Underwater footage revealed that the killer whales were also following dolphins on their dives of up to 60 metres. File photo.AFP / FRANCO BANFI
A pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins off the coast of British Columbia have been observed cooperating with orcas, a traditional enemy that is better known for taking out great white sharks than friendly interaction.
Scientists say they have documented the dolphins and a local population of killer whales known as Northern Resident orcas teaming up to hunt the orcas’ staple food: salmon. Though other groups of orcas feast on dolphins, Northern Residents do not. Still, it is the first time this type of cooperative behaviour has been documented between the two marine mammals, researchers reported.
“Seeing them dive and hunt in sync with dolphins completely changes our understanding of what those encounters mean,” said Sarah Fortune, Canadian Wildlife Federation chair in large whale conservation and an assistant professor in Dalhousie University’s oceanography department. Fortune was the lead author of the study, which published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
To witness the dolphins and orcas interacting, the researchers captured drone footage as well as underwater video by attaching suction tags to the orcas that were equipped with cameras and hydrophones.
Their footage showed that the killer whales travelled toward the dolphins and followed them at the surface level. The underwater footage revealed that the killer whales were also following dolphins on their dives of up to 60 metres, where the orcas were able to prey on Chinook salmon.
Though light levels are low at those depths, Fortune said cameras picked up the killer whales catching salmon, with clouds of blood billowing from their mouths, and hydrophones picked up the crunch of a kill.
To understand better what was happening, the researchers also eavesdropped on the echolocation clicks made by dolphins and orcas, which allow animals to navigate and sense their environment by listening to the returned echoes of the noises they make. “We can look at the characteristics of these clicks to infer whether a whale is actively chasing a prey for a fish and also whether it may have caught the fish,” Fortune said.
The researchers recorded 258 instances of dolphins and orcas interacting between 15 and 30 August 2020.
They found that all the whales that interacted with dolphins also engaged in killing, eating and searching for salmon.
Put together, the data Fortune and her colleagues collected suggested that the killer whales, fearsome predators able to take on great whites and whale sharks several times their size, were essentially using the dolphins as scouts.
“By hunting with other echolocating animals like the dolphins, they might be increasing their acoustic field of view, providing greater opportunity to detect where the salmon are. That’s sort of the prevailing thought here,” she explained. Using dolphins in this way would also allow the orcas to conserve energy, with salmon often hiding at depths to try and avoid predators such as orcas.
But what do dolphins get out of the interactions?
The video Fortune and her colleagues collected showed that once the orcas caught their prey and shared it with the pod, the dolphins were quick to eat the leftovers.
But salmon isn’t a core part of a dolphin’s diet, so greater access to food likely wasn’t the sole motivation, Fortune said. By hanging out with the orcas, dolphins likely gain protection from other orca pods that pass through the area and hunt dolphins.
In addition to the salmon-eating Northern Resident killer whales, the region is home to a distinct type of orca known as the Bigg’s or transient killer whales that specialize in eating marine mammals such as dolphins.
Interactions between Northern Residents and dolphins have occurred off north-eastern Vancouver Island for at least three decades, according to Brittany Visona-Kelly, a senior manager at Canadian conservation group Ocean Wise’s Whales Initiative, who wasn’t involved in this research but has studied the interactions between dolphins, porpoises and the same population of orcas.
In her experience, it was the dolphins that initiated interaction with the killer whales, not the other way around, and she said she was sceptical that the two were genuinely engaging in cooperative foraging. Instead, she said, the orcas may have viewed the dolphins as an annoying pest that was easier to put up with than get rid of.
“Over several years of observations, we concluded that dolphins and porpoises – not killer whales – benefit most from these encounters. Dolphins and porpoises likely gain protection from their primary predator,” she said via email.
“We suggest that Northern Resident killer whales derive no clear benefits from these interactions, but that actively avoiding or resisting them may impose greater energetic costs than tolerating them,” she added.
Fortune, however, said her team’s findings upended the prevailing view among scientists of the interactions.
