Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Kate Marie Quigley, DECRA Research Fellow in molecular ecology, James Cook University

Lord Howe Island lies in the middle of the ocean, about 700 kilometres northeast of Sydney. It’s covered in lush forest and fringed by the world’s most southerly coral reef ecosystem.

This reef system isn’t as famous as its northern neighbour, the Great Barrier Reef. Our new research in the Journal of Applied Ecology, shows it plays an outsized role in keeping vast coral regions across the Pacific connected – and alive.

A small number of other reefs in the region serve a similar function. Knowing which reefs matter most for recovery and adaptation to ocean warming – and protecting them now – could make the difference between regional reef collapse and long-term resilience.

Tiny coral babies in a vast ocean

Coral reefs are in global decline, but this loss is not just about dying corals – it’s about breaking the natural connections that allow reefs to recover after marine heatwaves, cyclones and other threats.

Right now, climate change is rapidly reducing the ability of coral larvae to travel between reefs, shrinking their chances of survival by undercutting recovery.

These tiny coral babies can sometimes spend many weeks in the surface waters of the open ocean, carried by currents across hundreds or even thousands of kilometres before settling and beginning to grow.

The movement of larvae provides a constant source of replenishment for reefs, both near and far away, which is especially important when reefs are damaged.

Without this constant replenishment, some damaged reefs simply cannot recover. Connectivity isn’t a nice-to-have for coral reefs. It’s their lifeline.

Tracking dispersal across 850 reefs

Our study used ocean circulation models to simulate the trajectories of coral larvae across the southwestern Pacific Ocean from 2011 to 2024, tracking the movement of larvae across 850 reefs.

These reefs spanned the Great Barrier Reef, New Caledonia, the Coral Sea and Lord Howe Island.

We traced how two key coral growth forms (fast-growing branching corals and slower-growing massive corals) move between reefs under current conditions and under projected global climate warming scenarios of 1°C, 2.5°C and 4°C above pre-industrial temperatures.

We then examined how corals moved between different types of reef, including reefs that were naturally resistant to heat stress, those that recover quickly after disturbance, and those that stay cooler because of local water currents and upwelling that naturally reduce water temperature around the reef.

This allowed us to ask not just which reefs are connected, but which kinds of reefs are sending and receiving different types of larvae.

A fragile network

We found that only a handful of reefs act as genuine hubs — places where larvae both arrive from distant sources and depart to “seed” reefs far away. Lose these stepping stones, and the entire network begins to fragment.

The Coral Sea reefs emerged as crucial bridges in this network, linking the southern Great Barrier Reef with New Caledonia and beyond. But perhaps the most striking finding involves Lord Howe Island.

Our modelling identified Lord Howe as a potential refugium: a place where corals may be able to persist even as warming intensifies, potentially owing to its more temperate, southerly position.

Yet its very isolation – what makes it a likely survivor – also means it has limited natural connectivity with surrounding reefs.

This situation therefore cuts both ways: while isolation helps protect its coral from extreme heat stress, it also means the reef relies less on new larvae that others could need for recovery. It therefore also means Lord Howe needs protection – not just for itself, but for the entire regional reef system that may one day depend on it.

Another important finding is that the reefs most resistant to heat stress (those classified as naturally resistant) tended to export larvae to a relatively smaller number of reefs within the wider network.

But there are techniques that enable the intentional movement of larvae from heat-tolerant reefs to more vulnerable locations. These include assisted gene flow, in which scientists deliberately move warm-adapted adult corals or their offspring to reefs that are more vulnerable to heat stress, helping to spread heat-tolerant genes more quickly across reef networks.

Protecting our marine superhighways

Our results make clear that marine protected areas should not be managed as isolated reserves but as an interconnected network, with transboundary cooperation between Australia and Pacific Island nations.

The larval corridors linking the southern Great Barrier Reef, New Caledonia and Lord Howe Island do not fall within national boundaries. Neither can our conservation response.

