavour: expressing, through effortless effort, the Taoist ideal of service to others.
To practise the set outside class, the moves must be memorised. It requires patience, persistence and possibly years-long commitment, but studies show the benefits are well worth the effort, especially as we age. Even a tai chi practice of only 24 weeks has demonstrated improved cognitive function in older adults with mild cognitive impairment.
‘I don’t want to seem mystical …’
Lou Reed’s book The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi, edited by his wife, artist Laurie Anderson, was published after Reed’s death. It contains his writings on tai chi and conversations with fellow musicians, artists and tai chi practitioners.
“I have often thought of tai chi as some kind of physical unity to the universe itself, some strange ancient methodology that could link us to the basic energy wave of existence,” he writes. “I don’t want to seem mystical, but something does happen to you when you practice this ancient art.”
Lou Reed credits tai chi with saving him.
Reed became a devotee of Master Ren Guangyi, practising Chen style tai chi for up to two hours a day, and for six or seven days a week. He took Ren on a world tour with him, eventually putting him on stage to do a tai chi set while improvising music to complement the form. The two performed together and engaged in tai chi with the public at Sydney’s 2010 Vivid Festival, which was curated by Reed and Anderson.
In The Art of the Straight Line, in a transcribed conversation between Laurie Anderson and Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (with whom Reed had studied meditation), Anderson movingly recounts how
as Lou died, he was completely conscious. And he was doing Cloud Hands, a tai chi movement, while he died.
Reed had had cancer of the liver and hepatitis, and had undergone a liver transplant six months earlier.
In Things I Do Not Want to Know, Deborah Levy concludes it was the past, specifically her childhood in Africa, that had returned to her when she was sobbing on escalators. After weighing things up in Majorca, she settles down to write. In Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion leaves New York and returns to California. After a time, the moon over the Pacific Ocean and the pervasive scent of jasmine make her tears in New York seem “a long time ago”.
Even so, after the death of her mother, Didion wrote: “There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” For a long time I had shared that view, but now, as I progressed with tai chi, I was beginning to think there might be ways.
For me, grief for the past has been as much a factor in my tears as my anxiety about the future. Helplessly poised between the two, I found in tai chi a way to manage this position – not by looking back, nor forward, but expanding and contracting into the present moment, shutting out the world’s noise and finding peace within myself through movement and mindfulness. If this sounds too mystical, I can only agree with Lou Reed: “Something does happen to you when you practice this ancient art.”
What is the “something” that happens? It’s difficult to define, and I suspect you feel it almost immediately if you’re going to feel it at all. I’ve noticed that people who’ve never done tai chi come to a first class and they either never return or, like me, embrace it with the zeal of missionaries. In searching for a way to explain the “something”, I can’t find a better place to start than the opening move.
‘I’m confident it’s happening’
The opening to tai chi appears the simplest of movements. The hands, from hanging at the sides with the palms open, rise in front of the body and then slowly float down. It’s the motion one uses when flinging a sheet over a mattress to make a bed, but so much slower. With the upward lifting of the hands, the body contracts; as the hands descend, the body expands and rises.
It is surprising how soothing this motion can be, how almost at once the mind and body calm. The upward lift is driven by pushing up from the floor, with the hands rising as if on puppet strings, but the downward drift comes from dropping the elbows. They are such subtle adjustments, yet the body responds with a palpable quietening.
There is a sense of return in this move, even though it is a beginning. It’s the feeling I get at the end of a long walk when I open the gate from the street and step into our garden. Or when I close the front door behind me and breathe in: home.
In The Art of the Straight Line, Anderson writes that after more than 25 years of practising tai chi, Lou Reed “could actually feel chi. He could pinpoint it, describe it, and trace the way it moved through his body”. She describes how Reed would demonstrate chi by passing one hand over the other.
When I felt that for the first time, I was electrified. I was holding a ball of unbelievably powerful energy and realizing that it could move through me and that this is also what I was made of.
I have not felt the chi moving through me, but it is early days yet. Eight months in, I remember to straighten my spine as I go about my day; I am calmer and have better balance. While I can’t actually see the new neural pathways forming in my brain, I’m confident it is happening.
I continue each week to carry my tiger to the mountain. In the kitchen, while I wait for the kettle or the oven, my white crane spreads its wings. At night, visualising the first 17 moves sends me to sleep. When I practice the difficult cloud hands, I am reminded of Lou Reed: the way he brought his art and his capacity for devotion to tai chi, and was rewarded.
I approach each class with beginner’s mind, and am hopeful of one day experiencing chi’s electrifying energy.
Carol Lefevre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Taylor Swift’s latest studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, has just enjoyed a second week on top of the Billboard charts, after smashing all-time sales records on its debut.
Swift once again topping charts with her latest album probably comes as little surprise. What has turned heads is the way she did it. In just one week, she released 34 versions of the same album.
This was more than clever marketing. It was economics in action. Swift’s release is a masterclass in pop economics, showing how artists turn attention, scarcity and emotion into revenue – on a record-breaking scale.
Taylor’s version(ing)
The Life of a Showgirl was released in dozens of formats, with physical and digital editions tailored to different levels of commitment.
In total, over the first week, there were 27 physical editions (18 CDs, eight vinyl LPs and one cassette) and seven digital download variants.
A range of covers, coloured vinyl, bonus tracks and signed inserts turned one album into a collectable series rather than a single product. Other artists – such as the Rolling Stones – have used this strategy before, but rarely at this scale or with such an intense response from fans.
Economists call this versioning: offering multiple versions of the same product so customers reveal how much they are willing to pay.