“Under that paradigm, the dolphins would need to be just kind of hanging out at the surface, grubbing scraps, not exerting time and energy and effort in the process, which they certainly are,” she said, adding that her team found no evidence of antagonistic or avoidant behaviour by the orcas toward the dolphins.
What’s more, the research by Fortune and her colleagues was the first time underwater footage has been used to understand the behaviour, she added.
Cooperation between different species is relatively common in nature, but rarer among mammals and typically doesn’t involve predators, said Judith Bronstein, University Distinguished Professor in the University of Arizona’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, who studies interspecies cooperation. However, she noted that coyotes had been observed hunting with badgers and opossums with ocelots.
Many species feed together, Bronstein said, noting that “mixed flocks of birds, mixed shoals of fish, for instance, all look out for predators.”
“What’s cool about this example is that each of the species has different abilities,” she said, “and when you look at collaboration between species, you’re always looking for the benefit that outweighs the cost.”
– CNN
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Prams, towels, bikes and booster seats are just some of the belongings left at Bondi Beach after Sunday’s terrorist attack, with locals asking how something like this can happen in their country.
Mourners were at the memorial area at Bondi Pavilion since the early hours.
Some cry while others straighten the Star of David flag at the foot of the growing pile of flowers.
A woman, who did not want to be named, said she and others helped to pick up the discarded items and lay them out together.
They sit near the waterfront memorial of flowers and messages over looking the sea.
sraeli Ambassador to Australia arrives in Bondi.RNZ/Charlotte Cook
“I found two prams, I found a didgeridoo …. people left their car keys … just lying there in the sand.”
Local and business owner Tom Pontidas said said there was an eerie feeling this morning at the beach – it’s cloudy and quiet, the roads are closed and there are police and blue tape everywhere.
New Zealand champion surfer Frankie Lewis, who is from Dunedin but lives in the Gold Coast, was visiting Bondi and enjoying the beautiful weather on Sunday when she heard what she first thought was fireworks.
“I remember standing up and I said it was too early for fireworks, that sounded like a gunshot,” Lewis told RNZ.
“Moments later, we saw thousands of people running, running for their lives.”
She ran to the back door of the cafe she was at to open the gate and let people in for safety.
She started calling for people to come inside.
“A lot of tourists had nowhere to go,” she said.
“They were screaming and crying and I said ‘you’re safe hear’.”
Lewis said lots of people ran into the cafe, including a pregnant women, children and a woman in a wheelchair, to take shelter.
“We just had this melting pot of people who were terrified.”
The shots kept coming, and then it went quiet, and they could hear the police, she said.
“It was the most terrifying thing, but we were all together.”
Her friend Daniela Pontidas said she was “incredible” in taking everyone in.
Daniela and her husband Tom Pontidas, co-owners of Lamrock Cafe in Bondi, said people were hiding in their cafe’s cool room and toilets.
Daniela Pontidas said she also thought the sounds that day were fireworks.
“But when I looked out the window and you just see … people running with this terror on their faces and then you’re heart drops.
“There was a mass swarm of people screaming in terror.”
Tom Pontidas said the fear on peoples’ faces is what stuck him.
He said the event will be traumatising for those there that day, and the family of those who died.
And possibly some anger – people asking ‘how can this happen here’ – he said.
“How can it happen here? How can it happen in Bondi, in Australia?”
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
sraeli Ambassador to Australia arrives in Bondi.RNZ/Charlotte Cook
Prams, towels, bikes and booster seats are just some of the belongings left at Bondi Beach after Sunday’s terrorist attack, with locals asking how something like this can happen in their country.
Mourners were at the memorial area at Bondi Pavilion since the early hours.
Some cry while others straighten the Star of David flag at the foot of the growing pile of flowers.
A woman, who did not want to be named, said she and others helped to pick up the discarded items and lay them out together.
They sit near the waterfront memorial of flowers and messages over looking the sea.
“I found two prams, I found a didgeridoo …. people left their car keys … just lying there in the sand.”