Reefs are already fighting against warming oceans. The waters of the Lord Howe Rise and South Tasman Sea, the vast oceanic region between Australia and New Zealand through which these larval corridors flow, are under threat from industrial fishing.

Industrial fishing, pollution and climate change are pushing these ecosystems to the brink, with longlines intersecting surface waters. This cumulative pressure across these newly identified larval transport superhighways adds yet another layer of pressure onto these already stressed ecosystems.

Our research adds a new and crucial dimension to high seas protection. Our region sits directly across the larval corridors that connect and sustain coral reef systems. Protecting this ocean is not just about what lives here. It is about what passes through – fundamental for migratory and connected populations.

The least we can do is protect the superhighways through which their future flows – invisibly, at the ocean surface, some larvae no bigger than a grain of rice, carrying the genetic potential to rebuild what we stand to lose.

Kate Quigley receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Minderoo Foundation. She is also Principal Research Scientist at Minderoo Founation.

Elise Thérèse Gisèle Dehont 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.

– ref. Coral reefs are secretly connected across vast oceans – and that’s crucial for their survival – https://theconversation.com/coral-reefs-are-secretly-connected-across-vast-oceans-and-thats-crucial-for-their-survival-278424

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Thomas Pace, Researcher and Lecturer at the Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast

Your brain is currently expending about a fifth of your body’s energy, and almost none of that is being used for what you’re doing right now. Reading these words, feeling the weight of your body in a chair – all of this together barely changes the rate at which your brain consumes energy, perhaps by as little as 1%.

The other 99% is used on the activity the brain generates on its own: neurons (nerve cells) firing and signalling to each other regardless of whether you’re thinking hard, watching television, dreaming, or simply closing your eyes.

Even in the brain areas dedicated to vision, the visuals coming in through your eyes shape the activity of your neurons less than this internal ongoing action.

In a paper just published in Psychological Review, we argue that our imagination sculpts the images we see in our mind’s eye by carving into this background brain activity. In fact, imagination may have more to do with the brain activity it silences than with the activity it creates.

Imagining as seeing in reverse

Consider how “seeing” is understood to work. Light enters the eyes and sparks neural signals. These travel through a sequence of brain regions dedicated to vision, each building on the work of the last.

The earliest regions pick out simple features such as edges and lines. The next combine those into shapes. The ones after that recognise objects, and those at the top of the sequence assemble whole faces and scenes.

Neuroscientists call this “feedforward activity” – the gradual transformation of raw light into something you can name, whether it’s a dog, a friend, or both.

In brain science, the standard view is that visual imagination is this original seeing process run in reverse, from within your mind rather than from light entering your eyes.

So, when you hold the face of a friend in mind, you start with an abstract idea of them – a memory or a name, pulled from the filing cabinet of regions that sit beyond the visual system itself.

That idea travels back down through the visual sequence into the early visual areas, which serve as your brain’s workshop where a face would normally be reconstructed from its parts – the curve of a jawline, the specific shade of an eye. These downward signals are called “feedback activity”.

A signal through the static

However, prior research shows this feedback activity doesn’t drive visual neurons to fire in the same way as when you actually see something.

At least in the brain regions early in the vision process, feedback instead modulates brain activity. This means it increases or decreases the activity of the brain cells, reshaping what those neurons are already doing.

Even behind closed eyes, early visual brain areas keep producing shifting patterns of neural activity resembling those the brain uses to process real vision.

Imagination doesn’t need to build a face from scratch. The raw material is already there. In the internal rumblings of your visual areas, fragments of every face you know are drifting through at low volume. Your friend’s face, even now, is passing through in pieces, scattered and unrecognised. What imagining does is hold still the currents that would otherwise carry those pieces away.

All that’s needed is a small, targeted suppression of neurons that are pulled by brain activity in a different direction, and your friend’s face settles out of the noise, like a signal carving its way through static.

Steering the brain

In mice, artificially switching on as few as 14 neurons in a sensory brain region is enough for the animal to notice it and lick a sugar-water spout in response. This shows how small an intervention in the brain can be while still steering behaviour.

