# Earth to Sea News
> We go out and find the good news: wildlife returning, reefs recovering, and the inventions quietly fixing things. From Australia and around the world.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).

## Pages
- [Our story](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/about.md) - We’re always searching for the stories that remind us what’s possible. At Earth to Sea News, we believe there is so much good happening for our planet. Every day, somewhere in the world, people are restoring habitats, protecting wildlife, discovering new solutions and proving that positive change i…
- [Balmoral Beach](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/balmoral-beach.md) - A grand old harbour beach with a netted swimming enclosure, an island joined by a little stone bridge.
- [Barrenjoey Lighthouse Walk](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/barrenjoey-lighthouse-walk.md) - A short, steady climb to a sandstone lighthouse with the ocean on one side and Pittwater on the other.
- [Bondi Icebergs](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bondi-icebergs.md) - The most photographed ocean pool in the world, and it earns it.
- [Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bondi-to-coogee-coastal-walk.md) - Six kilometres of clifftop path linking beach after beach, with whale sightings in season and an ocean pool waiting at nearly every stop.
- [Bushrangers Bay](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bushrangers-bay.md) - A tiny rocky cove with its own aquatic reserve.
- [Camp Cove](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/camp-cove.md) - A golden crescent just inside South Head where the harbour is at its clearest.
- [Clovelly Beach](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/clovelly-beach.md) - A long, narrow bay walled by rock platforms that keep the water calm and glass clear.
- [Explore](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/explore.md) - Places to swim, walk, gather and travel, chosen with love. Filter by where you are and what you are after.
- [Our Living World](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/gallery.md) - A growing collection from our field photographers, from Sydney’s beaches to the Torres Strait, together with our own reef photographs from the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island.
- [Grand Canyon Track, Blackheath](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/grand-canyon-track-blackheath.md) - A loop that drops you into a green slot canyon of tree ferns, mossy walls and creek crossings.
- [Milk Beach](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/milk-beach.md) - A pocket of sand below Strickland House with the whole harbour laid out in front of you.
- [National Pass, Wentworth Falls](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/national-pass-wentworth-falls.md) - A hundred year old track carved into the cliff face halfway between the valley floor and the sky.
- [Parsley Bay](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/parsley-bay.md) - A quiet, leafy harbour bay with a netted swimming area, gentle water and a lovely little suspension bridge.
- [Shelly Beach and Cabbage Tree Bay](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/shelly-beach-and-cabbage-tree-bay.md) - A protected aquatic reserve where snorkellers drift over groupers, wobbegongs and schools of fish just metres from the sand.
- [Spit Bridge to Manly](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/spit-bridge-to-manly.md) - Ten kilometres of harbour bushland, quiet coves and lookouts, finishing with a well earned swim at Manly.
- [The Coast Track](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/the-coast-track.md) - Twenty six kilometres of sea cliffs, hidden beaches and heathland between Bundeena and Otford.
- [Wattamolla Lagoon](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/wattamolla-lagoon.md) - A sheltered lagoon behind the beach where fresh water meets salt, ringed by bush.
- [West Head and the Basin Track](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/west-head-and-the-basin-track.md) - Sandstone country above Pittwater with wildflowers, ancient rock engravings and one of the finest lookouts in the state at the end.
- [Wylies Baths](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/wylies-baths.md) - A heritage tidal ocean pool built in 1907.

## Posts
- [Kampung Naga said no to the power line, no to the escalator, and yes to a summer of quiet](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/kampung-naga.md) - Four hundred stone steps below the Garut road, a Sundanese village of exactly one hundred and three thatched houses has turned down electricity, turned down an escalator, and this year closed its gate to visitors for three months so the land and the customs could breathe.
- [Forty five kilometres out on Lake Titicaca, an island that runs itself](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/taquile-island.md) - Three hours by boat from Puno, at almost four thousand metres, about two thousand two hundred people share one island, six fields that take turns, a three line code they live by, and a knitting tradition that UNESCO has listed and every boy learns.
- [In Darmstadt, a fridge keeps its cool with a magnet and a tank of water](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/magnotherm-cooling.md) - Nearly every fridge on Earth works by squeezing a gas. A startup in Darmstadt has built one that works by sliding a metal in and out of a magnet, with nothing but water in the pipes, and it is already cooling drinks in German supermarkets.
- [From seven per cent to sixty: thirty years of learning to recycle, and the week that marks it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/recycling-week.md) - When Planet Ark held the first National Recycling Week in 1996, Australia recycled about seven per cent of what it threw away. Thirty years on the figure is over sixty, and next week the campaign asks every household for one better habit.
- [Twenty seven signatures in Tuvalu, and a promise of an ocean declaration in Antalya](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/pacific-cop31.md) - A month before the world's climate talks open in Türkiye, leaders stood on Tuvalu, signed a declaration named for the Tuvaluan word for strength in unity, and asked that the ocean be written into whatever Antalya decides. Türkiye has said yes to trying.
- [Six calves and not one loss in sixteen months: the Mekong's river dolphins reach one hundred and eighteen](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/mekong-dolphins.md) - On 27 April a three day old dolphin was seen swimming with six adults at Kampi pool on the Mekong. It was the sixth calf of the year, and with no dolphin lost in sixteen months, Cambodia's river dolphins now number one hundred and eighteen.