Local and business owner Tom Pontidas said said there was an eerie feeling this morning at the beach – it’s cloudy and quiet, the roads are closed and there are police and blue tape everywhere.
New Zealand champion surfer Frankie Lewis, who is from Dunedin but lives in the Gold Coast, was visiting Bondi and enjoying the beautiful weather on Sunday when she heard what she first thought was fireworks.
“I remember standing up and I said it was too early for fireworks, that sounded like a gunshot,” Lewis told RNZ.
“Moments later, we saw thousands of people running, running for their lives.”
She ran to the back door of the cafe she was at to open the gate and let people in for safety.
She started calling for people to come inside.
“A lot of tourists had nowhere to go,” she said.
“They were screaming and crying and I said ‘you’re safe hear’.”
Lewis said lots of people ran into the cafe, including a pregnant women, children and a woman in a wheelchair, to take shelter.
“We just had this melting pot of people who were terrified.”
The shots kept coming, and then it went quiet, and they could hear the police, she said.
“It was the most terrifying thing, but we were all together.”
Her friend Daniela Pontidas said she was “incredible” in taking everyone in.
Daniela and her husband Tom Pontidas, co-owners of Lamrock Cafe in Bondi, said people were hiding in their cafe’s cool room and toilets.
Daniela Pontidas said she also thought the sounds that day were fireworks.
“But when I looked out the window and you just see … people running with this terror on their faces and then you’re heart drops.
“There was a mass swarm of people screaming in terror.”
Tom Pontidas said the fear on peoples’ faces is what stuck him.
He said the event will be traumatising for those there that day, and the family of those who died.
And possibly some anger – people asking ‘how can this happen here’ – he said.
“How can it happen here? How can it happen in Bondi, in Australia?”
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Austen’s six novels – including Emma and Pride and Prejudice – were groundbreaking in the early 1800s.
As a pioneer of free indirect style and the marriage plot, her mastery has inspired many homages and imitations — both on the page and the screen — over the last two centuries.
On the 250th anniversary of her birthday, we look back at Austen’s life and legacy.
A portrait of Jane Austen based on a drawing by her sister Cassandra.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Lifeis a French film about a fan of the great novelist, who goes to England as part of an Austen residency and soon her life starts to echo an Austen romance. But which one?
Who was Jane Austen?
Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in the village of Steventon in rural Hampshire, where her father, the Reverend George Austen, was a clergyman.
Her mother, Cassandra, was “known for her poems and her wit”, Devoney Looser, who is a professor of English at Arizona State University, tells ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.
“She had two very interesting parents, but they were not by any means a family of great wealth.”
Jane Austen fans pose at at Winchester Cathedral with a Bank of England £10 note featuring the author’s portrait.
AFP
The Austens were what’s often described as lower gentry: people of ‘good birth’ who weren’t landowners themselves.
The Austen home was an “intellectual environment” but one in which money was tight.
To supplement the family’s income, George Austen took in a series of male students, to the ultimate benefit of his daughter’s education.
“There were, one scholar has estimated, 19 different boys who spent some years of their lives in this clergyman Reverend George Austen’s home,” Looser says.
“In effect, Jane Austen didn’t just grow up as a clergyman’s daughter; she grew up in a boys’ school.”
Early signs of genius
Austen is believed to have started writing when she was 11. She made copies of some of these early works, written between 1787 and 1798, later published as her juvenilia.
Looser says that while many critics initially dismissed this early writing as lightweight, it is now viewed more favourably.
“You can see her brilliance, her genius in these works from 11, 12, 13 years old. It’s quite incredible.”
Her early work often played on sending up the literary conventions of the day to comic effect.
“The juvenilia is filled with drunkenness, adultery, murder – not the things you necessarily associate with the mature Jane Austen, the Jane Austen of the six major novels,” Looser says.
Devoney Looser is a professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive and Untamed Jane.
Supplied
The collected works of Jane Austen
Aspiring authors, take heart: Austen’s first attempts to have her work published were unsuccessful.
