Now out of the clear blue seas off the islands of Polynesia where scientists have discovered an area teeming with sharks, normally there is a naturally balance with lots of prey and fewer predators, but not so in this case. Our science reporter Jonathan Web told us how this discovery came about.
Well, actually scientists went to this at all. And it is an usual little place. There is a channel running through the middle of it, quite a small channel only about thirty metres deep. They went there because a different type of fish not sharks in fact but a group of fish are known to spawn there. They went there thinking they were gonna study those fish. They ended up finding a huge concentration of grey reef sharks, a higher concentration two or three times higher than it’s been found anywhere else in the world. And so they said about trying to understand what was going on. They tagged some of the sharks. They did a sort of census of the channel.
Because that abundance of, sort of peak predator if you like, something right at the top of the food chain is really hard to sustain. Normally if you add up the biomass in a particular eco system, there’ll be much much more of the things down the bottom, lots and lots of prey and as you’re saying not very many predators so…
So why do they think this happened?
Yes, so they tried to work out exactly what was going on and it turns out that those spawning fish, the ones that they went there to study in the first place were effectively giving a great big delivery. Every winter time those fish would come just for a couple of months of the year from all around the area and spawn in that
particular neighbourhood. Instead of running around to find their prey elsewhere, they will just hang out in the channel for even longer during the winter and feed on those abundant fish just who happened to be there spawning. So it’s an unusual way that the sharks have found to make the most of what’s available and in effect kind of flip the usual food pyramid.
Our science reporter Jonathan Web.
Researchers say they hope the discovery of a new antibiotic found inside the human nose could herald a new age in the fight against superbugs. It follows a research carried out at the University of Tübingen in Germany which found the antibiotic was effective in treating superbug infections in mice. New antibiotics are desperately needed as doctors face the growing challenge of infections that resist current drugs and could become untreatable. Our science editor David Schuchman examines how significant this new discovery could be.
It was back in the 1980s that the last major new type of antibiotic was introduced. And since then several bacteria have built up resistance to the latest drugs.