- [Healthiest honey bees on Earth: the Norfolk Island community that has sworn to keep them that way](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/norfolk-bees.md) - Varroa mite is now across mainland Australia, but one island never let it in. Norfolk Island's honey bees carry the fewest pests and pathogens of any population on Earth, and the island keeps it that way with patience, a shut door and five hives opened on the first of every month.
- [On Wooroora, a Jirrbal Elder walks the land where his great grandmother was born](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/wooroora.md) - His great grandmother was born on Wooroora, and until this spring Uncle Kurt Noble had never set foot on it. Bush Heritage Australia is $5.3 million short of buying the station and joining rainforest to reef, with Jirrbal people helping care for it, and the deadline is 24 December.
- [In a bay too warm for the Barrier Reef, Australia's reef scientists go to school](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/palau-reef-school.md) - Palau's lagoons run hot enough to bleach the Great Barrier Reef, and the corals there are fine. In August the people who look after Australia's reef flew to Koror to see how, and came home with a model worth copying.
- [On Norfolk Island, the reef's best news comes from the people who swim it every week](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/norfolk-reef.md) - Norfolk Island's lagoon reef is honestly in trouble, rated High Concern this year. Yet the offshore coral is thriving, a fifth of the lagoon's pale corals turn out to be perfectly healthy, and the septics draining to the bay are being replaced. Here is what gives the scientists hope.
- [Fourteen sea stars, one month on the seafloor, and the urchins that ran away](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/sunflower-stars.md) - Sunflower sea stars once ate the urchins that now strip California's kelp, until a disease took more than 90 per cent of them. This year, for the first time since 2018, young stars raised in a lab went back to the seafloor off Monterey. Most thrived, and the urchins ran.
- [Manta rays of Lady Elliot Island: every belly is a fingerprint, and your snorkel photo can read it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/manta-ray.md) - Reef mantas gather off Lady Elliot Island each winter, once almost 80 in a day, and each carries belly spots as personal as a fingerprint. Project Manta reads them from photographs that snorkellers send in, and the Australian Geographic Society is raising money for its tags.
- [Warddeken rangers put AI to work on Country, and win back four months a year](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/warddeken-rangers.md) - Nearly a million camera trap photographs a year, and someone has to look at every one. In West Arnhem Land the Warddeken rangers asked their Elders first, then put an open source AI to work on the sorting, and won back four months a year for the real job: looking after Country.
- [Ten years in the Congo forest: the bonobo camp where the females do the hunting](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bonobo-hunters.md) - Ten years of dawn walks in a Congo forest have produced a surprise about our closest relatives. At LuiKotale, on the edge of Salonga National Park, the female bonobos lead the hunt, and the two neighbouring communities each hunt in their own way. "Man the hunter" has met the women of the forest.
- [On a beach called Haevo, the nests go up ten per cent a year](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/haevo-leatherbacks.md) - Leatherbacks are the biggest turtles on Earth, and the ones that nest in the Solomon Islands are among the rarest. A new study says the beach that has been guarded longest is filling with nests again, and most of its turtles swim south to us.
- [Two foster mothers, one microlight and thirty young ibises learning the way to Spain](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/ibis-flight.md) - Young northern bald ibises learn their migration route from their elders. When there are no elders left, two women in the back of a microlight do the job instead. This year's flock landed in Andalusia on 2 October.
- [A hornbill in Amsterdam ate breakfast with a beak that came out of a printer](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/hornbill-beak.md) - A young southern ground hornbill at ARTIS in Amsterdam broke both halves of his beak and was left with two stumps. Vets scanned his head, printed him a new one and screwed it on. He picked up his own food the next morning.
- [Twelve thousand acres of standing stone are now America's newest national park](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/chiricahua.md) - In the far southeast corner of Arizona a volcano went off about 27 million years ago, and what it left behind is a forest of stone. On 20 October that forest became the United States' 64th national park.
- [In a Milwaukee forest, a trail you can read with your fingertips](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/braille-trail.md) - Havenwoods is a state forest inside the city of Milwaukee. On 17 October it opened a short looped trail where the forest's story is told in braille, sound and things you can touch, with white canes at the door for anyone who needs one.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 31](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-31.md) - Miki, the cocker spaniel who found 73 orchids. Photo: Fiona Walsh. Good morning. This week begins in Tasmania, where a cocker spaniel named Miki found 73 orchids the scientists had walked past. Then thousands of caper white butterflies arriving in Adelaide on their spring journey south from the red…
- [Miki the spaniel found 73 orchids the scientists had walked past](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/tasmanian-orchids.md) - Tasmania has more than two hundred kinds of orchid and seventy seven of them are threatened. One of the rarest took eight years to grow in a lab, with a fungus that turned out to prefer quinoa. Then a cocker spaniel showed the scientists where it was hiding.
- [A gazillion butterflies: Adelaide's spring visitors from the red centre](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/caper-whites.md) - Every spring a small white butterfly leaves the heat of central Australia and heads for the coast. This year, after good rain inland, Adelaide is getting them by the thousand, resting on caper bushes in front gardens and parks.
