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Algae Protein…New Source to Feed Animals

Workers clear algae along the coast in Qingdao, Shandong province, China June 12, 2021. Picture taken June 12, 2021. China Daily via REUTERS
Workers clear algae along the coast in Qingdao, Shandong province, China June 12, 2021. Picture taken June 12, 2021. China Daily via REUTERS
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Algae Protein…New Source to Feed Animals

Workers clear algae along the coast in Qingdao, Shandong province, China June 12, 2021. Picture taken June 12, 2021. China Daily via REUTERS
Workers clear algae along the coast in Qingdao, Shandong province, China June 12, 2021. Picture taken June 12, 2021. China Daily via REUTERS

Animal feed is vital for the global food security, but it deeply affects the environment given the amount of greenhouse emissions emitted during its production and processing. Yet, new innovations and techniques could help provide sustainable and clean solutions in this field.

New feed source

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has collaborated with the Ministry of Environment, Water, and Agriculture (MEWA) to produce a new source of animal feed in the KSA.

The new project, which aligns with Vision 2030 and the Saudi Green Initiative's focus on food security, aims at developing new techniques to produce the highest quality of algae protein used as feed for animals such as fish and poultry. The project supports producing local raw material for animal feed and reduces the reliance on imported raw materials. This could help establish a sustainable animal feed industry in Saudi Arabia.

“The microalgae project aligns with the kingdom’s Vision 2030 and the Saudi Green Initiative, and will bring environmental, social, and economic benefits not only for Saudi Arabia, but for the whole world,” said Dr. Ali Al Shaiki, CEO of National Fisheries Development Program.

The project, known as Development of Algal Biotechnology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia- (DABKSA), is overseen by MEWA’s National Fisheries Development Program (NFDP) located on the KAUST campus. The project director in Dr. Claudio Grünewal, joined KAUST in October 2021 from Swansea University in Wales, bringing extensive experience in marine microalgal production, with the engineering expertise needed to design, build and operate high-scale aquaculture installations. Grünewald has delivered several microalgae industrial size projects in different countries such as Spain, Chile, Japan and the United Kingdom.

Pilot program

Phase one consisted of constructing an 870 m2 -experimental facility aimed at studying the feasibility of the high-protein algae. Opened on March 22, the facility provides documented data on the productivity of algae during the first year. The data will be used to assess the feasibility, economic benefits, and sustainability of the project.

Algae grows in both seawater and fresh water, driven by sunlight’s reaction with nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide. In the DABKSA project, algae rich in protein, oils and carbohydrates are planted in systems of outdoor ponds (raceways) and closed tubes (photobioreactors). The concentrated paste is made using a liquid culture (usually conducted in testing tubes), and then it’s freeze dried to make the powdered biomass that will be included in feed for animals.

The project has several environmental benefits, and the limited sources such as soil, water, and energy are being used in growing animals and their feed. It’s also expected to help reduce greenhouse emissions usually produced by the conventional animal feeds.

Algae-based techniques can also contribute to reducing environmental impacts. Among the proposed solutions is feeding the fish the algae-based food, and then reuse the water from the tanks used to grow the fish to grow more algae, which could lead to a circular economy. Algae can grow along the Saudi coasts (3,400 kilometers), the Red Sea, and the Gulf.

Production phase

Once feasibility is demonstrated in Phase I, the Algal Biotechnology project will proceed to Phase II, which involves designing and building a larger aquaculture and algae plant. The target tonnage of dry weight biomass is expected to reach approximately 1.5 – 2 tons in the first year, and a larger yield in Phase II (late 2023-24) — between 50 and 100 tons, when the plant expands to a four-hectare facility. A future goal of DABKSA is to apply multi-trophic aquaculture approaches to the Red Sea Project and NEOM, among other in-Kingdom projects.

KAUST is a center for wide-scale research on algae in the Kingdom. In the past two years, the university has preserved the main talents and equipment to accelerate – not only the animal feed project related to the food security initiative and the Saudi Vision 2030 – but also the use of algae in the production of tires, perfumes, and pharmaceutical drugs.

