Over two days in November, record-breaking heat in Australia’s north wiped out almost one-third of the nation’s spectacled flying foxes, according to researchers**.**
The animals, also known as spectacled fruit bats, were unable to survive in temperatures which exceeded 42oC.
In the city of Cairns, locals saw bats toppling from trees into backyards, swimming pools and other locations.
Wildlife rescuers found surviving animals clumped together, usually on branches closer to the ground.
“It was totally depressing,” one rescuer, David White, told the BBC.
‘Biblical Scale’
Recently, researchers from Western Sydney University finalised their conclusion that about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes died in the event on 26 and 27 November.
That tally was reached through counting by wildlife volunteers who visited seven flying fox camps following the heatwave.
YMD: In the biological world, when death takes place, it is in, at worst, a few hundred here, a few hundred there. But if 23,000 died in two days, then one has to search for other causes, other than simply heat-wave.
At 30, World Wide Web ‘Not the Web We Wanted,’ Inventor Says
At its ripe old age of 30 and with half the globe using it, the World Wide Web is facing growing pains with issues like hate speech, privacy concerns and state-sponsored hacking, its creator says.
Tim Berners-Lee joined a celebration on Tuesday of the Web and reminisced about where he invented it at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research beginning with a proposal published on March 12, 1989.
The 63-year-old Englishman is calling on governments, companies and citizens to work together, and wants the web to become more accessible to those who aren’t online.
Speaking at a “Web 30” conference, Berners-Lee acknowledged that for those who are online, “the web is not the web we wanted in every respect”.