While we don’t know how many neurons are needed to steer internal activity into a conscious experience of imagination in humans, growing evidence shows the importance of dampening neural activity.

In our earlier experiments, when people imagined something, the fingerprint it left on their behaviour matched suppression of neuronal activity – not firing. Other researchers have since found the same pattern.

Other lines of evidence strengthen our theory, too. About one in 100 people have aphantasia, which means they can’t form mental images at all. One in 30 form these images so vividly they approach the intensity of images we actually see, known as hyperphantasia.

Research has found that people with weaker mental imagery have more excitable early visual areas, where neurons fire more readily on their own. This is consistent with a visual system whose spontaneous patterns are harder to hold in shape.

Taking all this together, the spontaneous activity reshaping hypothesis – our new theory that imagination carves images out of the steady stream of ongoing brain activity – explains why imagination usually feels weaker than sight. It also explains why we rarely lose track of which is which.

Visual perception arrives with a strength and regularity the brain’s own internal patterns don’t match. Imagination works with those patterns rather than against them, reshaping what is already there into something we can almost see.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How does imagination really work in the brain? New theory upends what we knew – https://theconversation.com/how-does-imagination-really-work-in-the-brain-new-theory-upends-what-we-knew-280803

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Karen Stockin, Professor of Marine Ecology, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

A humpback whale repeatedly restranding in shallow waters in the Baltic Sea for more than three weeks has become the focus of a complex debate about reconciling compassion for animals with ethical, evidence-based decision making.

Affectionately known as Timmy, the whale restranded several times and has been growing weaker, failing to recover despite multiple rescue attempts.

Its struggle attracted global attention and triggered debates between experts and the public regarding intervention versus allowing a natural end.

Marine biologists and veterinarians observing the whale made a clear and evidence-based assessment earlier this month: further intervention was unlikely to succeed and would risk prolonging the animal’s suffering.

Yet public pressure – driven by empathy amplified by social media and sharpened into outrage – led German state authorities to permit renewed rescue efforts this week, framed as a “last ditch” effort.

At first glance, it seems an act of compassion. But beneath the surface lies a more difficult truth. As our research shows, when scientific advice is sidelined in favour of public sentiment, outcomes for the very animals we aim to protect can worsen.

The emotional pull of “doing something”

Large, charismatic animals like whales evoke powerful emotional responses. They are intelligent, expressive and visibly vulnerable when stranded.

For many people, choosing not to intervene feels morally unacceptable, with inaction often perceived as neglect.

Wildlife medicine, however, does not operate on instinct or optics. It relies on probabilities, welfare assessments and the recognition that intervention is not always beneficial.

In Timmy’s case, experts from the German Oceanographic Museum and the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research, as well as international organisations, reached a consistent conclusion that the whale was unlikely to survive.

After repeated failed rescues, the environment minister for Germany’s state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania determined that continued intervention would likely worsen the whale’s condition. By then, Timmy was showing clear signs of trauma and exhaustion.

The decision was not made in isolation. In early April, the International Whaling Commission’s stranding expert panel publicly supported the German authorities. It outlined that further rescue attempts would likely increase suffering without improving survival chances.

Euthanasia, frequently suggested as an alternative, was deemed impractical, however. The whale’s partial buoyancy, combined with logistical, safety and personnel challenges meant this was not a viable option.

New Zealand’s experience

In 2021, New Zealand experienced a similar situation with Toa, a stranded orca calf.

The response was extraordinary, mobilising national and international expertise. Veterinarians, marine mammal scientists and stranding specialists contributed to an unprecedented rescue effort.

The scientific consensus, however, was sobering. Given Toa’s young age (unweaned), prolonged separation from his pod, and the challenges of reintegration, his chances of survival were extremely low.

Over time, his welfare declined during extended human care. Many experts ultimately supported euthanasia as the most humane option.

That path was not taken. Driven by public hope and attention, efforts continued. Toa died after weeks in care. In retrospect, the case raised a difficult but necessary question: when expert consensus and public sentiment diverge, which should guide decisions?