The university is also the only laboratory experimenting with algae-based applied biotechnology in the Arabian Peninsula, working on identifying local algae strains, their different behaviors and tolerance of external environmental factors. KAUST has also built a library featuring the local strains of algae of commercial value to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Among the project’s team members is Dr. Kyle Lauersen, KAUST assistant professor and algae expert, who helps professor Grünewald developing strategies to train future generations of algae experts and help them apply new techniques across the Kingdom.

"I truly believe that the Kingdom has a competitive advantage to run industrial algal cultivation along the Red Sea coast with its flat land, CO2 sources, and year-round solar irradiation," Grünewald said.

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Varieties

Nations Commit to Get Nature Goals Back on Track

Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Astrid Schomaker (C-R), Armenia's Minister of Environment and COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan (C-L), Deputy Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Jihyun Lee (3rd L), and other members of the secretariat react during the closing session of the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Yerevan on October 31, 2026. (AFP)
Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Astrid Schomaker (C-R), Armenia's Minister of Environment and COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan (C-L), Deputy Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Jihyun Lee (3rd L), and other members of the secretariat react during the closing session of the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Yerevan on October 31, 2026. (AFP)
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Nations Commit to Get Nature Goals Back on Track

Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Astrid Schomaker (C-R), Armenia's Minister of Environment and COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan (C-L), Deputy Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Jihyun Lee (3rd L), and other members of the secretariat react during the closing session of the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Yerevan on October 31, 2026. (AFP)
Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Astrid Schomaker (C-R), Armenia's Minister of Environment and COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan (C-L), Deputy Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Jihyun Lee (3rd L), and other members of the secretariat react during the closing session of the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Yerevan on October 31, 2026. (AFP)

Nearly 200 nations struck hard-fought agreements Friday at a UN biodiversity summit, but the outcome was accompanied by disappointment over missed opportunities to address humanity's destructive toll on nature.

Delegates cheered as crucial texts were approved in overtime but the celebrations were tempered by acrimonious debates and regret over limited progress on some of the most contentious issues.

The COP17 summit in Armenia sought to revive a landmark commitment to halt and reverse the destruction of nature by 2030 after global efforts to meet that goal fell short.

Over two bruising weeks in Yerevan, nations were urged to correct course to keep the pact alive and protect the plants, animals and ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

The United Nations had warned that progress was insufficient to meet the goals of the 2030 target including protecting 30 percent of Earth's land and oceans, tackling pollution and invasive species, and boosting money for conservation.

"And that's it. Perfect," said COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan in Armenia as he brought down the gavel on two major texts, the final versions of which were still not available early Saturday.

But the outcome was "not commensurate" with the crisis engulfing the natural world, said French Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut on Saturday.

"The progress we failed to achieve here is a series of missed opportunities to speed up our response to the loss of biodiversity," Barbut said in a lengthy statement sent to AFP, stressing that "nature will not wait for the pace of our negotiations."

- 'Step forward' -

The final plenary stretched through Friday night and well into the next morning, with negotiations turning sour as the hours dragged on.

Even as some delegates left to catch flights, others stayed behind to argue technical points.

Veteran COP observer Juliette Landry from the IDDRI think tank told AFP "there was a lot of push and pull in every direction" throughout the summit and "in that context, it's hard to get things accepted".

UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker said the summit had achieved some "quite remarkable things at a moment when multilateralism is supposedly not functioning."

"Some of these more difficult subjects, we could not expect to have strong negotiated commitments. That was never the plan," she told reporters after the summit's close.

In a draft agreement of one closely watched text, nations were urged to "accelerate" their efforts and warned that "increased action" was needed to tackle the forces driving biodiversity loss.

This "represents a positive outcome... and though there are weaknesses, particularly on harmful subsidies, it does represent a step forward," Guido Broekhoven from WWF International told AFP.

