Simon Mustoe's Blog: Wildlife in the Balance

Here is my trip report for Raja Ampat and the Banda Sea with Pindito. In the end, one of the earliest and furthest northern cyclones to ever develop in the Arafura Sea (channelling strong winds from the northwest) didn’t detract from our trip’s enjoyment. By implementing the ‘flexible itinerary’ rule, we were able to stay ahead of  unseasonal winds. This made for another memorable trip into this extraordinary part of the world.  

Read the full trip report here

Amazing whale and dolphins

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Have you ever wondered, where are the teachers, doctors and fire fighters in conservation? Of course you haven’t. Why would we ever expect our frontline responders, healthcare professionals and educators to drop what they’re doing and volunteer? Isn’t it strange then, that conservation depends almost entirely on volunteer labour. Doesn’t this deny these and other important people a voice or chance to play a role?

Search and rescue forces running to a destroyed building.

Continue reading Where ar...

A couple of interesting studies came out this week. If any of you have read Wildlife in the Balance you may recall me talking about the number of whales in the world’s oceans in the past. I mentioned, in particular, the impact of species like Blue Whale and Sperm Whale on fisheries and climate. The return of the great whales is something that isn’t talked about that much.

Return of the great whales

In Nature Communications a study titled ‘The global biomass of mammals since 1850’ was recently p...

In the marshmallow challenge a bunch of CEOs and primary school kids were given marshmallows and toothpicks and told to build the tallest structure possible within a certain amount of time. The kids did it faster through rapid experimentation, failure and adaptation. The CEOs procrastinated as they tried to work out how, and took longer. I was reminded of the marshmallow challenge when I was in a talk by an associate from Ozfish the other day.

Continue reading Where kids beat professionals to re...

I’m writing this in the noisy departure lounge of Nadi Airport, Fiji. The plane is delayed a couple of hours, so I thought I’d start thinking about one of the most thought-provoking encounters of our recent trip to Taveuni & the Yasawas: a wonderful encounter with mysterious Sperm Whales.

Many travellers are milling around me right now using Fiji as a hub to traverse the Pacific. It’s amazing the variety of cultures and nationalities that meet here.

Continue reading A wonderful encounter with my...

For the last 10 years I’ve been privileged to know film-makers Nick Hayward (Platypus Guardians, Quoll Farm) and director Mark Pearce. While we worked on a series of short films about Australia, they were completing a love project about Lyrebirds. Nick filmed the infamous Attenborough scene of the birds mimicking chainsaws. This was voted Attenborough’s #1 moment by the British public. But was it real? Or was the bird simply reproducing a sound of natural origin?

Continue reading The Message of ...

The other day I wrote an article about scientific catastrophising. In How to Survive the Next 100 Years: Lessons from Nature I’ve also delved into how news algorithms amplify catastrophe; are often chronically out of data; and that consuming a more balanced diet of information is much better for us. It’s a simple fact that animals behave in surprising ways. What we digest online is mostly there to grab our attention and AI logic amplifies what the internet has already chosen as fact.

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I’ve been away for a couple of weeks taking a group of friends and family to Fiji so this is just a quick udpate. I don’t normally do tours outside of the Pindito trips we do to Indonesia. But this was the chance to bring everyone together at a wonderful place we discovered in Fiji a couple of years ago. Paradise Taveuni is located at the southern end of the country’s eastern division. The island is a barrier to predominant trade winds which makes it a good bet for reasonable swimming weather.

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Last week I was delighted to be invited onto this forum, alongside Marc Oremus of the ShellBank (Turtle) Project, Tia Bool of Project Restore and Matt Singleton from the Odonata Foundation. We were there to talk about how we transform threatened species recovery by thinking differently.

In preparation for the talk, I put together a blog on this subject which you can read here. Here is the few minutes introduction to that article:

Event: How to transform society’s thinking to enable conservatio...

If any of you have followed my writing for long, you’ll know I bestow a grim power on plants. As nature’s first recipients of the Sun’s eroding energy they become destroyers of worlds. Before land animals evolved plants contributed to a mass extinction of almost all sea life. As Gavin Maxwell opined in the wonderful Ring of Bright Water: ‘there is always something a little stifling in this enveloping green stain’. English naturalist John Ray (1627-1705) is attributed to saying ‘Beauty is power; ...