When perception overrides expertise

This tension is not anecdotal; it is well documented. Research shows that human perceptions and emotional investment can significantly shape responses to cetacean strandings, sometimes directly conflicting with recommendations based on the animal’s wefare.

In high-profile cases, decision making can shift from expert-led processes to outcomes shaped by public pressure. The patterns observed in Germany – repeated strandings, declining condition and cumulative stress – are strong predictors of poor outcomes, regardless of continued intervention.

The disconnect is clear. Experts assess welfare through measurable physiological, behavioural and environmental markers to infer the mental state of an animal. The public often evaluates it through effort, visibility and intent. The result is a compelling but flawed assumption: that doing more means doing better.

A common principle in veterinary ethics is that the ability to intervene does not justify doing so. Every rescue attempt carries risks: handling stress, injury, prolonged suffering and the diversion of limited resources.

While financial cost is often highlighted, the more critical issue is animal welfare. In repeated stranding cases, the ethical balance becomes increasingly stark.

When recovery is highly unlikely, continued intervention can shift from care to harm. In repeated stranding cases, the ethical calculus becomes sharper. Yet this is precisely the moment when public pressure tends to intensify.

A more difficult kind of care

Compassion is not the problem; it is fundamental to conservation. But compassion without evidence can mislead.

What’s at stake is trust in scientific expertise, veterinary judgement and the difficult reality that the most humane decision is not always the most emotionally satisfying one.

If every high-profile stranding becomes a referendum driven by public pressure, we risk creating a system where decisions are shaped less by animal welfare and more by public visibility.

The instinct to rally around a stranded whale reflects the best of human empathy. But real care in wildlife conservation is not always about action. Sometimes, it requires restraint.

In Toa’s case, official documents later revealed most experts had recommended euthanasia to prevent prolonged suffering.

Timmy’s situation raises a similar question. Not whether people care enough, but whether we are willing to accept that caring also means listening to science, to experience and to the difficult truths they bring.

Karen Stockin is the ethics chair for the Society for Marine Mammalogy and a member of the IWC strandings expert panel.

– ref. Whale strandings draw emotional responses. But repeated rescues can cause more harm – https://theconversation.com/whale-strandings-draw-emotional-responses-but-repeated-rescues-can-cause-more-harm-281137

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

US President Donald Trump is a longtime climate denier and oil industry ally, who sums up his own energy policy as “drill, baby, drill”. Yet he is doing more than almost anyone to speed up the global shift from fossil fuels to clean energy and electric vehicles (EVs).

After the US and Israel struck Iran in late February, Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the largest disruption of oil supply in history.

Ironically for Trump and his oil industry donors, this crisis may be an irreversible tipping point for clean energy. For years, fossil fuel advocates spruiked oil, gas and coal as “reliable” energy. That narrative has been reversed. Fossil fuels have become expensive and unreliable, while renewables are cheap, reliable and secure.

For the first time ever, more than 50 nations will gather next week in Colombia to hash out how to wind down and end their dependence on coal, oil and gas. The history-making conference was planned before the Iran war. But this year’s energy crisis has greatly raised the stakes.

The oil crisis is real

Iran’s closure of the narrow Strait of Hormuz stopped oil tankers reaching their destinations. But that wasn’t all. More than 60 gas and oil sites have been damaged in the conflict so far. Even if a durable ceasefire is reached, these impacts will reverberate for months and years to come.

Around 80% of the trapped crude oil was destined for the Asia-Pacific. Faced with dwindling supply, the region’s governments are implementing emergency measures such as sending workers home, banning government travel, rationing fuel and cutting school hours.

The problem is especially bad in the Pacific. Many island nations use diesel for power generation. In response, leaders declared a regional emergency.

Fuel import bills were already a major burden for Pacific nations, leading to efforts to switch to local renewables. Fuel bills could rise by A$933 million in Fiji (nearly three times the healthcare budget).

Scrambling for energy

When energy supplies are disrupted, leaders have three options: find alternate supplies, reduce use or switch to alternatives. In the very short term, countries aim to shore up supply, just as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did last week in Malaysia.