- [Twenty kites, four people and no fuel: a sled sets out across Antarctica](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/wind-sled.md) - Four people, a fifteen metre sled, twenty kites and about eighty days of ice. On Sunday a Spanish team left for Antarctica to cross the emptiest part of the continent without burning a drop of fuel, with sixteen science projects riding along.
- [Two hundred thousand plants and ninety seven species: the Beeliar bush is coming back](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/beeliar-bush.md) - In 2016 a strip of Perth's Beeliar Wetlands was cleared for a highway extension that was never built. Eight years after 280,000 seedlings went in, the survey is back: 97 species of animal, Carnaby's cockatoos among them, and a bush that is well on its way.
- [Somewhere near you is a tree holding someone's special memories](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/thank-you-tree.md) - A swing under the shade, a cubby built by tireless parents, a tall pine that leads a child home from an adventure. Trees give more than we notice, and this year whole towns said thank you to theirs.
- [Don't dump it, sell it: the Bondi idea that became Australia's biggest second hand weekend takes its last bow](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/garage-sale-trail.md) - It started at Bondi in 2010 with a hand painted sign that said don't dump it, sell it. Sixteen years and 7.2 million second hand treasures later, the Garage Sale Trail is running its last two weekends under the people who built it, and looking for someone to carry it on.
- [One cheap powder, a little heat, and acrylic glass comes apart into something new](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/acrylic-glass.md) - Acrylic glass is in car tail lights, window panes, furniture, signs and fish tanks, and most of it has nowhere good to go at the end of its life. A Zurich lab has found a cheap, simple way to take it apart and make it new again.
- [Out past Cobar, a 1901 water tank became a chapel of sound](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/cobar-sound-chapel.md) - A short drive west of Cobar, a rusted water tank from 1901 holds a concrete room open to the sky, where a string quartet plays day and night. Collect the key from the museum, drive out on the red dirt, and step inside.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 30](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-30.md) - Gladstone Harbour, Queensland, where seagrass meadows and oyster reefs are being restored side by side. Photo: Jack Bain, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Good morning. This week begins in Gladstone Harbour, where seagrass meadows and oyster reefs are being planted back side by side in a trial an insure…
- [Seagrass and oysters, planted side by side: the Gladstone trial an insurer is paying for](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/chubb-reef.md) - Seagrass meadows feed the turtles and dugongs and store carbon faster than a rainforest. In Gladstone Harbour they are being replanted beside new oyster reefs, in a trial paid for by an insurance company's foundation and run by the people who know the water best.
- [Answers from our own paddocks: the farmers testing regenerative agriculture for five years](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/csiro-farmers.md) - Regenerative farming has plenty of believers and not enough Australian evidence. A five year trial led by farmers' own groups, with CSIRO measuring, sets out to find what works in old soils and unpredictable rain.
- [A cleared paddock near Coonamble is going back to Weeping Myall woodland, 968 hectares of it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/coonamble-myall.md) - Weeping Myall woodland once ran across the western plains and most of it was cleared for cropping and grazing. On a property near Coonamble, a farming company is planting almost a thousand hectares of it back, with the grazing to follow once the trees are up.
- [Orangutan mothers walk their babies to play dates, and it costs them: fifteen years of watching in Borneo](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/orangutan-playdates.md) - Orangutans live mostly alone, which leaves their young short of playmates. Fifteen years of watching mothers and infants in a Bornean forest shows the mothers fixing that themselves, walking further and eating less so the children can wrestle.
- [Where did all the Christmas beetles go? This year's Awards for Nature will find out](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/awards-nature.md) - A national network to find out where the Christmas beetles went, 25,000 native plantings on Ngarrindjeri Country, and a shorebird patrol at Shark Bay. Five projects shared $150,000 this week, and every one of them is the patient kind.
- [The biggest wildlife bridge in North America is working: crashes with animals down 91 per cent](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/wildlife-overpass.md) - Before December, the stretch of Interstate 25 between Larkspur and Monument averaged about one serious crash with an animal a day. Then the biggest wildlife bridge on the continent opened above it, and the elk started using it.
- [Twenty minutes with the birds: the Aussie Bird Count is on this week, and anyone can join](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bird-count.md) - Sit in your favourite outdoor spot for twenty minutes, write down the birds you see, and press submit. That is the whole job, and last year nearly 64,000 people did it and counted more than five million birds.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 29](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-29.md) - A lagoon ringed by woodland on Kendall River Station, Cape York Peninsula. Photo: Justine Hausheer, The Nature Conservancy. Good morning. This week begins in the far north of Queensland, where two stations on the Gulf Plains and one on Cape York Peninsula, almost 396,000 hectares of wetlands, water…
- [Three cattle stations the size of a small country are now Queensland's newest protected land](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/queensland-stations.md) - Two stations on the Gulf Plains and one on Cape York Peninsula, almost 396,000 hectares of wetlands, waterholes and savanna woodland, are joining Australia's protected area network. Queensland bought them with The Nature Conservancy and two philanthropic partners.
- [Uluru's mala are back to nearly 500, and a robot dog walks the fence](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/uluru-mala.md) - Mala, the rufous hare wallaby, vanished from the wild in 1991. Twenty four were brought home to Uluru in 2005. This May, Anangu, Mala Rangers and park staff counted them at nearly 500.