Tackling subsidies and other incentives that encourage activities harmful to nature -- such as fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and overfishing -- was one of the most politically fraught agenda items at the summit.

"Even though the agreed decision text expresses it in weak terms, COP17 saw important political momentum to address harmful financial incentives, including subsidies," An Lambrechts from Greenpeace International told AFP.

A rare fight over science cast a pall over the summit, with a number of countries accused of undermining efforts to approve key reports in scenes that shocked even seasoned negotiators.

"We regret the increasing instances in which scientific evidence and its uptake has been challenged or constrained" by politics, said Swiss negotiator Gabriela Blatter in a statement on behalf of dozens of countries.

"Our delegations fully respect every state's right to safeguard national interest but science is not negotiable".

- Finance feud -

A separate row revolved around finding new cash sources to fund conservation efforts -- another hot-button issue with public budgets under strain amid an energy crisis and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The European Union led a charge for wealthy emerging economies such as China to contribute to global conservation efforts, a contentious issue at COP17.

In a sign of possible compromise, another draft text that circulated Friday invited countries outside the developed-country donors to voluntarily join the group.

Outstanding questions over the design of the Cali Fund -- a UN mechanism that hoped to attract billions of dollars in corporate contributions but is close to empty -- were left unresolved.

"By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then," said Pakhi Das from the nonprofit organization Plant-for-the-Planet.

The COP17 summit decided early Saturday that Ecuador would host the next biodiversity talks in 2028 after the South American nation defeated rival candidate Panama in a secret vote.

Varieties

Long-Distance Flights Can Interfere with the Internal Clocks of Seabirds

A Manx shearwater flies around Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire, Wales, Britain, in this handout image released on October 29, 2026. (Joe Wynn/Handout via Reuters)
A Manx shearwater flies around Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire, Wales, Britain, in this handout image released on October 29, 2026. (Joe Wynn/Handout via Reuters)
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Long-Distance Flights Can Interfere with the Internal Clocks of Seabirds

A Manx shearwater flies around Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire, Wales, Britain, in this handout image released on October 29, 2026. (Joe Wynn/Handout via Reuters)
A Manx shearwater flies around Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire, Wales, Britain, in this handout image released on October 29, 2026. (Joe Wynn/Handout via Reuters)

People who travel across many time zones, like a trip from London to Tokyo, may experience jet lag, with the body's internal 24-hour clock — the circadian rhythm — thrown out of sync with the local time at the arrival location. A new study shows that birds that fly long distances may experience a similar phenomenon that causes them to drift off course.

Research involving seabirds called Manx shearwaters found that crossing the Atlantic at speed can throw their internal clocks out of sync with local time, causing errors in the strategy they use to navigate their way home.

Birds can use several cues to find their way, including having the sun serve as a compass. A bird flying south sees the sun on its left at sunrise and on its right toward sunset, so it must keep adjusting its heading as the sun moves across the sky.

"Animals use an internal clock to do this, the ‌same one that tells ‌our bodies when to sleep, when to be active," said Patrick Lewin, a researcher ‌at ⁠the University of ⁠Oxford's Department of Biology and one of the leaders of the study published in the journal Science.

To investigate how the birds navigate across vast stretches of open ocean, researchers analyzed 20 years of GPS data from 1,045 breeding Manx shearwaters, birds that can travel as far as about 1,000 km (620 miles) west from colonies on islands off Britain on foraging trips.

Using the positions of the birds and the sun's movement across the sky, the researchers calculated the error each bird should make if its internal clock stayed set to the time at dawn. Across 335 homing flights made out of sight of land, the headings of the birds closely matched those ⁠predicted errors.

"The process behind what we're observing here — the mismatch between the internal clock ‌and external time caused by longitudinal movements — is exactly the same as what ‌causes jet lag in humans," Lewin said.

The researchers have not yet investigated whether the clock mismatch affects the birds beyond navigation. But internal clocks ‌influence behaviors including feeding and rest, raising the possibility that those too could be mistimed.

