AFP

It could be a scene from a bad horror movie: Torchlights slice through the darkness inside a church in western France as the building echoes with the shrieks of hundreds of bats.

But these creatures of the night are scaring no one. 

They are having their annual check-up, as scientists try to unravel the secrets of an animal whose fiendish reputation has eclipsed its many gifts to the world.

Dozens of Greater Mouse-eared bats are passed from hand to hand — gloved to avoid a bite — by volunteers and scientists in Saint Martin’s church at Noyal-Muzillac, in Brittany.  

Each bat is painstakingly examined, its sex, height and weight noted, its blood taken, teeth checked for wear, translucent wings stretched out and inspected. 

A male pup, born just a few weeks ago in the church rafters, is hanging upside down by its claws in a tube placed on a weighing scale: 19.7 grams (0.7 ounces).

Once the physical assessment is finished, the latest addition to the colony is implanted with a tag, no bigger than a grain of rice.  

“They put a little microchip like you would a dog or a cat, it’s called a pit tag, under the skin on these bats when they are babies and they release them,” said Emma Teeling, head of zoology at University College Dublin. 

This is a ritual that has been repeated every year for a decade by the organisation Bretagne Vivante, which captures and checks the entire colony to help understand and safeguard this protected dark-furred species. 

Why lavish so much attention on such a maligned creature? 

Because they are one of the world’s most endangered animals — threatened by habitat loss and by human persecution.

  

– Seeds and super powers –

Long demonised as fanged monsters or vectors of disease, the pandemic has done little to improve bats’ image, after the World Health Organization said the coronavirus likely originated in the animals. 

Rodrigo Medellin, who co-leads the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Bat Group, said he has never worked harder to defend them. 

But the only mammal capable of flight has a lot more to offer than viruses and vampire legends. 

If you have ever sipped coffee, eaten a taco or worn a cotton t-shirt, you can thank bats, Medellin told AFP. 

Fruit-eating species help disperse seeds from tree to tree, while some bats are indispensable pollinators.

Some species can swallow half their weight in insects each night, according to Bat Conservation International.

“They are the best natural pesticide,” said Medellin, of Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autonoma, adding that even tequila can be traced to millions of years of bat pollination of the agave plant. 

“The benefits we receive from them are so huge and so different that they touch every day of our life,” said Medellin. 

But it is not just what bats do that makes them special. 

They also have an array of innate talents that fascinate scientists.  

Engineers are inspired by their natural sonar, enabling them to fly low and find their way thanks to echolocation. 

And yes, they can harbour viruses like coronaviruses or Ebola. But why do they not fall ill? 

Bats also seem to have evolved a way to slow down the ageing process, said Teeling, whose lab in Ireland is exploring how these creatures stay healthy almost until the end of their lives.

Little animals typically “live fast, die young”, she said, explaining that a reduced body size often means a fast metabolism: the lifespan of a mouse is often measured in months, while a bowhead whale can live for over a century.  

“In nature, when you look at the body size of something, you can predict how long they are going to live for,” she said. 

Not bats.

The Greater Mouse-eared Bats that Teeling and her colleagues study do not exceed eight centimetres (just over three inches), but they can live up to 10, or even 20 years. 

In 2005, researchers in Siberia captured a Brandt’s bat that had been tagged 41 years earlier, estimating it had lived nearly 10 times longer than expected for its size.

– ‘Ecological traps’ – 

From the tiny two-gram “bumblebee bat”, to the giant Philippine flying fox with its 1.5-metre (five-foot) wingspan, bats make up a fifth of all terrestrial mammals. 

But some 40 percent of the 1,321 species assessed on the IUCN’s Red List are now classified as endangered. 

“We are losing species all over the world,” said Julie Marmet, chiropterologist (bat expert) at the National Museum of Natural History in France. 

Bats have been “resilient” for 50 million years, she told AFP, but today’s changes are “far too fast for species to adapt”. 

Human actions are to blame, as with the biodiversity crisis gripping the entire planet — which will come under the spotlight at the IUCN congress in early September. 

Deforestation and habitat loss is the primary driver. 

Many species live in trees and the 40 percent that live in caves depend largely on forests for foraging, said Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International. 

Climate change is also increasingly taking its toll. 

Flying foxes in Australia have been devastated by heatwaves, while in the United States thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats have been killed by hypothermia. 