One of Austen’s novels (no one is sure which) that her father submitted to a publisher in the 1790s was rejected sight unseen.
In 1803, she sold a manuscript for £10 ($NZ30) to a publisher, who, for reasons unknown, refused to either publish the novel or return it to her.
(Her brother eventually acquired the novel back in 1816, and it was published as Northanger Abbey in 1817).
While Austen was a prolific writer, she had to wait until she was 35 to see her first novel in print.
Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, was a reworking of her first full-length novel, Elinor and Marianne, written years earlier. No copies of the earlier manuscript survive.
Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 drama series Pride and Prejudice.
BBC
In 1813, Austen published her next novel, Pride and Prejudice — also based on an early draft, known as First Impressions, that she began in 1797, when she was 21.
She published two more novels in her lifetime: Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816).
Another two novels — Northanger Abbey and Persuasion — were published after her death in July 1817.
Austen published her novels anonymously and was relatively little-known during her lifetime, but news of her true identity soon began to spread thanks to the likes of the Prince Regent (later King George IV), who was “a notorious gossip”.
“Once the Prince Regent knows your identity, you can assume that the cat’s out of the bag,” Looser says.
The woman behind the books
To the great disappointment of Austen fans and biographers alike, most of her letters were destroyed after her death, some by her sister Cassandra and others by her niece Fanny. Only 160 of her missives remain.
The first published biography of the author, written by her brother Henry just months after her death, presented Austen as a saintly and, it must be said, dull figure.
“He says that her life was not a life of event. This is obviously not true,” Looser says.
“We can tell from her letters that she was not someone who was boring and nice and faultless. She had a rapier wit, and she wasn’t afraid to use it, especially in private.”
Camille Rutherford and Pablo Pauly in the 2024 French comedy Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.
supplied
Looser makes a case against Austen’s perceived mildness in her 2025 book Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive and Untamed Jane.
While Austen wasn’t an out-and-out radical, she broke with social convention in her efforts to become a published author.
“Certainly, she was not the wildest person of her day, but there were things that she was doing that were really outside of what was proper. They were outside of what was conventionally feminine,” Looser says.
“The ideal woman was supposed to be passive and quiet, and not unlike what Henry Austin describes in his biographical notice of her in 1818.
“This is clearly not who Jane Austen was.”
Looking for clues in her novels
Many have turned to her writing to learn more about who the elusive Austen really was.
“Clearly, she has a sense of what it means to be good, and her characters who do good and behave in ways that are good have better ends,” Looser says.
What differentiates Austen from her contemporaries is the way she dispenses justice in her novels.
“She goes a little light on her villains,” Looser says. “She’s responding to a very strong didactic moralising tradition in her era that kills off the villain or sends them away … They die a tragic death because they’re bad. She doesn’t do that.
“She lets her most flawed and villainous characters have a different kind of bad end. Often, they’re punished by being around other people who are really unpleasant … and I think that too is a kind of morality. But it’s not a punishment in the way that we generally think of it from fiction of this period.”
She introduced a new breed of sassy female protagonist in characters like Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse.
“Her heroines are not pictures of perfection,” Looser says.
“Their flaws are part of what make them interesting and, arguably, even good.”
ALBERT LLOP
Irish author Colm Tóibín, an avowed Austen fan, has found other common themes running through her work.
“She loves a sailor,” he says, noting that Austen’s youngest brother Charles was a rear-admiral in the navy.
“In Jane Austen, anyone who’s in the navy is good, anyone who’s in the army is bad, and anyone who has inherited money is suspect.”
A real-life marriage plot
Austen never married, but her life wasn’t without romance. When she was 20, she formed a brief amorous attachment to Tom Lefroy, a neighbour who was, unfortunately, as impecunious as she, and the match went nowhere.
Then, in 1802, she accepted the proposal of one Harris Bigg-Wither, the brother of a friend, but changed her mind 24 hours later.
Looser says the one-day engagement shows that Austen was ambivalent about the institution of marriage.
Jane Austen’s bed at Jane Austen’s House Museum in England.