- [Up to three million people lived in the western Amazon two thousand years ago. Then the forest grew back over them](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/aquiry-amazon.md) - Fly a laser scanner over the rainforest of Acre in western Brazil and the ground underneath gives up its secrets: ring after ring of ditches and banks, dug by a people archaeologists now call the Aquiry, who may have numbered three million at their height.
- [Three Barkandji women took a bush medicine to the lab, and kept the knowledge](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/paaru-bush-medicine.md) - Paaru Natural Products was founded by three Malyangapa and Barkandji women on medicinal plant knowledge handed down through their mothers' lines. With CSIRO they have turned it into a process six times more efficient, and the plant's identity never left the room.
- [Three zoo born red wolf pups were slipped into a wild den. Their new mother took them as her own](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/red-wolf-pups.md) - America's rarest wolf lives wild in one corner of North Carolina, fewer than forty animals in all. In April three pups born at a zoo in Missouri were placed in a wild mother's den at seven days old. Months later, the cameras found all three alive and growing.
- [Nine years after the caves went quiet, the bogongs are tiling the walls again](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bogong-comeback.md) - In 2017 the bogong moths all but vanished. People who climbed into the alpine caves that spring found bare rock. This October the moths are back in their billions, and at Zoos Victoria there have been happy tears.
- [Gunlom's pools are open again, on Jawoyn terms](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/gunlom-falls.md) - Gunlom is the waterfall everyone knows, an 85 metre drop with a natural pool at the top looking out over Kakadu. It closed in 2019 and stayed closed for almost six years. On 1 July it opened again, and the reason it took that long is the best part of the story.
- [Twice a week, a grocer's leftovers go up the hill to Dural's wildlife](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/hills-wildlife-sanctuary.md) - On 35 acres of bush at Dural, against Berowra Valley National Park, a sanctuary founded in 1977 has cared for Sydney's injured and orphaned wildlife on volunteer hours and donated food. Twice a week the boxes come up the hill from the Harris Farm store, and now there is a cool room to keep them.
- [Manly to North Head, one blessed morning and four quiet beaches](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/manly-to-north-head.md) - An early start from the ferry, a family of brush turkeys, cockatoos free falling out of the canopy, and a swim I could not resist. Five special places, one short ferry ride from home.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 28](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-28.md) - Giant waterlily pads, the Amazon cousins of the new species, near Iquitos on the Peruvian Amazon. Photo: Unsplash. Good morning. This week begins on a river in eastern Colombia, where a giant waterlily nobody had named was spotted in the background of an Instagram photo and found after a night on t…
- [Hiding in an Instagram photo: a giant waterlily nobody had named](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/victoria-colombiana.md) - In 2021 a Colorado nursery owner posted a photo of himself beside some very large lily pads on a river in eastern Colombia. At Kew, Carlos Magdalena knew no giant waterlily had ever been recorded there. A satellite search and one night boat ride later, Victoria colombiana has a name.
- [A Sunday at Woytopia, and the plates that came back](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/woytopia.md) - We caught the train up the coast on a spring Sunday for Woytopia, the free sustainable living festival the Peninsula Environment Group has run with volunteers since 2008. Here is the day as we lived it, from the first plate to the last tree.
- [Three kilometres under the sheep country, a drill found a coral reef](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/adavale-reef.md) - About 63 kilometres south east of Blackall, Geoscience Australia drilled three kilometres down looking for rock salt. What came up instead was nearly a kilometre of core packed with fossil corals, sponges, trilobites and ammonites from a reef more than 325 million years old.
- [Two bustards walk out into the Thar Desert, and a ten year wait is over](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bustards-fly.md) - On a Sunday morning in Rajasthan's Thar Desert, two young male Great Indian Bustards, hatched and raised by people, walked out of a soft release pen in Desert National Park and into the wild. Ten years of patient work came down to those first free steps, with 97 more birds growing up behind them.
- [How a speck of pond life became a switch for the brain](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/pond-alga-nobel.md) - Peter Hegemann simply wanted to know how a single celled pond alga finds the light. Thirty years on, the protein he and Georg Nagel found, and that Karl Deisseroth slipped into nerve cells, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In Basel, eye doctors are already giving a little sight back.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 27](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-27.md) - A sea otter in a kelp bed, the same species that is back in Clayoquot Sound. Photo: Mike Baird, CC BY 2.0. Good morning. This week begins under the water off Tofino, where the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, a restoration society and a kelp grower are raising a forest on four long lines and the sea ott…
- [Under the water off Tofino, a First Nation is growing a forest](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/clayoquot-kelp.md) - In Tla-o-qui-aht waters off Tofino, guardians, scientists and a kelp grower are raising baby kelp on four long lines under the sea and planting it out so young salmon and herring have a forest again. About 1,500 sea otters, back after the fur trade, are helping.
- [On Fiji's Coral Coast, a village of 150 people planted 18,000 corals](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/naidiri-fiji.md) - Naidiri is 32 households on Fiji's Coral Coast. Since 2009 it has kept a stretch of its own sea closed to fishing, and in one year planted 18,000 corals and 10,000 mangroves. Now its youth group wants the protected line pushed further out.