For many casual listeners, one version is enough. But for devoted Swifties, collecting extra editions can feel irresistible.
By tempting these superfans to buy special editions, often at a premium price, Swift captures consumer surplus – the gap between what a fan is willing to pay and what they actually pay.
Instead of leaving that money on the table, the strategy turns passion into profit. The cost of creating extra covers or vinyl colours is small, but the willingness of fans to pay more for them is high. That is exactly where versioning pays off.
The psychology of spending like a Swiftie
Swift’s strategy is not just about pricing. It relies on how people actually make decisions, with emotion, status concerns and social pressure, rather than as perfectly rational consumers in economic theory.
One of the strongest ideas in behavioural economics is loss aversion. People feel the pain of losing something more than the pleasure of gaining it. Swift’s release uses this to full effect.
For many fans, the thought of missing out on having a particular version forever feels worse than the cost of paying for it now.
Scarcity strengthens the pull. When items are available only briefly or in fixed quantities, they become positional goods, valued not only for what they are, but because others might not be able to get them.
Research shows that when something is scarce and uncertain, people act faster and spend more.
When one vinyl beats thousands of streams
These emotional decisions translate into commercial results. In major music markets, every physical purchase counts towards the charts, no matter the format. If one fan buys four editions, that counts as four sales. When thousands do the same, first-week numbers soar.
This strategy makes even more sense in the streaming era, where listening contributes far less to chart rankings than physical sales. On the US Billboard 200 chart, it takes about 1,250 paid streams or 3,750 ad-supported streams to equal one album sale.
Physical sales are once again a major source of revenue for the music industry. In the United States in 2024, physical formats generated around US$2 billion (about A$3 billion), up 5% from the previous year.
Vinyl sales rose for the 18th straight year and made up almost three-quarters of all physical music revenue.
Where the strategy meets its limits
Versioning works, but it has limits. Even the most devoted fans reach a point where excitement fades and cost starts to matter.
Economists call this diminishing marginal utility. The first version of an album brings a lot of satisfaction. The fifth or sixth brings less. Eventually, another version does not add enough enjoyment to justify the price. Fans begin to feel they have had enough.
Some fans are already asking how many versions are too many. That reaction matters. Trust and goodwill function like capital. They take time to build, but they can also be spent. If fans begin to feel taken for granted, loyalty becomes harder to maintain and even harder to win back.
The Life of a Showgirl was a lesson in the monetisation of fan devotion. But every show has a final act. If fans start to feel like customers rather than part of the performance, the applause can fade quickly.
Paul Crosby does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
By examining decades of research, we found that for most people who think they react to gluten, gluten itself is rarely the cause.
Symptoms but not coeliac
Coeliac disease is when the body’s immune system attacks itself when someone eats gluten, leading to inflammation and damage to the gut.
But people with gut or other symptoms after eating foods containing gluten can test negative for coeliac disease or wheat allergy. They are said to have non-coeliac gluten sensitivity.
We wanted to understand whether gluten itself, or other factors, truly cause their symptoms.
What we did and what we found
Our study combined more than 58 studies covering symptom changes and possible ways they could arise. These included studying the immune system, gut barrier, microbes in the gut, and psychological explanations.
Across studies, gluten-specific reactions were uncommon and, when they occurred, changes in symptoms were usually small. Many participants who believed they were “gluten sensitive” reacted equally – or more strongly – to a placebo.
One landmark trial looked at the role of fermentable carbohydrates (known as FODMAPs) in people who said they were sensitive to gluten (but didn’t have coeliac disease). When people ate a low-FODMAP diet – avoiding foods such as certain fruits, vegetables, legumes and cereals – their symptoms improved, even when gluten was reintroduced.
Another showed fructans – a type of FODMAP in wheat, onion, garlic and other foods – caused more bloating and discomfort than gluten itself.
This suggests most people who feel unwell after eating gluten are sensitive to something else. This could be FODMAPs such as fructans, or other wheat proteins. Another explanation could be that symptoms reflect a disorder in how the gut interacts with the brain, similar to irritable bowel syndrome.
Some people may be truly sensitive to gluten. However, current evidence suggests this is uncommon.
People expected symptoms
A consistent finding is how expecting to have symptoms profoundly shapes people’s symptoms.
Some who expected gluten to make them unwell developed identical discomfort when exposed to a placebo.
This nocebo effect – the negative counterpart of placebo – shows that belief and prior experience influence how the brain processes signals from the gut.
Brain-imaging research supports this, showing that expectation and emotion activate brain regions involved in pain and how we perceive threats. This can heighten sensitivity to normal gut sensations.
These are real physiological responses. What the evidence is telling us is that focusing attention on the gut, coupled with anxiety about symptoms or repeated negative experiences with food, has real effects. This can
sensitise how the gut interacts with the brain (known as the gut–brain axis) so normal digestive sensations are felt as pain or urgency.
Recognising this psychological contribution doesn’t mean symptoms are imagined. When the brain predicts a meal may cause harm, gut sensory pathways amplify every cramp or sensation of discomfort, creating genuine distress.
This helps explain why people remain convinced gluten is to blame even when blinded studies show otherwise. Symptoms are real, but the mechanism is often driven by expectation rather than gluten.
So what else could explain why some people feel better after going gluten-free? Such a change in the diet also reduces high-FODMAP foods and ultra-processed products, encourages mindful eating and offers a sense of control. All these can improve our wellbeing.
People also tend to eat more naturally gluten-free, nutrient-dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and nuts, which may further support gut health.
But for most who feel better gluten-free, gluten is unlikely to be the true problem.