Eurasia Press / Photononstop via AFP
Bigg-Wither appears to have been a somewhat prickly character, but he stood to inherit extensive family estates that would have assured Austen’s economic future — no small thing in Regency England.
“It seems likely from what we know of her fiction that she wasn’t in love with him,” Looser says.
“It would have been a good match. She would have had economic comfort. She would have taken herself off the family balance sheet, so in that sense it would have been a gift to her father and brothers, but she put herself first by taking back her ‘yes’.”
It’s a decision that Looser believes mirrors the fictitious Elizabeth Bennett’s refusals of marriage – and one that paid off for Austen.
By the time of her death, the author had achieved a degree of economic independence, earning £700 ($NZ1,617) from her books, a significant sum for the time.
Life beyond death
In a tragic turn of fate, Austen died of an unknown illness when she was just 41.
In addition to her six novels, she left two unfinished fragments, Sanditon and The Watsons.
In the years since her death, her literary reputation has continued to grow to the point where she is now considered one of the giants of the English canon.
The title page from the first edition of the first volume of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Her work has provided rich fodder for the screen, too. The first television adaptation of an Austen novel was a BBC production of Pride and Prejudice in 1938.
Many more have followed, including the 1995 six-part series starring Colin Firth in a famously damp shirt as Mr Darcy, and the 2005 film version, which starred a dishevelled Keira Knightley rambling through the muddy English countryside.
While many Austen adaptations are faithful to the period, others — like the inimitable Clueless, a reworking of Emma — have reimagined her work in a contemporary setting.
To Tòibìn — who has taught Austen’s novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, in his creative writing classes at Columbia University — this longevity is no surprise.
“The more you study them and disentangle them, deconstruct them, the more perfect they seem,” he says.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Lord Fakafanua is Tonga’s new prime minister.VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
The election of a noble to lead Tonga’s next government is raising concerns over the direction of the country’s democracy.
Lord Fakafanua, 40, beat incumbent prime minister Dr ‘Aisake Eke – the only other nominee – in Monday’s vote for the top job. The country’s 26 elected representatives cast ballots for the two candidates, with Fakafanua winning 16 votes to 10.
It comes about four weeks after the cohort were elected in the country’s general election on 20 November.
Fakafanua, set to be Tonga’s youngest ever prime minister, spoke to RNZ Pacific following the vote and identified unity in the new parliament as a top priority.
“What I wanted to advocate for was for us to look back at our roots and our foundation as a nation, so we can work together,” he said.
“Because this continued divisive politics is not only a waste of energy and taxpayers’ money, but it directs us away from the real priorities, and that’s to lift poverty and build the economy and help lower the cost of living.”
Lord Fakafanua, 40, is set to be Tonga’s youngest ever prime minister, but not everyone is convinced having a nobles’ representative as the country’s leader is the best way forward. RNZ Pacific / Teuila Fuatai.Teuila Fuatai
Fakafanua entered politics at age 24 in 2008 after being elected as a nobles’ representative for Ha’apai. At age 27, he was elected to the role of speaker, becoming the youngest person to ever hold the role.
Since then, he has been praised for his ability to maintain control of the debating chamber and different factions in Tonga’s Legislative Assembly.
As prime minister designate, Fakafanua will now be looking towards picking his cabinet, which must be approved and appointed by the King. He reiterated his desire for stability in a new government following Monday’s vote.
“I would love to build a cabinet built on a general consensus for the 26 members of parliament,” he said.
However, despite Fakafanua’s message of cohesiveness, pro-democracy advocates have warned that having a noble at the helm of the government is a slide backwards for Tonga’s democracy.
In 2010, the country’s constitutional reforms were implemented to shift the balance of power from the King and the nobles to the people. Now, the Legislative Assembly is made up of 17 people’s representatives, which are elected by the general public, and nine nobles’ representatives, elected in a separate voting process by the nobles.
When Fakafanua is formally appointed to the role of prime minister by King Tupou VI, it will be the second time a nobles’ representative has led the government since the reforms.