- [Blue, the size of a golf ball, and brand new to science](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/blue-octopus.md) - In 2015 a robot camera 1,773 metres down beside Darwin Island caught a small blue octopus crossing the sand, and the scientists watching live could not believe their eyes. This year it got its name, and was described whole, in thousands of X ray slices.
- [On a volcanic island reached twice a week by ferry, Japan found a bird it never knew it had](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/tokara-warbler.md) - Between Yakushima and Amami, the Tokara Islands are twelve specks of volcanic rock with a ferry twice a week. A small olive warbler that sings there every spring is now its own species, Japan's first new bird in 45 years, told apart by its genes and its song.
- [A phone scan, an hour of design, and a new arm made close to home](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/encaja.md) - Fitting a prosthetic arm begins with the socket, and that is slow, skilled work. Laura Echeverri Giraldo of Pereira has won Colombia's James Dyson Award for a system that does it from a phone scan, cuts eight hours of design to one, and prints it in the person's own town.
- [On a Northumberland beach, England's smallest seabird doubled a record that stood since 1994](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/long-nanny-terns.md) - At Long Nanny on the Northumberland coast, National Trust rangers kept watch over the dunes day and night all summer, and 126 pairs of little terns nested there, more than double the 1994 record. At Blakeney Point, a thousand pairs of sandwich terns came back after two years away.
- [Helper, the Utah town that says beavers saved it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/helper-beavers.md) - Helper is an old railway town in the Utah desert, and the Price River through it used to shrink to a trickle. In 2019 a Utah State University student began moving beavers there. Six years on the river runs all year, the fish are back, and the town floats down it all summer.
- [On Maupiti, the breadfruit tells you which fish to eat](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/maupiti-breadfruit.md) - West of Bora Bora, a small island paired every fish with a breadfruit variety so each one got the rest of the year off, and a geographer and a Tahitian researcher have just written down what the islanders carved in stone.
- [An island of two hundred people paid for its own dig, and found a monastery to rival Iona](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/lios-mor.md) - On Lios Mor, a limestone island in Loch Linnhe on Scotland's west coast, the historical society paid for the excavation, islanders dug beside the archaeologists, and a paper out this week says their monastery was melting gold and silver thirteen centuries ago.
- [A ladybird, a glow worm and a fly with eyes on stalks: Australia picks its insect of the year](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/insect-of-the-year.md) - Voting is open in the ABC's Australian Insect of the Year, a tortoise shelled ladybird is in the final six, and the reigning champion is a dragonfly with painted wings.
- [Milk in glass comes home to Timboon](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/milk-in-glass.md) - Schulz Organic Dairy in Timboon has sold milk in returnable glass since 2017, and from July its bottle is made in South Australia instead of shipped in from overseas.
- [An oasis in the Peruvian desert, and the people topping it up by hand](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/huacachina.md) - Five hours south of Lima, a lagoon ringed by palms and sand dunes is a regional conservation area with a new five year plan, a citizens' committee and a monthly top up from a well, while a woman nearby has planted tens of thousands of the desert's own trees.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 25](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-25.md) - The Talbragar fish bed case at Crystal Kingdom, Coonabarabran. Photograph: Oliver Strewe. Good morning. This week begins out past the Warrumbungles, at a small museum in Coonabarabran where a volcano buried a lake 150 million years ago and the fish are still in their glass case, beside the ancestor…
- [A volcano buried a lake, and a museum in Coonabarabran keeps what it saved](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/crystal-kingdom.md) - Out past the Warrumbungles, a museum built from one district's rocks holds Jurassic fish, the leaves of a tree that grew before the Wollemi pine, and the most colourful crystals the volcanoes ever made.
- [Her name means hope, and she is the first wild tiger in Kazakhstan for 70 years](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/umit-tiger.md) - On the last day of July a female Amur tiger called Umit walked out of her enclosure into 450,000 hectares of river forest and reed bed in south east Kazakhstan, the first tiger to live wild there since 1948.
- [Why we love the rain: the science of that smell, and the tiny lives it wakes](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/love-the-rain.md) - That smell when rain lands on warm ground has a name, an Australian one, and behind it is a partnership between soil bacteria and tiny creatures that is 400 million years old.
- [Istanbul's dolphins have names now, and one of them was first photographed in 2012](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bosphorus-dolphins.md) - In the strait that runs through the middle of Istanbul, researchers are photographing dorsal fins the way police photograph fingerprints, and the fins keep coming back with calves beside them.
- [Hippos make their own sunscreen, know their friends by voice, and cannot swim](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/hippos.md) - Everything you think you know about hippos is a little bit wrong, in the best way, and the scientists who spend their nights on African riverbanks have the evidence.
- [He was looking for somewhere to camp, and found a crater 25 kilometres wide](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/uhackatik-crater.md) - An amateur astronomer scrolling satellite maps for a camping spot in Quebec saw a circle that should not have been there. Two years later, geologists flew in and confirmed a crater that had been hiding in plain sight for 390 million years.
- [What the teeth said: 25,000 years ago in Sulawesi, someone found comfort in a nut](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/betel-teeth.md) - Two sets of ancient teeth from Sulawesi carry the same deep grooves and the same chemical trace, and Australian and Indonesian scientists say they tell of people chewing betel nut for comfort 25,000 years ago.
