"Our paper is the first to publish accurate measurements for whale sharks in the field," says PhD candidate Christoph Rohner.
"Other researchers have previously tried to measure the sharks with a tape measure, or by visually estimating size, which is obviously difficult to do accurately," he explains.
"Our ecological footprint - what we take out of the planet - is now 1.3 times the biological capacity of the Earth.
In the words of Professor Bob Watson, Defra's chief scientific adviser and former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we are in danger of approaching "a point of no return".
So the action we take in the... See More next couple of decades will determine whether the stable environment on which human civilization has depended since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago will continue. "
"The Middlemist's Red exists in only two known locations: a greenhouse in the UK, and a garden in New Zealand. Imported to Britain two hundred years ago from China, back when flowers where a luxury item, it has since been exterminated in its original homeland.
The flower is in bloom for the next couple of weeks, and will be the star attraction at the reopening of the Chiswick House, the BBC reports."
"The number of tigers in India's wild has gone up by 20%, according to the latest tiger census, which has surveyed the whole of India for the first time.
The census puts the population of the big cat at 1,706. There were 1,411 tigers at the last count in 2007."
"Forres-based charity Trees for Life will keep the six animals in a 30.4 acre enclosure on its Dundreggan Estate in Glen Moriston, Inverness-shire.
It hopes the boar will control the spread of bracken which shades out other wild plants.
Once a native species, the mammal was hunted to extinction in the UK by the 13th Century. "
Darwin would be heart broken----The Galapagos archipelago has already been transformed by global climate changes and human activity, a report has concluded.
This is messed up, "A series of events, including the 1982 El Nino, overfishing and the appearance of urchins that destroy coral, has altered the islands' marine ecosystems.
At least 45 Galapagos species have now disappeared or are facing extinction. "
The tiny spectral tarsier, one of the shortest and most primitive primates in the world, is caught on camera hunting at night in the jungle of Sulawesi, Indonesia.