Lured by milder winters into abandoning their habitual migration south, many of these little bats have taken to staying in their roosts under bridges in Texas during the cooler months. 

These bridges over waterways look like “restaurants” for bats, said Frick, but it also represents an “ecological trap”. 

During the last winter, there was a particularly cold snap in Texas.  

“Thousands and thousands of bats died during that big freeze,” she said.  

– Hunted and harassed –

Modern human infrastructure has become a perilous obstacle course.

Already victims of collisions with cars, they must now avoid wind turbines — studies suggest half a million are killed every year in the US either by the blades or the deadly effects of the forceful air movement.  

Even the automatic motion sensors that illuminate the stairways of apartment blocks can turn a short stopover for migrating pipistrelles into a waking nightmare. 

Normally these matchbox-sized bats only fly at night, said Andrzej Kepel, of the Polish association Salamandra.

But when they try to continue with their migration after a couple of days in these stairways, they trigger the sensor and the lights turn on.    

“So they land,” said Kepel. Again and again they try to leave and every time the lights flick on, stopping them. 

Their cries can attract others. 

“After several days, there are hundreds of bats in the staircase and people are panicking,” he said. Bats can end up starving to death.

Inside caves, they are still not safe. 

Whether it is tourists shining torches or the incursions of those collecting bat guano to use as fertilizer, the slightest disturbance can be devastating. 

Especially since most bat species only have one baby per year, unusually for such a small mammal, said Marmet.  

So “if there is a problem in a colony, it’s over.”

Hunted for meat or sport by people in Southeast Asia and Africa, they also fall prey to other animals. 

In Jamaica, for example, cats have staked out the cave of a colony of critically endangered bats.  

“We’ve documented within an hour cats taking about 20 bats, ripping their wings off and snacking on them,” said Frick.

– Vampires to Vatican – 

So who is frightening who? 

Bats have not always had a bad reputation.  

In Mayan culture they played a major role in the forming of the universe. 

But in the Western world they have been unwittingly typecast as mascots of Halloween and horror films.

While just three types of bats in South America are (animal) blood-drinking “vampires”, when Bram Stoker wrote “Dracula” in the 19th century it tarnished the reputation of the whole family.  

“That is the moment bats began to be accused of being envoys of the devil, being evil, and filthy, and bringing diseases,” said Medellin.

Batman was helpless to redress the balance. 

Even Pope Francis last year likened people in a state of sin to being “like ‘human bats’ who can move about only at night”. 

But many of those who spend time with bats end up loving them. 

“They are cute! We get attached to them,” says Corentin Le Floch, of Bretagne Vivante. 

In the church of Noyal-Muzillac, it’s snack time and a Greater Mouse-eared bat is nibbling on a wriggling mealworm. 

He gets a quick caress of his little pointy ears and then: freedom.

Thousands of indigenous protesters marched through Brazil’s capital Wednesday, dancing to the beat of pounding drums, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up a case that could eliminate reservations on their ancestral lands.

In what organizers said was the country’s biggest indigenous protest ever, an estimated 6,000 demonstrators marched to the seat of power in Brasilia, filling the ultra-modern square bordered by the Supreme Court, Congress and the presidency with traditional costumes and chants.

The protest aimed to pressure the high court as it began a session where it will consider a case that could remove protected status for some native lands, opening them to agribusiness and mining.

The protesters, who hail from more than 170 ethnic groups, were also fighting what they call systematic persecution under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

“The Supreme Court needs to listen to the concerns of indigenous peoples and protect our constitutional rights,” said Jatota Wajapi, 32, of the Wajapi people in the northern state of Amapa.

“The president wants to do away with our rights,” he told AFP.

The protest was peaceful, with organizers urging demonstrators to avoid confrontations with police.

A similar protest in June erupted into clashes, with three indigenous demonstrators injured and three police wounded by arrows.

The court case revolves around the Brazilian constitution’s protection of indigenous lands.

The agribusiness lobby argues those protections should only apply to lands whose inhabitants were present in 1988, when the constitution was adopted.

Indigenous rights activists argue the constitution mentions no such time limit, and that native inhabitants have often been forced from their ancestral lands.

Indigenous protesters have been camped out near the high court since Sunday, and plan to remain for a week — though it is unclear how long the ruling will take.

The court adjourned Wednesday without getting to the case, the second on its docket.

– ‘Brutally expelled’ –

The case involves a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina but will set legal precedent for similar cases across Brazil, experts say.