There’s also a cost to going gluten-free unnecessarily. Gluten-free foods are, on average, 139% more expensive than standard ones. They are also often lower in fibre and key nutrients.
Unlike coeliac disease or a wheat allergy, non-coeliac gluten sensitivity has no biomarker – there’s no blood test or tissue marker that can confirm it.
Diagnosis instead relies on excluding other conditions and structured dietary testing.
Based on our review, we recommend clinicians:
rule out coeliac disease and wheat allergy first
optimise the quality of someone’s overall diet
trial a low-FODMAP diet if symptoms persist
only then, consider a four to six-week dietitian-supervised gluten-free trial, followed by a structured re-introduction of gluten-containing foods to see whether gluten truly causes symptoms.
This approach keeps restriction targeted and temporary, avoiding unnecessary long-term exclusion of gluten.
If gluten doesn’t explain someone’s symptoms, combining dietary guidance with psychological support often works best. That’s because expectation, stress and emotion influence our symptoms. Cognitive-behavioural or exposure-based therapies can reduce food-related fear and help people safely reintroduce foods they once avoided.
This integrated model moves beyond the simplistic “gluten is bad” narrative toward personalised, evidence-based gut–brain care.
Jessica Biesiekierski receives funding from NHMRC, Rome Foundation, Yakult and Australian Eggs. She is affiliated with the Nutrition Society of Australia and the Australiasian Neurogastroenterology & Motility Association.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation
Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump at the White House.Press service of the president of Ukraine
This newsletter was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.
It appears that Volodymyr Zelensky is fast catching on to the best way to curry favour with Donald Trump. The Ukrainian president has this week backed the US president’s call for a freezing of the conflict in Ukraine along its current frontlines so that negotiations proper can get underway.
“[Trump] proposed ‘Stay where we stay and begin conversation’,” Zelensky told reporters on October 22. “I think that was a good compromise, but I’m not sure that Putin will support it, and I said it to the president.”
And that’s the key. The Ukrainian president knows that Vladimir Putin won’t support Trump’s latest plan. Putin has said as much. So Zelensky gets to pal up with the US president while reminding him who is to blame. It’s statecraft worthy of Putin, the master manipulator, himself.
At the beginning of the week it appeared that it was Putin that had once again played the US president, phoning Trump to persuade him to ditch his idea of supplying Ukraine with the powerful Tomahawk missiles he’d been promising and instead schedule a get together in Budapest sometime in early November.
Reports from the White House were that Trump and Zelensky subsequently had a stormy meeting, during which the US president is said to have thrown maps of Ukraine around the room and ordered the Ukrainian president to surrender the key Donbas region or be “destroyed” by Russia.
Stefan Wolff, professor of international security at the University of Birmingham has discerned something of a pattern to Trump’s relationship with Putin.
“First he expresses anger and frustration with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin,” Wolff observes. “Then he threatens severe consequences. And finally – usually after some contact with the Russian president – he finds some imaginary silver lining that, in his considered view alone, justifies backing down and essentially dancing to the Russian dictator’s tune again.”
Zelensky has clearly caught onto this, but if anything his technique is more Machiavellian – encouraging Trump in a venture he knows that the Russian president will reject and as a result gaining traction from the occupant of the Oval Office.
It’s already bearing fruit. Just one day after the plan for a Trump-Putin summit in Budapest fell through, the US announced it will impose sanctions on Russia’s biggest oil exporters, Rosneft and Lukoil. It is the first sanctions package imposed by the US since Trump returned to the White House in January.
It’s all very well, writes economist Sergey Popov, of Cardiff University. But will the sanctions really have much effect on Russia’s ability to continue fighting? The country’s economy is now fully geared up for war and Putin seems to be able to replenish the admittedly severe casualties his army is taking in Ukraine.
Russia has also proved itself adept at evading sanctions in the past. Popov believes that the west should have hit Russia with severe sanctions years ago – as early as 2008 when Putin sent his troops into Georgia. Everything since has been too little and too late, primarily coming from the EU and UK. And in fact, European countries still buy a great deal of oil from Russia.
But the US has joined the party. There’s hope, Popov concludes.
The cancellation of the Budapest summit, meanwhile, has at least avoided the awkward diplomatic prospect of the Russian leader, the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), having to fly through EU airspace in order to get there.
Not only that, but Hungary – despite having announced its intention to withdraw from the ICC, has not yet completed the process, so would be formally obliged to detain Putin. The chances of that happening were always going to be remote in the extreme, but it raised an awkward situation when it comes to the delicacy of the country’s relationship with its EU partners.
As Marc Roscoe Loustau notes, Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orbán, is known to be an admirer of Putin and has often played a role in blocking or delaying the EU’s efforts to help Ukraine. But the Trump-Putin meet-up might have damaged the relationship beyond repair.
Meanwhile, Russia continues to make small but incremental gains on the battlefield. Some bad weather in Ukraine has played to Russia’s advantage, hampering Kyiv’s ability to exploit its much-vaunted expertise in drone warfare.
State of the conflict in Ukraine, October 20 2025. Institute for the Study of War
Russia has been taking advantage of this to push ahead on the ground, confident that the Ukrainian military’s ability to knock out its heavy armour with swarms of drones is weakened by conditions. As Peter Lee says, once again Russia is using its old ally, winter weather, to steal an advantage in conflict.
Last weekend an estimated 7 million people took to the streets of US cities to protest Trump’s increasingly autocratic style of government. The “No Kings” marches were, by all accounts, overwhelmingly peaceful and aimed to ram home a point which is sure to resonate with the majority of people, given recent polling that found 85% of Americans reject the idea of being subjects in a monarchy.
