Petra Stock

2 weeks ago | msn.com | Petra Stock

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2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Petra Stock

A tiny, critically endangered bat – roughly the size of a matchbox – can fly about 150km in a single night, new research has found. Southern bent-wing bats roost in caves in south-west Victoria and south-east South Australia. They fly out at night in search of food, eating about half their body weight in insects. Little is known about these foraging flights, so Victoria’s Arthur Rylah Institute tracked bats from the Portland maternity cave 350km west of Melbourne, to see where they went.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Caitlin Cassidy |Petra Stock

Dozens of Victorian public schools will be waiting until after the next state election for key infrastructure projects – promised by the then premier Daniel Andrews in 2022 – to come to fruition. Prior to the November 2022 state election, Andrews pledged to spend $850m upgrading 89 schools, to be completed by the end of 2026. The upgrades were later extended to 96 schools.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Petra Stock

Baby humpback whales are turning up in unexpected places. In Australia, humpback mums were assumed to travel north to give birth in warmer, tropical waters – like the Great Barrier Reef – before migrating south with their calves along the “humpback highway” to feed in waters off Antarctica. But new research, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, has flipped that script, recording newborns as far south as Tasmania, more than 1,500km from the assumed calving zone.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Petra Stock

Scientists have recommended limits on urban beekeeping after a peer-reviewed study found introduced honeybees could be harming Australian native bees and risked driving them to extinction. The Australian research, published in Frontiers in Bee Science, found native bees living in areas with high densities of introduced honeybees had fewer female offspring and a higher death rate in their first year of life.