Countries have also moved to reduce use. This can have lasting effects. During the Middle East oil shocks of the 1970s, oil prices tripled and then doubled again. Authorities responded by improving energy productivity to do more with less. The world’s final oil demand per capita peaked in 1979 and has never recovered.

But the real difference from half a century ago is that fossil fuel alternatives are ready for prime time. Since the 1970s, the price of solar panels has fallen 99.9%, while the cost of wind has fallen 91% since 1984. Battery prices have fallen 99% since 1991.

This means it’s now viable for many nations to switch to these alternatives.

The European Union will accelerate electrification, after its fossil fuel bill increased more than $36 billion since February. France has doubled state aid to help households switch to EVs and electrify home heating. Import-dependent South Korea gets 70% of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz. It now plans to double renewables capacity within four years.

Electric vehicles at the tipping point?

This year’s oil shock shows signs of creating an unplanned social tipping point – a threshold for self-propelling change beyond which systems shift from one state to another. Climate scientists warn of climate tipping points which amplify feedback and accelerate warming. But social scientists also point to positive tipping points – collective action that rapidly accelerates climate action.

The rush to EVs is a case in point. In Australia, petrol prices surged almost 50% in March, and diesel more than 70%. It’s no surprise new EV sales are at an all-time high, while secondhand EV sales more than doubled last month.

Australia’s 1.3 million hybrid and battery electric vehicles avoid almost 15 million litres of petrol and diesel use every week.

The rush to electric transport is global. Most new Chinese cars are powered by batteries, not oil. Battery electric vehicles outsold petrol cars for the first time in Europe in January.

A conference to quit fossil fuels

The routine burning of coal, oil and gas is the primary driver of the climate crisis. The world’s highest court last year made clear nations have obligations to stop burning fossil fuels.

But fossil fuels have barely been mentioned in 30 years of global climate negotiations, due in part to blocking efforts by big fossil fuel exporters and lobbyists.

Frustrated by slow progress, a coalition of nations has bypassed global climate talks to discuss how to actually phase out fossil fuels.

The first of these summits will take place next week. More than 50 nations will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss a potential standalone treaty to manage fossil-fuel phaseout while protecting workers and financial systems.

Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres says it comes at the “best possible moment”, as the oil crisis focuses global attention on fossil fuel dependency.

If next week’s summit produces real momentum to wean off fossil fuels amid the energy crisis, we might look back at it as a social tipping point where early adopters move in earnest – and make it easier for the rest of the world to follow.

Wesley Morgan is a fellow with the Climate Council of Australia

Ben Newell receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. The end of oil? As fuel shocks cascade, 53 nations gather to plan a fossil fuel phaseout – https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-oil-as-fuel-shocks-cascade-53-nations-gather-to-plan-a-fossil-fuel-phaseout-280263

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Alex Munt, Associate Professor, Media Arts & Production, University of Technology Sydney

In the opening moments of Vladimir, Netflix’s new erotic drama series, the protagonist M (Rachel Weisz) is sprawled on a couch in her negligee, writing in her notepad. She leans towards the camera, then stares into the lens to address you, the viewer, on your couch.

In film and television, this is called “breaking the fourth wall”. It is a ploy of metafiction: a kind of self-aware mode of storytelling.

The fourth wall is the invisible plane through which the camera observes the action. To break the fourth wall is to play with – or sever – audiences’ suspension of disbelief, and abandon the norms of screen narration.

The history of breaking the fourth wall is almost as long as the history of cinema itself. Edwin S. Porter’s film The Great Train Robbery ends with an outlaw firing his gun directly towards the camera. Back in 1903, audiences ducked for cover.

Nearly a century later, director Martin Scorsese paid homage to Porter in Goodfellas (1990) in a scene where Mobster Tommy DeVito (Jo Pesci) fires his gun directly at the screen. Here, the fourth wall break is used in an existential moment for Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) – rather than for pure shock.