Tom Wright of the University of Sussex, who specialises in political rhetoric, says that America was “built on a rejection – the rejection of being ruled by a monarch”. The charge of wanting to set up as a royal ruler has been levelled against various US presidents over 250 years, he says. This includes – remarkably – Abraham Lincoln, whose sweeping powers during the civil war gave rise to concerns he had become too powerful.
Going back further, the very suggestion by Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, that the correct styling for a US president should be “His Highness”, resulted in widespread derision. (Incidentally, he was also given the nickname “His Rotundity”, which was dreadfully unfair given that he was reportedly 6’2″ and weighed just 82 kilos.)
Good King Barack. American Spectator
But down the ages, when anyone wants to mock a president they portray them as wearing a crown. It was even done to Barack Obama in 2014 by the American Spectator magazine.
Wright argues that the No Kings protest is something that could unite large sections of the fractured US population: “It has the potential to speak to conservatives alarmed by executive overreach, to progressives wary of authoritarian drift, and to independents nostalgic for civic balance.”
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The UK government is reportedly considering abandoning its goal of removing fossil fuels from the country’s electricity supply by 2030 in an attempt to keep energy bills down.
This is understandable given that the UK is already one of the most expensive places in Europe to use electricity, something that – despite plenty of investment in relatively cheap renewable energy – is unlikely to change any time soon. In fact, bills remain high even when wind farms are spinning at full capacity.
However, neither a drive to decarbonise the grid – which is needed for other reasons – nor abandoning this target is going to make energy significantly cheaper. The reason for this lies in how electricity markets work, and in the geography and policies that shape the UK’s energy system.
To begin with, wholesale electricity prices are determined in a way that essentially means that everyone has to pay for the most expensive source of electricity used at a given time, which in the UK is mostly gas power plants.
The gas which is burned to power the UK’s lights and kettles has to be liquefied, shipped from the US or Qatar amid global bidding wars, and then converted back into its original state. High gas prices drive high wholesale prices, which directly translate into high electricity bills.
Cheaper renewable energy sources (the cost of producing solar, wind or nuclear electricity is very low) have little effect. This is partly because while the operating cost of renewable electricity is very low, the cost of setting it up is not.
To encourage companies to build new generation capacity, the government must offer them a guaranteed price for the electricity they produce, to compensate for their costs. For a wind farm, this would include money for planning applications, as well as buying and installing turbines and electrical equipment.
Bringing different sources of electricity to consumers also requires expensive infrastructure investment. In the UK for example, grid capacity is not where it needs to be after decades of low investment.
Nearly 40% of the electricity produced by Scottish wind farms has been wasted so far this year, because the grid was not able to move it to other parts of the UK or store it.
Overall then, consumers’ bills will be high, both now and in the future, because of the combined costs of imported gas, infrastructure and the guaranteed prices for producers.
Despite these challenges, successiveUK governments have committed to continuing investment in new technologies, because dependence on imported, polluting and volatile fossil fuels is deemed too risky. Postponing the full transition to renewables, as reported in the Guardian, is effectively a bet that gas prices will decrease in the short term, and that the UK will be able to commission cheaper renewables later on.
But cheaper renewables present their own problems, because they play different roles. Solar and wind are cheaper, but intermittent. Nuclear is the most expensive but works all the time.
But the main factor is simply geography and timing. Partly due to its location, the UK has become a world leader in wind power, a renewable technology that seems to be taking a less important global role than solar. And while the cost of solar production is decreasing steeply, the learning curve is slower for wind.
So for all the frustration over high bills, the UK’s options are limited. Geography gives us wind, not sunshine. Policy has delivered world-class renewables, but also a grid struggling to carry their power.
The future will depend on whether new technologies, including cheaper batteries, tidal power and small modular nuclear reactors can fill the gaps left by weather and planning delays.
None of this will be easy or cheap. But the alternative – continued dependence on imported, volatile fossil fuels that make bills hostage to global crises – is worse. UK consumers face a future where electricity remains more expensive than much of Europe, not only because of policy choices, but because it lacks the sunshine that’s driving costs down elsewhere. Betting on emerging technologies is the only way to close that gap.
Renaud Foucart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Late on an October Monday night, George Springer smashed a three-run homer to send nearly 45,000 fans in Toronto’s Rogers Centre — and a record national television audience — into a frenzy.
It had the feeling of a denouement. Yet, like other famed home runs in Blue Jays history, Springer’s blast was just one step in the long journey through baseball’s three playoff rounds.
A year earlier, Jose Bautista’s then-audacious bat flip followed a dramatic home run — also like Springer’s hit in the seventh inning — that moved the Blue Jays onto the same championship series round that they had not won since 1993. Until this year.
The enduring legacy of 1993
Invoking 1993 holds special resonance for Blue Jays fans. It’s the last time the team won, let alone reached, the World Series.
It is easy to tell the story of the Blue Jays through the lens of dramatic game-winning home runs. However, the context of the team’s championships —and near misses — offers a more nuanced tale.
Following a handful of dire losing seasons, Blue Jays management earned a reputation for talent development. The first crop of stars — Dave Stieb, George Bell and Tony Fernandez — won a division championship in the team’s ninth season. They fell one game short of qualifying for the World Series, losing the only seventh game in a post-season series in franchise history prior to this year.
Modernity came to Toronto in 1989 when the team moved into SkyDome, a then-state-of the-art domed stadium complete with retractable roof (and by then, beer vendors) that was funded and operated by a public-private partnership.