Former political adviser Lopeti Senituli said while he believed Fakafanua had performed well as speaker, he feared that a noble as prime minister signalled a shift in power back to the monarchy.
Lopeti Senituli is concerned by some of the political manouvres being made in Tonga.ABC News
“What I’m worried about is that the reassertion of the nobility and the King’s control of government.
“The political reform that we adopted in 2010 was the relocation of what is called executive authority – that was transferred from absolute authority of the King to shared executive authority between the King and the elected prime minister.”
Senituli warned that a nobles’ representative as prime minister effectively resulted in less checks on the King and nobles’ powers because they were not accountable to the general public in the same way a peoples’ representatives are through the four-yearly general election vote.
He also pointed to the role of speaker and deputy speaker in parliament, which can only be held by nobles’ representatives. Lord Vaea, the brother of Queen Nanasipau’u was elected the new speaker of parliament at yesterday’s vote, while Lord Tu’iha’agana was elected deputy speaker.
“No people’s representatives can be elected to those two positions,” Senituli said. “So, we are at a disadvantage because the nobles have control over parliament and the deputy speaker and the speaker of parliament.”
Teisa Pohiva, daughter of the late pro-democracy leader and former prime minister ‘Akilisi Pohiva, went a step further and said the outcome of the vote was a “sad day” for Tonga’s democratic reforms.
In a post on Facebook, she highlighted the disparity between the election process for nobles’ representatives like Fakafanua and peoples’ representatives. Both voting processes take place on polling day, however only nobles vote towards the nine nobles’ representatives resulting in a far smaller voting pool.
“New prime minister elect Lord Fakafanua – elected by three people into parliament and elected by 16 Parliamentarians to prime minister,” Pohiva wrote.
She also pointed out the close links between Fakafanua and King Tupou VI.
Fakafanua is a member of the Tonga’s royal family through his mother – who was a granddaughter of the beloved Queen Salote III. He has noble lineage through his father, who held the Fakafanua title before him. His sister is also married to Crown Prince Tupouto’a Ulukalala.
However, despite the criticisms, Fakafanua remains focused on the next steps.
He told RNZ Pacific he understands the new parliament is due to have its first sitting on 19 January, when the MPs and cabinet will be sworn in.
He said he feels “very privileged” to be elected to the role of prime minister and is committed to doing everything he can for the people for Tonga.
“I look forward to working with everyone and hope to have the support from everyone in the country, so that the aspiration of uniting the nation and bringing us all to work towards a common goal is realised.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Australia is mourning 15 people shot dead in the Bondi terror attack, with thousands attending vigils in Sydney and Melbourne.
Sixteen people – including one of two gunmen – were killed after a father and son opened fire at a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach.
Australian officials described it as a targeted, anti-semitic terror attack.
Overnight, Sydney’s iconic Opera House was lit up with an image of candles on a menorah, and thousands attended vigils held in multiple states. International leaders have also condemned the attack.
Australian actress Rachael Carpani has died, aged 45.
Carpani was best known for her role as Jodi Fountain on the hit show McLeod’s Daughters.
In an Instagram post Carpani’s parents Tony and Gael say Carpani “unexpectedly but peacefully passed away after a long battle with chronic illness”.
She died in the early hours of Sunday.
“Rest in Peace our beautiful girl….the “baby” of our MD family….” McLeod’s Daughters co-star Bridie Carter wrote in a tribute on Instagram.
“We love you, we cherish you…. This is the wrong order of things. We are better people for having the privilege of sharing time with you…
“May your blessed spirit, so vivid, so full of life, laughter, joy generosity, unique talent, energy, fervour, intelligence, resilience, courage and great humour, and a gentle humility, may you rest in peace.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Have you ever thought a font looked “friendly” or “elegant”? Or felt that Comic Sans was somehow unserious? You’re not imagining it.
Typefaces carry personalities, and we react to them more than we realise. My work explores how the shapes of letters can subtly influence our feelings.