The plaintiffs are the Xokleng, Guarani and Kaingang peoples of the Ibirama-Laklano indigenous reservation, part of which lost protected status when a lower court ruled the groups were not living on the land in question in 1988.

They say that is because Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) forcibly removed them.

“During the dictatorship, the state sold our land to farmers. The reason we weren’t there (in 1988) is because they expelled us and forced us onto a tiny corner,” Ana Patte, a 29-year-old Xokleng activist, told AFP.

“Everyone knows how brutal the process of colonization was in Brazil… They killed us as if we were insects they had to clean up so they could plant crops.”

– Legal onslaught –

The implications of the case are far-reaching.

Experts say it will set legal precedent for dozens — potentially hundreds — of similar cases, at a time when a powerful, Bolsonaro-backed agribusiness lobby has been aggressively moving to rewrite the rules on protected lands in Brazil.

The case echoes legislation before Congress that would enshrine the 1988 “time-frame argument” in law.

The bill is one of several that indigenous activists and environmentalists say Bolsonaro and his allies are trying to use to further the advance of agriculture and industry into Brazil’s rapidly disappearing forests.

Environmentalists say protecting indigenous reservations is one of the best ways to stop the destruction of the Amazon, a critical resource in the race to curb climate change.

Bolsonaro warned Tuesday that “chaos” would ensue if the court did not rule in favor of the 1988 cutoff.

“There’s land that’s productive today that could stop being productive… It would be chaos for Brazil and a great loss for the world,” he said.

Bolsonaro has vowed in the past that “not one centimeter” of new indigenous reservations will be created in Brazil.

A team of archeologists examining the remains of victims from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD have discovered coastal people of the time ate far more fish than modern Italians, with men getting more of the high-status food than women.

The researchers, led by a team at the University of York, analyzed amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — in 17 adult skeletons excavated from the city of Herculaneum, a popular seaside resort that remained buried under volcanic ash until the 18th century.

By studying the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes of the amino acids and applying a statistical model, they were able to differentiate between food groups with a new level of precision, the team wrote in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

Lead author and PhD student Silvia Soncin told AFP that Herculaneum provided an “extraordinary population” to study historic diets because the natural disaster gives archeologists a snapshot in time.

“Cemeteries are usually used over a certain period, we’re talking about hundreds of years, and the food sources may have changed because of changing climate or different trade routes,” she said.

Though Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii were destroyed by the volcano, most inhabitants managed to escape in time, senior author Oliver Craig, a professor of bioarcheology told AFP.

The 11 men and six women studied by the team were picked at random from 340 people who died on the beach and from nine adjacent fornici — stone chambers for boats — where they had sought shelter from the pyroclastic flow.

“We found a surprisingly high amount of marine contribution to the diet of these people, particularly compared to the modern Mediterranean population,” said Soncin, with the ancient dwellers eating about three times the amount of seafood compared to their counterparts today.

Herculaneum’s sewers were filled with fish bones, prior research has shown. Typical species would have included porgies, tuna and shellfish.

– Gender gap –

They also discovered a significant sex gap within the group, with males on average getting 50 percent more of their protein from seafood compared to females.

Men also got slightly more protein from cereals compared with their female contemporaries, while women obtained more of their proteins from animal products and locally grown fruits and vegetables.

The team put forward several possible reasons: men may have been more involved in fishing than women, but the historical record also shows that certain fish such as tuna were considered high-status food in Roman society, with men having more access.

Another aspect is that, although Herculaneum was known as a resort for the elite, it was also home to many slaves and freedmen, said Craig. 

Male slaves had a higher chance of emancipation than women and were generally freed at an earlier age, giving them more access to coveted foods.

“Now we’ve got a way and approach for actually quantifying diet in the past, so what we want to do is apply this more widely through time and space,” said Craig.

He hopes to next examine how quickly diets shifted when prehistoric humans moved from hunter-gathering activities to agricultural societies.

Thousands of indigenous protesters marched through Brazil’s capital Wednesday, dancing to the beat of pounding drums, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up a case that could eliminate reservations on their ancestral lands.

In what organizers said was the country’s biggest indigenous protest ever, an estimated 6,000 demonstrators marched to the seat of power in Brasilia, filling the ultra-modern square bordered by the Supreme Court, Congress and the presidency with traditional costumes and chants.

The protest aimed to pressure the high court as it began a session where it will consider a case that could remove protected status for some native lands, opening them to agribusiness and mining.