The Blue Jays 2025 success — realizing the promise of a new generation of star prospects headlined by Vladimir Guererro Jr. and Bo Bichette — has rekindled memories of these past glories: the first winning teams of the 1980s, the back-to-back champions in 1992-93 and the bravado of the Bautista-Encarnacion-Josh Donaldson teams from a decade ago.
Lost in this pantheon of star players and dramatic moments, however, is the two decades of mediocrity that followed the heights of the Carter home run.
A more dispassionate, bottom-line ownership led to teams that failed to reap the talents of Hall of Famers like Roy Halladay and major stars like Carlos Delgado and Shawn Green.
Rogers Communications purchased 80 per cent of the Blue Jays in 2000, with Interbrew retaining 20 per cent. The on-field performance changed little, but the business model evolved significantly.
Rogers acquired the remaining 20 per cent of the team in July 2004. Before the year was out, it had gained control of SkyDome for $25 million, a fraction of the $600 million that the stadium has cost to build only 15 years earlier. Now fully privately owned, it was renamed the Rogers Centre.
Today, the Blue Jays reflect the vertical integration of modern commercial sports. The team is the primary tenant in a stadium operated by their owners. Their games are broadcast on television channels, radio stations and streaming services owned and operated by Rogers Communications. These channels market other Rogers-owned content during Blue Jays games.
Meanwhile, fans consume this content on cable subscriptions and internet services that are Rogers’ core businesses. The newest extension of this revenue-generation model is the increasing prominence of sports betting, which is integrated fully into broadcasts by on-screen commentators providing odds as though delivering sports “news,” not paid advertising
Canada’s team
The production and circulation of dominant narratives is a consequence of such a structure, what sociologist David Whitson termed “circuits of promotion.”
One of the most powerful is that the support for the Blue Jays is nationwide. They are Canada’s team. There is an element of truth to this. The Blue Jays’ fan base is considerable, particularly when they are winning.
But this is also a marketing construct — one that benefits from the Blue Jays being the only remaining Canadian-based team in a U.S.-operated professional sports league. This would be a much harder narrative to sell if the Montreal Expos were not now the Washington Nationals, and it is not entirely novel.
Basketball’s Toronto Raptors, themselves the beneficiaries of the relocation of the Vancouver Grizzlies, capitalized on both the team’s appeal as well as its monopoly on Canadian markets with its wildly popular 2019 marketing campaign, “We The North.”
Come Friday night, when Trey Yesavage throws the first pitch of the 2025 World Series, the absence of other Canadian-based teams and the centralization of media outlets in Toronto will ensure there will be a ready (and passionate) audience across the country all ready to chant: “Let’s go, Blue Jays!”
Russell Field does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Healthy staghorn coral were crucial builders of Florida’s coral reef. Today, few survive there.Maya Gomez
In early June 2023, the coral reefs in the lower Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas were stunning. We were in diving gear, checking up on hundreds of corals we had transplanted as part of our experiments. The corals’ classic orange-brown colors showed they were thriving.
Just three weeks later, we got a call – a marine heat wave was building, and water temperatures on the reef were dangerously high. Our transplanted corals were bleaching under the heat stress, turning bone white. Some were already dead.
That was the start of a global mass bleaching event. As ocean temperatures rose, rescuers scrambled to relocate surviving corals to land-based tanks, but the heat wave, extending over 2023 and 2024, was lethal.
In a study published Oct. 23, 2025, in the journal Science, we and colleagues from NOAA, the Shedd Aquarium and other institutions found that two of Florida’s most important and iconic reef-building coral species had become functionally extinct across Florida’s coral reef, meaning too few of them remain to serve their previous ecological role.
No chance to recover
In summer 2023, the average sea-surface temperature across Florida’s reef was above 87 degrees Fahrenheit (31 degrees Celsius) for weeks. We found that the accumulated heat stress on the corals was 2.2 to 4 times higher than it had ever been since modern satellite sea-surface temperature recordings began in the 1980s, a time when those two species – branching staghorn and elkhorn corals – were the dominant reef-builders in the region.
A sea-surface temperature map from mid-July 2023 shows the extraordinary heat around the Florida Keys. NOAA Coral Reef Watch
The temperatures were so high in the middle and lower Florida Keys that some corals died within days from acute heat shock.
Everywhere on the reef, corals were bleaching. That occurs when temperatures rise high enough that the coral expels its symbiotic algae, turning stark white. The corals rely on these algae for food, a solar-powered energy supply that allows them to build their massive calcium carbonate skeletons, which we know as coral reefs.
How coral bleaching occurs. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
These reefs are valuable. They help protect coastal areas during storms, provide safety for young fish and provide habitat for thousands of species. They generate millions of dollars in tourism revenue in places like the Florida Keys. However, the symbiotic relationship between the coral animal and the algae that supports these incredible ecosystems can be disrupted when temperatures rise about 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 2 degrees Celsius) above the normal summer maximum.
By the end of summer 2023, only three of the 200 corals we had transplanted in the Lower Keys to study how corals grow survived.
In the Dry Tortugas, corals’ bone-white skeletons were already being grown over by seaweed. That’s a warning sign of a potential phase shift, where reefs change from coral-dominated to macroalgae-dominated systems.
Time lapse of a coral branch bleaching under heat stress over a month. Each tiny polyp is one appendage of the coral animal. The structure turns white as the corals lose their symbiotic algae. Reefscapers Maldives
Our colleagues observed similar patterns across the Florida Keys: Acroporid corals – staghorn and elkhorn – suffered staggering levels of bleaching and death.