- [A clear box the size of a lunchbox is putting baby coral back on the reef, 56 times faster](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/coral-seedbox.md) - Once a year the Great Barrier Reef spawns in a pink snowstorm, and most of that new life drifts away. A small clear box built by CSIRO and Southern Cross University holds it where it is needed, and the corals are settling in numbers nobody has managed before.
- [One night in a tent resets your body clock](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/one-night-in-a-tent.md) - A weekend under the sky moves your body clock most of the way back to sunrise, and a review of 108 brain studies shows the stress circuits settling within minutes. Here is a place an hour and a half from Sydney to try it.
- [Three new national parks for Victoria, open from 5 October](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/victoria-new-national-parks.md) - On 5 October the Wombat, Pyrenees and Mount Buangor forests become Victoria's first new national parks in more than a decade, after decades of local people looking after them. Greater gliders, platypus and powerful owls live there, and they are a couple of hours from Melbourne.
- [Some cool updates from the Brazilian moringa team](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/moringa-river-water.md) - Ten years ago a team in Brazil chose a tree seed over a chemical. Now that seed pulls microplastics out of drinking water as well as the industry standard, and it is cleaning river water in their laboratory. Professor Adriano Reis and his team sent us their photographs and their story.
- [Tiny red tailed phascogales double at Mt Gibson](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/red-tailed-phascogale.md) - Red tailed phascogales are tiny tree climbing marsupials whose males live a single season. At Mt Gibson in Western Australia the count has just doubled to the most in nine years, and in South Australia they have bred in the wild three years running.
- [Oregon opens the first grid connected wave energy test site in the US](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/pacwave-ocean-energy.md) - Off the Oregon coast the first grid connected wave energy test site in the United States is open after fifteen years of work, with room for twenty machines and a promise to study how they sit with marine life. A Fremantle company is about to put its own wave machine in the sea in Spain.
- [Tucson is planting a million trees where the heat bites hardest](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/tucson-million-trees.md) - Tucson, Arizona had 112 days over 38 degrees in 2024. Its answer is a million trees by 2030, native species chosen for birds and pollinators as much as shade, and up to three free trees for any household on the streets that need them most.
- [Good company, above the water and below](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/shelly-park-pool.md) - How lucky we are, to look after each other and the marine life, together.
- [Twenty patches of San Francisco Bay, all coming back at once](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/san-francisco-bay.md) - Twenty projects around San Francisco Bay have just been funded together, and almost all of them are places you will be able to walk to.
- [Eleven coral nurseries, one morning, and the whole island turns up](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/bonaire-reefiesta.md) - Once a year on Bonaire, divers, snorkelers, dive shop staff and people who simply live there spend a morning tending the island's underwater coral nurseries, then come ashore for a party.
- [Five islands, dredged off the bottom of a lake, turn ten](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/marker-wadden.md) - On a flat grey Dutch lake, engineers dredged sand and clay and silt off the bottom and shaped it into islands, and this week those islands turn ten.
- [In La Paz, no boat leaves until the sharks arrive](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/la-paz-whale-sharks.md) - In the shallow bay off La Paz the biggest fish in the sea comes to feed every winter, and the town has learned to wait for the sharks to arrive before a single boat goes out.
- [Joshua Wilson taught a computer to count birds, then gave it away](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/counting-birds-from-the-air.md) - A researcher in Queensland has built a tool that reads drone photographs and counts every bird in them, and he has given it away to the world.
- [Troy Warry takes the water apart and hands it back clean](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/dubbo-water-twice.md) - A water scientist in central New South Wales has built a plant that takes contaminants apart rather than straining them out, and his town now gets to use the same water twice.
- [Ken Nakajima drew this garden, and spring finishes it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/cowra-blossoms.md) - Australia's largest Japanese garden sits in a country town in the central west of New South Wales, and this weekend it is celebrating its cherry blossom.
- [Boodjamulla comes home to the Waanyi](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/boodjamulla-homecoming.md) - Four hours north west of Mount Isa, a national park of emerald gorges and ancient fossils is Aboriginal land again, and the Waanyi rangers who care for it will keep the gate open for everyone.
- [Head, heart and hands: Kit Shepherd's seventeen years of growing with Transition Bondi](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/kit-shepherd.md) - For seventeen years Kit Shepherd has kept Transition Bondi growing, one cafe scrap bucket at a time, with a pollinator corridor to Tamarama gully in her sights. Now that corridor is coming to her streets, and there is room for you.
- [Painters by the Sea, Cronulla, this Sunday](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/painters-by-the-sea.md) - Cronulla throws its spring party this weekend, a hundred market stalls and fifty food trucks from Friday night to Sunday, and on Sunday afternoon the painters set up their easels by the water, with the money raised going to Relay For Life.
- [Native food festival at Carriageworks this weekend](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/native-food-festival.md) - Finger limes, wattleseed, sea succulents and the people who grow them fill Carriageworks on Saturday and Sunday, with Kylie Kwong and Bruce Pascoe among the cooks and storytellers.