The protesters, who hail from more than 170 ethnic groups, were also fighting what they call systematic persecution under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

“The Supreme Court needs to listen to the concerns of indigenous peoples and protect our constitutional rights,” said Jatota Wajapi, 32, of the Wajapi people in the northern state of Amapa.

“The president wants to do away with our rights,” he told AFP.

The protest was peaceful, with organizers urging demonstrators to avoid confrontations with police.

A similar protest in June erupted into clashes, with three indigenous demonstrators injured and three police wounded by arrows.

The court case revolves around the Brazilian constitution’s protection of indigenous lands.

The agribusiness lobby argues those protections should only apply to lands whose inhabitants were present in 1988, when the constitution was adopted.

Indigenous rights activists argue the constitution mentions no such time limit, and that native inhabitants have often been forced from their ancestral lands.

Indigenous protesters have been camped out near the high court since Sunday, and plan to remain for a week — though it is unclear how long the ruling will take.

The court adjourned Wednesday without getting to the case, the second on its docket.

– ‘Brutally expelled’ –

The case involves a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina but will set legal precedent for similar cases across Brazil, experts say.

The plaintiffs are the Xokleng, Guarani and Kaingang peoples of the Ibirama-Laklano indigenous reservation, part of which lost protected status when a lower court ruled the groups were not living on the land in question in 1988.

They say that is because Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) forcibly removed them.

“During the dictatorship, the state sold our land to farmers. The reason we weren’t there (in 1988) is because they expelled us and forced us onto a tiny corner,” Ana Patte, a 29-year-old Xokleng activist, told AFP.

“Everyone knows how brutal the process of colonization was in Brazil… They killed us as if we were insects they had to clean up so they could plant crops.”

– Legal onslaught –

The implications of the case are far-reaching.

Experts say it will set legal precedent for dozens — potentially hundreds — of similar cases, at a time when a powerful, Bolsonaro-backed agribusiness lobby has been aggressively moving to rewrite the rules on protected lands in Brazil.

The case echoes legislation before Congress that would enshrine the 1988 “time-frame argument” in law.

The bill is one of several that indigenous activists and environmentalists say Bolsonaro and his allies are trying to use to further the advance of agriculture and industry into Brazil’s rapidly disappearing forests.

Environmentalists say protecting indigenous reservations is one of the best ways to stop the destruction of the Amazon, a critical resource in the race to curb climate change.

Bolsonaro warned Tuesday that “chaos” would ensue if the court did not rule in favor of the 1988 cutoff.

“There’s land that’s productive today that could stop being productive… It would be chaos for Brazil and a great loss for the world,” he said.

Bolsonaro has vowed in the past that “not one centimeter” of new indigenous reservations will be created in Brazil.

Streetlights — particularly those that use white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — not only disrupt insect behavior but are also a culprit behind their declining numbers, a new study carried out in southern England showed Wednesday.

Artificial lights at night had been identified as a possible factor behind falling insect populations around the world, but the topic had been under-researched.

To address the question, scientists compared 26 roadside sites consisting of either hedgerows or grass verges that were lit by streetlights, against an equal number of nearly identical sites that were unlit.

They also examined a site with one unlit and two lit sections, all of which were similar in their vegetation.

The team chose moth caterpillars as a proxy for nocturnal insects more broadly, because they remain within a few meters of where they hatched during the larval stage of their lives, before they acquire the ability to fly.

The team either struck the hedges with sticks so that the caterpillars fell out, or swept the grass with nets to pick them up.

The results were eye-opening, with a 47 percent reduction in insect population at the hedgerow sites and 37 percent reduction at the roadside grassy areas.

“We were really quite taken aback by just how stark it was,” lead author Douglas Boyes, of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told AFP, adding the team had expected a more modest decline of around 10 percent.

“We consider it most likely that it’s due to females, mums, not laying eggs in these areas,” he said. 

The lighting also disturbed their feeding behavior: when the team weighed the caterpillars, they found that those in the lighted areas were heavier.

Boyes said the team interpreted that as the caterpillars not knowing how to respond to the unfamiliar situation that runs counter to the conditions they evolved in over millions of years, and feeding more as a result to rush through their development.

The team found that the disruption was most pronounced in areas lit by LED lights as opposed to high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps or older low-pressure sodium (LPS) lamps, both of which produce a yellow-orange glow that is less like sunlight.