Of the more than 50,000 acroporid corals surveyed across nearly 400 individual reefs before and after the heat wave, 97.8% to 100% ultimately died. Those farther north and offshore in cooler water fared somewhat better.
But this pattern of bleaching extended to the rest of the Caribbean and the world, leading NOAA to declare 2023-2024 the fourth global bleaching event. This type of mass bleaching, in which stress and mortality occur almost simultaneously across locations around the world, points to a common environmental driver.
A bleached and dead staghorn coral thicket in the Dry Tortugas, already being overgrown by seaweed in September 2023. The corals had been healthy a few months earlier. Maya Gomez
In the summer of 2023, that environmental driver was clearly soaring water temperatures caused by climate change.
Becoming functionally extinct
Even before the 2023 marine heat wave, staghorn and elkhorn numbers had been dwindling, with punctuated declines accelerated by a diverse array of stressors – hurricane damage, loss of supporting herbivore species, disease and repeated bleaching.
Caribbean acroporids have not entirely disappeared in Florida, but those left are not enough to fulfill their ecological role. When populations become too small, they lose their capacity to rebound – in conservation biology this is known as the “extinction vortex.” With so few individuals, it becomes harder to find a mate, and even when one is found, it’s more likely to be a relative, which has negative genetic consequences.
Live elkhorn coral, Acropora palmata, off Florida before the marine heat wave. NOAA Fisheries A bleached colony of elkhorn coral in Dry Tortugas National Park off Florida on Sept. 11, 2023. Shedd Aquarium/Ross Cunning
For an ecosystem-builder like coral, many individuals are required to build an effective reef. Even if the remaining corals were the healthiest and most thermally tolerant of the bunch – they did survive, after all – there are simply not enough of them left to recover on their own.
Can the corals be saved?
Florida’s acroporids have joined the ranks of the California condor – they cannot recover without help. But unlike the condor, there are still pockets of healthy corals scattered throughout their broader range that could be used to help restore areas with localized extinctions.
The surviving corals in Florida could be bred with other Caribbean populations to boost their numbers and increase genetic diversity, an approach known as assisted gene flow.
Maya Gomez, one of the authors of this article and the study, takes photos of transplanted corals off Florida. Jenna Dilworth
Advancements in microfragmentation, a way to speed up coral propagation by cutting them into smaller pieces, and cryopreservation, which involves deep-freezing coral sperm to preserve their genetic diversity, have made it possible to mass produce, archive and exchange genetic diversity at a scale that would not have been possible just 10 years ago.
Restoration isn’t easy, though. From a policy perspective, coordinating international exchange of endangered species is complex. There is still disagreement about the capacity to scale up reef restoration to recover entire ecosystems. And the question remains: Even if we could succeed in restoring these reefs, would we be planting corals just in time for the next heat wave to knock them down again?
This is a real risk, because ocean temperatures are rising. There is broad consensus that the world must curb the carbon emissions contributing to increased ocean temperatures for restoration to succeed.
Climate change poses an existential threat to coral reefs, but these advancements, in concert with effective and timely action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, could give them a fighting chance.
Carly D. Kenkel has received funding from NSF, NOAA, The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, the Mary Gard Jameson Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She serves on the Genetics Working Group of the Coral Restoration Consortium, the US Acropora Recovery Implementation Team and the Intervention Risk Review Group for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program.
Maya Gomez is affiliated with the Perry Institute for Marine Science.
Jenna Dilworth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Morgane Dujmovic, Chargée de recherche CNRS, Géographe et politiste spécialiste des frontières et migrations, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
This series of articles draws on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations while onboard the ship.
This is the first of a four-part series. Read part two here, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.
‘The journey we’ve undertaken’
“We were ready to jump. We were so afraid the Libyans would arrive!” These words came from a young Syrian man, recorded in the data table as part of my year-long study aboard the Ocean Viking search-and-rescue ship, between the summers of 2023 and 2024.
His words did not reflect an isolated incident. Among the 110 rescued people who took part in the onboard survey, nearly a third described a similar fear at the sight of a ship on the horizon. Not fear of imminent shipwreck or drowning, but of being intercepted by Libyan forces and returned to that country.
Portrait of Shakir. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l’auteur
The words echo those of Shakir, a Bangladeshi man I met on the OV – as the Ocean Viking ship is commonly nicknamed. He told me: “You refreshed our minds with the workshops. Since Libya and the sea, we felt lost. Now, we understand the journey that we’ve undertaken.”
On the OV’s deck and in the containers serving as shelters until disembarkation in Italy, I offered participatory mapping workshops. Around 60 people took part, retracing the steps, places and timelines of their journeys through hand-drawn maps.
I developed this collaborative research method to encourage the expression of knowledge formed through migration. I had not anticipated that these gestures and drawings could also help reclaim points of reference and build valuable understanding about the journey undertaken.
Portrait of Koné. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l’auteur
The words also resonate with those I collected after a disembarkation in Ancona. There, I met Koné, an Ivorian man who had been rescued by another NGO vessel a week earlier. He told me:
“The worst is not the sea, believe me, it’s the desert! When you go out on the water, it’s at night and you don’t see what’s around you – it’s only when daylight comes that you see the waves. In the desert, they put 50 people on a pickup truck made for ten: if you fall, you’re left behind. At sea, you die instantly. In the desert, you die a slow death.”
All these words have led me to rethink my assumptions about borders and their dangers. Why take the risk of crossing the sea, with such uncertain outcomes? How is rescue perceived from a boat in distress? What is life like during the days spent onboard an NGO vessel? What hopes are projected on to arriving in Europe, and beyond?