- [On Groote Eylandt, a sea farm that cleans its own water](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/groote-aqua.md) - An Anindilyakwa owned sea farm in the Gulf of Carpentaria is growing sandfish in a closed loop where nothing is wasted, and training the island's own kids to run it.
- [Helen Asu's net found a fish lost for forty years](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/spinach-pipefish.md) - On the Sepik River, a fisherwoman's hand net did what four decades of expeditions could not: two spinach pipefish, last seen by science in 1985.
- [Otter families are back in the heart of Seoul](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/seoul-otters.md) - Twenty years of swapping concrete banks for soil, gravel and reeds has given the Han River something it had not had in living memory: otter parents raising pups in the heart of a city of nearly ten million.
- [Sealers Cove is open again](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/sealers-cove.md) - Wilsons Promontory's most loved overnight walk is back, on a boardwalk rebuilt by crews who camped in the bush for months and lifted the whole thing thirty centimetres for the sea to come.
- [In the Pilliga, five animals nobody had seen for a century are back](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/pilliga-homecoming.md) - Bilbies, wallabies, bettongs, plains mice and bandicoots are digging the Pilliga again, and on 29 June the NSW Government signed on for ten more years of bringing them home.
- [Everyone who lives in Mahon Pool](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/everyone-who-lives-in-mahon-pool.md) - Under the cliffs at North Maroubra, a pool built by hand in the 1930s shares its water with anemones, crabs, blennies, sea hares and the odd octopus. Go at low tide and meet the neighbours.
- [Three hundred became three thousand: the numbat comes home](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/numbat-comeback.md) - In July the world's Red List moved the numbat from Endangered to Near Threatened, after forty years of work by scientists, Perth Zoo and volunteers who count numbats from a slow car and raise the money at bingo nights.
- [Two days of climbing through cloud, and a frog nobody had named](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/lynchius-frog.md) - On the sandstone summits of Ecuador's Cordillera del Condor, a frog small enough to sit on a fingertip has been described for the first time. Her name honours a botanist, and the same museum team found the glass frog we told you about in August.
- [China's electric cars, and the air, measured from space](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/china-electric-cars-air.md) - Published in Nature Health: satellite readings across 150 Chinese cities show fine particle pollution 23.8 per cent lower than it would have been without electric cars, and a great deal of breathing made easier.
- [Raven is in orbit, listening to the animals](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/raven-satellite.md) - A shoebox sized satellite built in Europe is the first of six that will hear from tiny tags on wild animals up to six times a day, a cheetah in Namibia among them.
- [London's children are breathing easier, and their lungs show it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/london-children-breathe.md) - Five years of measuring more than 3,400 children in London and Luton found that as the air cleared, young lungs grew faster and caught up: a result published this August in The Lancet Public Health.
- [One echidna, or five?](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/one-echidna-or-five.md) - Associate Professor Stewart Nicol has spent more than forty years with echidnas. His review of decades of research finds one species living five quite different lives, and that matters for every carer and zoo in the country.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 20](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-20.md) - Eight new stories this Wednesday morning, from the marine parks to the canoe country of Minnesota.
- [Have your say on 44 marine parks](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/marine-parks-review.md) - Off the Coral Sea, seabird islands have just been found healthy from end to end. Behind them, Parks Australia is writing six new plans for every Commonwealth marine park, and the public window is open until 4pm on Wednesday 30 September.
- [Canoe country, kept clean by a signature](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/boundary-waters.md) - Minnesota has stopped state permits for copper mining across the watershed that feeds the Boundary Waters, the great American wilderness where the only way through is by paddle.
- [Good news lands when it is felt together](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/sharing-good-news.md) - A new study from the University of California San Diego on what happens when we share good news finds the magic is not in understanding the teller. It is in feeling glad alongside them.
- [One more shared meal, and life feels better](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/shared-meals.md) - Researchers at Oxford, Harvard, UCL and Gallup put a number on something every family table already knows: people who eat with others more often are happier, wherever in the world they live.
- [Iceland fills its ditches back in](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/iceland-peatlands.md) - Thirty four thousand kilometres of ditches drained Iceland's lowland bogs last century. An eight million euro project is now closing them, one landowner at a time, for the birds that fly there every spring to nest.
- [Egypt backs the world's toughest coral](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/egypt-coral-fund.md) - From Hurghada to Marsa Alam, the reefs of the Red Sea shrug off heat that bleaches coral elsewhere. Now they have a fund of their own, help for the small businesses that live by them, and mooring buoys so boats stop dropping anchor on them.
- [Kyoto learns white from snow and lotus](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/kyoto-white-foam.md) - Published in Nature this week: a plastic film that is brilliantly white and sheds water like a lotus leaf, with no titanium dioxide and none of the forever chemicals that usually do that job.
- [A reed raft cleans Phillip Island's water](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/phillip-island-wetlands.md) - On a treatment lagoon at Cowes, a floating garden the size of a tennis court and a half has spent two years quietly doing the work of machinery, and the numbers from the world first trial are in.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 19](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-19.md) - 149 new deep sea species off Christmas Island, five marine reserves for Otago, a swamp bought twice, poems that plant trees, and the kites over Bondi today.