In fact, the shock value of the technique has depleted over time, as audiences have become more media literate.

Making the invisible visible

The fourth wall breaks from early cinema fast disappeared with the industrialisation of the medium. The rise of the American studio system privileged some film techniques over others.

The “Classical Hollywood” style – think Casablanca (1942) – was built on a premise of invisibility, from the carefully directed eye-lines of actors, to “continuity” editing that stitched together different camera angles.

In Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1959) Jean-Luc Godard opted for jump-cuts and “direct address”. This is when a character speaks to, or looks directly at, the viewer.

Today, direct address is used widely across genres, from Barbie (2023), to Marvel’s Deadpool films (2016, 2018, 2024), and Jane Austen adaptations such as Persuasion (2022).

On television, we’ve seen women creators and characters explore the power of direct address in a re-calibration of the “male gaze”.

One example is Phoebe Waller-Bridges’ confessions to the camera in Fleabag (2016–19). Cinematographer Tony Miller notes how creative camera choices work in conjunction with direct address to make viewers “complicit in her [character’s] journey”.

The direct gaze

A fourth wall break is not always dialogue-driven. In Persona (1966) film auteur Ingmar Bergman directed his actors to stare deep into the abyss of the camera lens, delivering existential malaise.

This direct gaze has been remediated for streaming programs, including in the
intense close-up shots of Carmy (Jeremy Allen-White) in the final season of The Bear (2025), and knowing glances from the troubled Rue (Zendaya) in Euphoria (2019–26).

Fourth wall breaks can also be graphic. In Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) traces a square of light on the screen with her finger instead of calling Vincent Vega (John Travolta) a “square”.

And in Michael Haneke’s films Funny Games (1997, 2007) a home invader literally “rewinds” the story when a victim kills his accomplice. These kind of wall breaks call attention to the invisible membrane of the screen.

As filmmaker Mark Cousins attests in The Story of Film: An Odyssey, the medium has advanced over time through innovation and the recycling of techniques such as fourth wall breaks.

Is breaking the fourth wall back in vogue?

With the dominance of literary adaptations for the screen (and IP-driven screen stories in general) we’re likely to see more cases of direct address, as screenwriters seek to creatively refashion texts for the screen. Vladimir, for instance, is an adaptation of Julia May Jonas’ 2022 novel of the same name.

While breaking the fourth wall may have lost its shock value, it remains a bold storytelling device which, if done well, can set apart one screen production from another.

Actor Matt Damon recently pointed out how streamers such as Netflix are discussing the potential to reiterate “the plot three or four times in the dialogue” of a film, to account for people who scroll on their phone while listening to “background TV”.

Having a character speak directly to a distracted audience may be one way to return their gaze to the bigger screen.

Hyper-reality in unscripted TV

Breaking the fourth wall sits within a wider envelope of “metafictional” storytelling.

As screen culture becomes increasingly aware of its own machinery, unscripted genres such as reality TV are not merely breaking the fourth wall, but abandoning the conceit of separation entirely. The boundaries between cast, camera, story producers and audience have become increasingly porous.

Alex Baskin, executive producer of the long-running series Vanderpump Rules (2013–25), describes this as “hyperreality”. In the wake of Scandoval, the cheating scandal of Tom Sandoval, the reality TV cast started to intervene in the producers’ narrative arcs by speaking on camera about audience feedback, and providing meta commentary on their own “edits”.

When Ariana Madix (Sandoval’s ex) refused to film with him, it disrupted plans for a neat season finale based on his apology. Madix left the set, effectively ending the entire show. Fellow cast member Tom Schwartz called it a “plot twist”. Unsurprisingly, Scorsese is a fan of the show.

Meta and hyperreal storytelling will continue to be on the rise as screen creators seek to imbue a point-of-difference in a congested market – serving an ever-distracted audience.

Alex Munt 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.

– ref. From Fleabag to Vladimir: why has breaking the fourth wall become so common? – https://theconversation.com/from-fleabag-to-vladimir-why-has-breaking-the-fourth-wall-become-so-common-280716