LED lamps have grown more popular in recent years because of their superior energy efficiency.

The paper acknowledged the effect of street lighting is localized and a “minor contributor” to declining insect numbers, with other important factors including urbanization and destruction of their habitats, intensive agriculture, pollution and climate change.

But even localized reductions can have cascading consequences for the wider ecosystem, resulting in less food for the birds and bats that prey upon insects.

Moreover, “there are really quite accessible solutions,” said Boyes — like applying filters to change the lamps’ color, or adding shields so that the light shines only on the road, not insect habitats.

Thousands of indigenous protesters marched in the Brazilian capital Wednesday, bearing bows and arrows and traditional headdresses, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up a case that could eliminate reservations on their ancestral lands.

In what organizers say was the biggest indigenous protest ever in Brazil, an estimated 6,000 demonstrators marched to the high court as it began a session where it will consider a case that could remove protected status for some native lands, opening them to agribusiness and mining.

The protesters, who hail from more than 170 ethnic groups, were also fighting what they call systematic persecution under President Jair Bolsonaro since the far-right leader took office in 2019.

“This government is attacking indigenous peoples,” said Syrata Pataxo, a 32-year-old chief of the Pataxo people from the northeastern state of Bahia.

“Today all humanity is calling for the Amazon rainforest to be protected. But the government wants our rainforest, the lungs of the planet, to be replaced by soybeans and gold mining,” he told AFP, wearing elaborate body paint.

The protest started peacefully, with organizers urging demonstrators to avoid confrontations with police.

A similar protest in June erupted into clashes, with three indigenous demonstrators injured and three police wounded by arrows.

The court case revolves around the Brazilian constitution’s protection of indigenous lands.

The agribusiness lobby argues those protections should only apply to lands whose inhabitants were present in 1988, when the constitution was adopted.

Indigenous rights activists argue the constitution mentions no such cutoff date, and that native inhabitants have often been forced from their ancestral lands.

– ‘Brutally expelled’ –

The case involves a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina but will set legal precedent for similar cases across Brazil, experts say.

The plaintiffs are the Xokleng, Guarani and Kaingang peoples of the Ibirama-Laklano indigenous reservation, part of which lost its provisional protected status when a lower court ruled the groups were not living on the land in question in 1988.

They say that is because Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) forcibly removed them.

“During the dictatorship, the state sold our land to farmers. The reason we weren’t there (in 1988) is because they expelled us and forced us onto a tiny corner,” Ana Patte, a 29-year-old Xokleng activist, told AFP.

“Everyone knows how brutal the process of colonization was in Brazil…. They killed us as if we were insects they had to clean up so they could plant.”

– Legal onslaught –

The implications of the case are far-reaching.

Experts say it will set legal precedent for dozens — potentially hundreds — of similar cases, at a time when a powerful, Bolsonaro-backed agribusiness lobby has been aggressively moving to rewrite the rules on protected lands in Brazil.

The case echoes legislation before Congress that would enshrine the 1988 “time-frame argument” in law.

The bill is one of several that indigenous activists and environmentalists say Bolsonaro and his allies are trying to use to further the advance of agriculture and industry into Brazil’s rapidly disappearing forests.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has surged under Bolsonaro. In the 12 months through July, a total of 8,712 square kilometers (3,364 square miles) — an area nearly the size of Puerto Rico — of forest cover was destroyed, according to official figures.

Environmentalists say protecting indigenous reservations is one of the best ways to stop the destruction of the Amazon, a critical resource in the race to curb climate change.

Bolsonaro warned Tuesday that “chaos” would ensue if the court did not rule in favor of the 1988 cutoff.

“There’s land that’s productive today that could stop being productive…. It would be chaos for Brazil and a great loss for the world.”

But the 1988 cutoff is “unconstitutional,” said lawyer Samara Pataxo, legal adviser for the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB).

“There’s nothing in the constitution that says indigenous peoples’ rights are limited to that date,” she told AFP.

A team of archeologists examining the remains of victims from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD have discovered coastal people of the time ate far more fish than modern Italians, with men getting more of the high-status food than women.

The researchers, led by a team at the University of York, analyzed amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — in 17 adult skeletons excavated from the city of Herculaneum, a popular seaside resort that remained buried under volcanic ash until the 18th century.