While rescues and shipwrecks often make headlines, the perceptions of the rescued people themselves are rarely studied; they usually reach us filtered through authorities, journalists or NGOs. Collecting these lived experiences and allowing exiled people to tell their own stories – this was the core purpose of my onboard research mission.
When maps tell stories of exile, with Morgane Dujmovic. French-language video by The Conversation France, 2025.
An improvised, floating laboratory
Onboard the OV, I occupied the “25th seat”, which is usually reserved for special guests. This was the ship’s first search-and-rescue (SAR) mission to host an external researcher.
For SOS Méditerranée, it was an opportunity to open the NGO’s work up to objective observation by a social scientist and to refine its operational response, drawing on the priorities expressed by rescued individuals. Among the crew, several members suggested this work could enhance their practices and deepen their understanding of the migration journeys they had been witnessing for years.
The Ocean Viking docked in the Sicilian port of Syracuse. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l’auteur
This was the case for Charlie, one of the NGO veterans who have spent a decade refining their rescue techniques for boats in distress. As SAR team leader, he coordinates the RHIBs (rigid-hulled inflatable boats) launched from the OV to carry out rescues. “This work is really useful because we are constantly looking to improve,” he told me. “What I’m really curious about is what happens before [the rescue]. I talk with them sometimes, but I want to know more about them.”
As for me, while I have worked for 15 years with exiled people, this was the first time I have written about borders while being physically inside a border zone – a feeling of immersion heightened by the horizon of the sea and the confined daily life onboard the OV.
The study unfolded over the course of five rotations, each a six-week mission in the search-and-rescue zone. It was implemented with the support of the entire OV crew: rescue, medical, protection, logistics and communications teams – all of whom were trained in the survey methodology.
The questionnaire emerged from a dialogue between scientific and operational objectives. It was designed around three themes: the sea rescue itself; care onboard the mothership in the post-rescue phase; and migration projects and pathways – from the country of origin to the imagined destinations in Europe. My presence on board allowed me to refine the initial version as I received feedback from both rescued people and crew members.
A mapping workshop held on the deck of the OV. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l’auteur
This was complemented by qualitative methods I have previously used on land, at the French-Italian and French-Spanish borders or in the Balkans, offering people who cross them participatory and emotional mapping tools to narrate their journeys.
To adapt these methods to the sea, I brought on board the OV maps previously drawn by other exiled people along with creative materials, and arranged a dedicated space. In this improvised, floating laboratory, I sought to create a space-time conducive to reflection, allowing silenced knowledge to emerge and be shared with the wider public – for those who wished to.
The invitation to participate was designed to be reassuring and encouraging. The workshop was guided and required no specific language or graphic skills; the aesthetic result mattered less than the interaction experienced during the mapping process.
When maps tell stories of exile, with Morgane Dujmovic. French-language video by The Conversation France, 2025.
These scientific and ethical concerns closely aligned with operational priorities – during the days of navigation before disembarking at an Italian port, there is a need to fill the waiting time and lift spirits.
On the OV’s deck, mapping gradually found its place among post-rescue activities, some of which had a psychosocial dimension aimed at restoring the dignity of rescued people and preparing them for the next stage of their journey in Europe. The collective mappings – where texts and drawings appeared – became a shared language and gesture, linking crew members and rescued people who joined the workshop.
Morgane Dujmovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Morgane Dujmovic, Chargée de recherche CNRS, Géographe et politiste spécialiste des frontières et migrations, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
This series of articles draws on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations on board the ship.
This is the second of a four-part series – read part one here and part three here, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.
Fragments of journeys
In all, 21 sketches were created in the workshops I conducted onboard the Ocean Viking. They tell fragments of journeys – routes that were sometimes smooth but often fraught, starting from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.
From Dhaka to Zuwara: one of ten sketches describing routes participants had taken from Bangladesh. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l’auteur
Some journeys were very costly but quick and organised, such as those of some Bangladeshi individuals who had travelled from Dhaka to Zuwara via Dubai in just a few days. Others stretched and intertwined over several years, adapting to encounters, resources, dangers and the multiple wars and violence in those countries crossed.
Among 69 people who responded to the questionnaire, 37.6% had left their country of origin the same year. But 21.7% had been travelling for more than five years – and 11.5% for over ten years. The longest journeys began in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and, in 60% of the cases studied, Syria. As one respondent explained:
I fled the Syrian army. I spent three years in prison and torture, saw terrible scenes. I was 18, I was not old enough to live or see such things.
From Syria to Zuwara: one of 11 sketches describing routes participants had taken from the Middle East. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l’auteur
2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015: the steady spread of departure dates for these journeys highlights the persistence of the conflicts that drive migration around the world. Motivations to continue these long journeys are often personal ambitions for a better life, such as being able to study or help family left behind – as was explained by a young Egyptian man: “I am the only son in my family. My parents are old and they are worried I won’t make it.”
The survey made it possible to outline the types of support received and the dangers encountered along the way. Alongside financial resources from personal savings or family loans, nearly 60% of respondents mentioned the importance of immaterial resources such as “advice from friends”, “psychological support from my husband”, or “information and emotional support from my niece”.
For some, the information received from loved ones seemed crucial at certain stages of the journey: as one respondent explained, it provided moral support to “survive in Libya”. Conversely, another participant confided it had been essential to hide the realities of their daily life in Libya from their family, in order “to hold on”.
Indeed, it was in this North African country that most difficulties were encountered: among the 136 situations of danger described, half were in Libya – compared with 35.3% at sea, 8.8% in the person’s country of origin, and 5.9% at other borders along their migration routes.