- [Sharks, whales and teddy bears over the surf: Festival of the Winds is today](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/festival-of-the-winds.md) - Festival of the Winds has turned Bondi Beach into a moving painting every September since 1978. This year's is today, Sunday 13 September, it is free, and the best way in is the train and a walk down the hill.
- [Off Christmas Island, the deep sea just gave up 149 new species](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/christmas-island-seamounts.md) - Two voyages to the seamounts around Christmas Island and the Cocos Keeling Islands brought home more than a thousand kinds of animal, and 149 of them had never been seen by science.
- [Thyme, rose and clove: the spray taking copper's place in French vineyards](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/eden-research-vineyards.md) - France has stopped selling most copper fungicides, the standby of organic vineyards for a century. Into the gap steps a spray from Oxfordshire made of three plant oils, wrapped in yeast cells so the rain sets them free.
- [In Liverpool, stale bread is being turned into the oil that replaces palm](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/clean-food-group.md) - A yeast first found on grape skins eats surplus loaves and fills itself with fat. A company born in a Bath laboratory is now brewing it by the hundred thousand litres near Liverpool, and the oil behaves just like palm oil.
- [Two hundred people bought a swamp, twice](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/wirey-swamp.md) - In the far west of Victoria, a small trust asked its supporters to help buy a drained wetland and bring the water back. They did it in 2025, then did it again this winter, and a flower thought lost from the district turned up in the reeds.
- [Write a poem about Country, and a tree goes in the ground for it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/poem-forest.md) - POEM FOREST plants a native tree in Wollongong for every nature poem a student or teacher sends in. More than 22,800 are already growing, and this year's round closes on 25 September.
- [Four things for spring, all made here from what the country already has](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/spring-four-things.md) - Spring is here, and so are four things worth having on the bench or in the pantry: a trowel pressed from bottle caps, a nursery of the native plants our birds and insects depend on, native flavours for the pantry, and furniture that comes back to be made again.
- [Otago's coast gets five marine reserves, and Kāi Tahu rangers to keep them](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/otago-marine-reserves.md) - On 1 July, five new marine reserves came into force along the coast south of Dunedin, three hundred and eight square kilometres of sea where nothing is taken, and Kāi Tahu rangers now share the keeping of them.
- [Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 18](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/issue-18.md) - Money flowing to nature: the Nari Nari buy back the Great Cumbung, your super owns a battery by the Murray, gliders move into boxes, salmon come home, a new walk near Ballarat, Lismore's rainforest returns, titanium that floats, packaging grown in the dark.
- [In the Great Southern Forest, the gliders are moving into the boxes](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/tallaganda-gliders.md) - Tallaganda lost many of its old hollow trees in the fires. Scientists hung 120 insulated boxes in their place, greater gliders moved in and raised joeys, and now men's sheds are building the next batch.
- [Your super just bought a battery beside the Murray](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/summerfield-battery.md) - Two million nurses, teachers, carers and public servants now own a share of South Australia's biggest battery, sitting on one hectare near Mannum, through the funds that hold their retirement savings.
- [Thirty thousand salmon came home to the Mendocino coast](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/coho-salmon.md) - Twenty five years of pulling out culverts, laying logs and letting creeks bend again, and last winter the most endangered coho in California came back in numbers nobody working on those rivers had ever seen.
- [Ten thousand steps through the place of plenty, five kilometres from Ballarat](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/woowookarung.md) - Woowookarung Regional Park turned ten this winter with a new eight kilometre loop, a new bridge, and a Welcome to Country from the daughter of the Elder who welcomed its first walkers a decade ago.
- [In Lismore the rainforest is coming back to the river, and you can help plant it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/lismore-rainforest-to-river.md) - More than 17,000 native plants are in the ground across sixteen sites in Lismore, some already taller than the people who planted them, and three spring planting mornings are open to anyone with a spare pair of hands.
- [Titanium that floats, printed in Melbourne](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/floating-titanium.md) - Metal lattices are wonderfully light and always sink. An RMIT team in Melbourne has printed a titanium one that floats, shrugs off seawater, and is stronger than the steel and plastic in every jetty and buoy.
- [In a dark room in Auckland, the packaging is growing itself](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/mushroom-material.md) - Mushroom Material feeds fungus roots on wood chips and cardboard, dries the result into little white marshmallows, and presses them into the shapes polystyrene used to fill. It composts at home in under three months.
- [At the end of the Lachlan, the Great Cumbung comes home to the Nari Nari](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/great-cumbung.md) - Where the Lachlan River spreads into reed beds and red gum forest before it meets the Murrumbidgee, 34,000 hectares of wetland now belong to the Nari Nari Tribal Council, bought with a $15 million loan and twenty five years of patience.
- [Celebrating all of our amazing fathers](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/seahorse-dads.md) - It is Father's Day in Australia, and to all the fathers out there, we hope you have the best day. One underwater father we would like you to meet is the endangered White's Seahorse, a doting dad who takes care of all the babies, with little hotels helping to take his kind off the endangered list.
- [September is platypus season, and the Royal has twenty to prove it](https://www.earthtoseanews.com/royal-platypus.md) - This month everyone in eastern Australia is invited to sit by a creek for an hour and look for a platypus. In Royal National Park, where they came back three years ago, the babies are now being born wild.

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