Daily Archives: February 9, 2016

A group of nature lovers in Queensland have been shocked to accidentally stumble across an extremely rare baby albino turtle.

Volunteers from Coolum and North Shore Coast Care were checking nests on the Sunshine Coast’s Castaways Beach on Sunday when they spotted a “pink-eyed, snow white” turtle in what they believed was an empty nest, the ABC reports.

The group’s president, Linda Warneminde, said at a glance it looked like a normal baby green turtle but closer inspection revealed “it had white shell and it had little white flippers”.
“And you could see a little bit of pink under its flippers,” she said.

A video shot by one of the volunteers shows the albino turtle scurrying along the shore furiously until it finally reaches the water.

Ms Warneminde said no one in the group had ever witnessed anything like it.
The Queensland’s Government’s Threatened Species Unit chief scientist, Dr Col Limpus, said albino hatchlings were extremely rare.

“It probably occurs at the rate of one in many hundreds of thousands of eggs that are laid,” he said, adding that he had never seen one in 50 years of working with turtles.

The doctor said that only one in 100 normal green turtles will reach maturity and the chances of an albino surviving were probably even more remote.

He said most never make it out of the nest but now that this albino had it was far from being in the clear.

Green turtles travel across the Pacific to Chile but the voyage is fraught with danger.

source:9news.com.au

The federal government has pulled all of its funding for Australia’s largest Islamic school, potentially putting the centre’s future in doubt.

The Malek Fahd school in Greenacre, in Sydney’s southwest, was issued with a notice from the Department of Education yesterday detailing a stop to the funding.

Education authorities made the decision to revoke $20 million in Commonwealth funding from April 8, because the money was not being spent on education – a requirement for funding under the Education Act.
The Daily Telegraph has reported the decision to stop the funding comes after several warnings.

“I am committed to ensuring that all school authorities meet the requirements of the Education Act to ensure that our taxpayer dollar and any private investment by parents is being spent to benefit -Australian students,” Education Minister Simon Birmingham told the Telegraph.

The school will now be forced to rely on NSW Department of Education funding.

The NSW department ¬issued a statement last night, saying it: “will continue to work with the Commonwealth Department of Education and Training on these matters”.

source:9news.com.au