Tropical flower production booming thanks to warm Top End dry season

A Northern Territory cut flower grower is struggling to keep up with demand and production is booming thanks to a warm Top End dry season.
         

Mike Braun, who runs a farm at Herbert in Darwin's rural area, thinks it is just a sign of things to come as the climate changes.

Mr Braun said he could not produce enough water lilies, and the Heliconias or lobster claws were also doing very well.

An investment in a second Heliconia plantation just over a year ago is paying off.

Mr Braun cuts flowers every Friday morning, selling around 250 stems to a wholesaler.

The flowers end up in markets and flower shops in Darwin and, in the warmer southern months, they are flown interstate.

Mr Braun said conditions were also good for Heliconia chartacea or "sexy pink", a valuable but temperamental variety that often succumbs to root rot.

"It's very hard to grow, a lot of growers can't grow it any more," he said.

The sexy pinks command a premium in the market place.

Near-blind shark is world’s longest-lived vertebrate

A large, almost-blind shark that lives in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans is officially the world’s longest-living vertebrate, scientists say.

The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) has a lifespan of at least 272 years, and might live as long as 500 years1. That is older than the 211-year lifespan of the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), the previous record-holder in the scientific literature2. It also beats the popular — but unconfirmed — tale of a famous female Koi carp called Hanako, who supposedly lived to 226 years old.

Marine scientists already knew that the Greenland shark was long-lived, says Peter Bushnell, a marine physiologist at Indiana University South Bend and a co-author of the study, published in Science. The fish are enormous but grow slowly, suggesting a long lifespan. Adult Greenland sharks have been measured at more than 6 metres long — and researchers think that they could grow even longer. One 1963 study estimated that the species grows at less than 1 centimetre per year3.

The eyes have it

Instead, the team decided to measure levels of radioactive carbon-14 in fibres in the centre of the shark’s eye lens. Such measurements reflect levels of radiocarbon in the ocean when the lens was first formed. Measurements of 28 female Greenland sharks, made during surveys in 2010–13, suggested that the largest of them (at 5.02 metres long) must have been between 272 and 512 years old at the time.