When maps tell stories of exile, with Morgane Dujmovic. French-language video by The Conversation France, 2025.
‘Inhumane acts’ against people in exile
The atrocities targeting people on the move in Libya are now well-documented. They appear in numerous sources including NGO reports and documentary films, as well as direct testimonies from those affected.
The findings of an independent UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission, published in 2021, qualified these realities as crimes against humanity. The report described “reasonable grounds to believe that acts of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against migrants form part of a systematic and widespread attack directed at this population, in furtherance of a State policy. As such, these acts may amount to crimes against humanity.”
Through the study on board the OV, participants were able to define, in their own words, the nature of the dangers they had experienced there. Their quotes conveyed subjective, embodied experiences reshaped by emotions – yet they were numerous and convergent enough to reconstruct what has been happening in Libya. The mechanisms of the reported violence were systemic: punitive detention combined with torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, racial and sexual violence endured or witnessed. And these acts were often cumulative:
During my first period in Libya, I was imprisoned six times, tortured, beaten. I can’t even remember the exact details.
The acts of violence involved perpetrators who were, to a greater or lesser degree, institutionalised, including coast guards, prison guards, mafias, militias and employers. They occurred across the entire country (Benghazi, Misrata, Sabratha, Sirte, Tripoli, Zawiya and Zuwara were the most frequently cited cities), but also in the desert and in detention sites at unknown locations. Omnipresent was the prospect of violent and arbitrary detention, which generated a presumption of widespread racism against foreigners:
The racism I experienced as an Egyptian is just unimaginable: kidnapping, theft, imprisonment.
Black people felt particularly targeted by such attacks. Among those who testified, an Ethiopian man trapped for four years in Libya described his constant sense of terror, linked to the repeated racist arrests he had endured:
People get kidnapped in Libya. They catch us and put us in prison because we don’t have papers. Then we have to pay more than US$1,000 to be released. It happened to me four times: two weeks, then a month, then two months, and finally a year. All because of my skin colour – because I am black. It lasted so long that my mind is too stressed from fear.
Such racial discrimination was confirmed by the UN Human Rights Council report in 2021, which found “evidence that most of the migrants detained are sub-Saharan Africans, and that they are treated in a harsher manner than other nationalities, which suggests discriminatory treatment.”
However, the risks of kidnapping and ransom would appear to spare no one on Libyan soil. Koné described them as a generalised and systemic practice:
There’s a business that many Libyans run. They put you in a taxi which sells you to those who put you in prison. Then they demand a ransom from your family to get you out. If the ransom isn’t paid, you’re made to work for free. In the end, in Libya you’re like merchandise: they let you enter the country only to make you work.
A mapping workshop held aboard the Ocean Viking. Alisha Vaya/SOS Méditerranée, Fourni par l’auteur
Several study participants had been caught in these networks, and their analyses afterwards converged on one point: the Libyan experience amounts to a vast system of exploitation through forced labour.
The facts reported match the International Labour Organization’s definitions of “human trafficking” and “modern slavery”, and were again confirmed by the UN report, which noted: “The only practicable means of escape is by paying large sums of money to the guards or engaging in forced labour or sexual favours inside or outside the detention centre for the benefit of private individuals.”
Ultimately, what Koné remembered most painfully was the feeling of shame:
I pity myself, my story, but I pity the people who went to prison even more. If your family can’t pay the ransom, they must take on debts, so it’s a problem you put on your family. Some people went crazy because of it.
Mapping as testimony
While the accounts of time spent in Libya were always bitter and often horrifying, sometimes beyond words, the study revealed a strong desire to bear witness to what happens there – not only for the general public, but for those who might attempt the same journey:
I want to say that in Libya, there are many women like me who are in a very difficult situation.
I don’t have much to say, except that so many people are suffering even more than I did in Libya.
I don’t advise anyone to come by this route.
To accompany these stories, our mapping workshops aboard the OV served as an invitation – an opportunity to share experiences without having to put traumatic events into words.
At first, the collective mappings organised on the OV’s deck allowed participants to bring out the main themes they wanted to address, according to three sequences: “our past”, “our present”, and “the future we imagine”. My role was to create an appropriate framework for expression, guide participants toward accessible graphic techniques, and enable the sharing of creations through their gradual display on the deck.
A mapping workshop held aboard the OV. Alisha Vaya/SOS Méditerranée, Fourni par l’auteur
Workshops were then offered to small groups or individuals inside containers – spaces that were more conducive to the confidentiality of intimate stories.
One of the tasks suggested by participants was to represent the zones of danger felt throughout the migration journey — where Libya inevitably stood out. From these personal pathways, a second exercise was introduced: describing the experience of danger at the Libyan scale, building on the places already mentioned.
Participants were encouraged to enrich their sketched maps with personal illustrations and narrative legends in their native languages, which were later translated into English.
Ahmed’s experience of Libya
On his map, Ahmed, a Syrian-born participant, depicted “insecurity” in Tripoli, “bad treatment and extortion of money” in Benghazi, and “violation of rights” in Zuwara.
His illustration shows a scene of ordinary, widespread crime: “the Libyan” shooting at “foreigners” evokes the collective violence that Ahmed described as occurring all across Libya. This emotional and participatory method served as a language for sharing stories that were difficult to verbalise, and for mediating them.
Beyond what these drawings facilitated for those sharing their stories, they allowed myself and others observing these violent images to contextualise them within a complex web of factors across time and geographical space.
Now read part three in this four-part series, or explore an immersive French-language version here.
Morgane Dujmovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