Shearwaters tend to hunt shortly ‌after dawn and before dusk, when fish and other prey are closer to the surface, meaning a mistimed rest period could cost them a feeding opportunity, Lewin said.

The study also showed that birds kept using their solar compass even when another source of information was readily available. Along coastlines, where familiar land could potentially guide them, their distance from shore still shifted in the direction predicted by clock-related sun-compass errors.

A ‌TWO-STEP PROCESS

"For most navigational tasks, it is thought that compass systems are used in conjunction with a map system in a kind of two-step process. In the map step, ⁠the animal determines where it is ⁠in relation to a goal, such as a home colony. Then in the compass step it uses a compass to translate that into movement," said Tim Guilford, a University of Oxford professor of animal behavior who was one of the study leaders.

The birds may continue to combine these systems even in familiar areas, rather than relying entirely on one or the other.

"If this only produces small deviations, there might not be strong selection against it," Lewin said.

Another possibility is that the sun compass helps the birds determine which way to go along the linear feature, Lewin said.

Even clouds may not render the sun compass useless. Evidence suggests that birds can sense polarized light and estimate the sun's position unless conditions are heavily overcast, Lewin said.

In people, jet lag can cause unpleasant short-term effects and has been linked to longer-term health problems in those who experience it frequently, such as airline pilots and flight attendants.

It is not yet known whether birds experience similar effects, but species such as shearwaters that regularly travel rapidly east-west may have evolved ways to cope with repeated disruption to their internal clocks, Lewin said.

"Knowing this phenomenon is occurring is only the first step, but perhaps these birds could teach us something about how to treat or avoid jet lag," Lewin said.

Varieties

Philippines Raises Volcano Alert Level as Blast Sends Ash Skyward

Smoke billows into the sky as Mayon volcano erupts as seen from Legaspi City, Albay province, south of Manila on October 30, 2026. (AFP)
Smoke billows into the sky as Mayon volcano erupts as seen from Legaspi City, Albay province, south of Manila on October 30, 2026. (AFP)
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Philippines Raises Volcano Alert Level as Blast Sends Ash Skyward

Smoke billows into the sky as Mayon volcano erupts as seen from Legaspi City, Albay province, south of Manila on October 30, 2026. (AFP)
Smoke billows into the sky as Mayon volcano erupts as seen from Legaspi City, Albay province, south of Manila on October 30, 2026. (AFP)

One of the Philippines' most active volcanoes fired a dark column of ash thousands of meters into the sky Friday in a "moderately explosive eruption" that lasted nearly six minutes, the state seismology office said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage in towns and cities surrounding Mount Mayon, but the country's volcano institute raised the alert level from 2 to 3 on its 0-5 scale and called for evacuations within six kilometers (3.7 miles) of the crater.

The 3,000-meter (nearly 10,000 feet) ash column gradually drifted southwest onto nearby population centers, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said in a bulletin.

"Mayon is in a new phase of magmatic eruption, with increased chances of lava flows and hazardous PDCs (pyroclastic density currents)... affecting the upper to middle slopes of the volcano in the immediate days to weeks," it said.

It urged local officials to evacuate areas near the crater "due to the danger of PDCs, lava flows, rockfalls and other volcanic hazards", with planes also advised to avoid flying close to the mountain.

The 2,462-meter (8,000-foot) Mayon, rising in a near-perfect cone about 330 kilometers southeast of Manila, is one of three Philippine volcanoes that have shown elevated levels of activity this year, though no major eruptions occurred.

In June 2023, more than 12,000 people living on its lower slopes were moved to evacuation centers to protect them from ash and toxic gases spewing from its crater.

Earthquakes and volcanic activity are common in the Philippines due to its position on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", where tectonic plates collide.

The country's most powerful eruption in recent decades was Mount Pinatubo in 1991, which killed more than 800 people and produced an ash cloud that travelled thousands of kilometers.