By studying the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes of the amino acids and applying a statistical model, they were able to differentiate between food groups with a new level of precision, the team wrote in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

Lead author and PhD student Silvia Soncin told AFP that Herculaneum provided an “extraordinary population” to study historic diets because the natural disaster gives archeologists a snapshot in time.

“Cemeteries are usually used over a certain period, we’re talking about hundreds of years, and the food sources may have changed because of changing climate or different trade routes,” she said.

Though Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii were destroyed by the volcano, most inhabitants managed to escape in time, senior author Oliver Craig, a professor of bioarcheology told AFP.

The 11 men and six women studied by the team were picked at random from 340 people who died on the beach and from nine adjacent fornici — stone chambers for boats — where they had sought shelter from the pyroclastic flow.

“We found a surprisingly high amount of marine contribution to the diet of these people, particularly compared to the modern Mediterranean population,” said Soncin, with the ancient dwellers eating about three times the amount of seafood compared to their counterparts today.

Herculaneum’s sewers were filled with fish bones, prior research has shown. Typical species would have included porgies, tuna and shellfish.

– Gender gap –

They also discovered a significant sex gap within the group, with males on average getting 50 percent more of their protein from seafood compared to females.

Men also got slightly more protein from cereals compared with their female contemporaries, while women obtained more of their proteins from animal products and locally grown fruits and vegetables.

The team put forward several possible reasons: men may have been more involved in fishing than women, but the historical record also shows that certain fish such as tuna were considered high-status food in Roman society, with men having more access.

Another aspect is that, although Herculaneum was known as a resort for the elite, it was also home to many slaves and freedmen, said Craig. 

Male slaves had a higher chance of emancipation than women and were generally freed at an earlier age, giving them more access to coveted foods.

“Now we’ve got a way and approach for actually quantifying diet in the past, so what we want to do is apply this more widely through time and space,” said Craig.

He hopes to next examine how quickly diets shifted when prehistoric humans moved from hunter-gathering activities to agricultural societies.

Thousands of indigenous protesters gathered in the Brazilian capital, bearing bows and arrows and traditional headdresses, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up a case Wednesday that could eliminate reservations on their ancestral lands.

In what organizers say is the biggest indigenous protest ever in Brazil, an estimated 6,000 demonstrators prepared to march to the high court when it opens its session to consider a case that could remove protected status for some native lands, opening them to agribusiness and mining.

The protesters, who hail from more than 170 ethnic groups, are also fighting what they call systematic persecution under President Jair Bolsonaro since the far-right leader took office in 2019.

They held a candlelight vigil Tuesday night in the square bordered by the presidential palace, the Supreme Court and Congress in Brasilia, dancing and singing to the beat of drums.

“This government is attacking indigenous peoples,” said Syrata Pataxo, a 32-year-old chief of the Pataxo people from the northeastern state of Bahia.

“Today all humanity is calling for the Amazon rainforest to be protected. But the government wants our rainforest, the lungs of the planet, to be replaced by soybeans and gold mining,” he told AFP, decked out in elaborate body paint.

The case revolves around the Brazilian constitution’s protection of indigenous lands.

The agribusiness lobby argues those protections should only apply to lands whose inhabitants were present in 1988, when the constitution was adopted.

Indigenous rights activists argue the constitution mentions no such cutoff date, and that native inhabitants have often been forced from their ancestral lands.

“All Brazil is indigenous land. We’ve always lived here,” said Tai Kariri, 28, a leader of the Kariri people from the northeastern state of Paraiba.

The case involves a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina but will set legal precedent for dozens of similar cases.

Bolsonaro warned Tuesday that “chaos” would ensue if the court did not rule in favor of the 1988 cutoff.

The case echoes legislation before Congress that would enshrine that “time-frame argument” in law.

The bill is one of several that indigenous activists and environmentalists say Bolsonaro and his allies are trying to use to further the advance of agriculture and industry into Brazil’s rapidly disappearing forests.

Operators of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant unveiled plans Wednesday to construct an undersea tunnel to release more than a million tonnes of treated water from the site into the ocean.

Plans for the one-kilometre (0.6-mile) tunnel were announced after the Japanese government decided in April to release the accumulated water in two years’ time.

Ministers say the release is safe because the water will have been processed to remove almost all radioactive elements, and will be diluted.

But the April decision triggered a furious reaction from neighbouring countries, and fierce opposition from local fishing communities.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it will start building the tunnel by March 2022 after carrying out feasibility studies and obtaining approval from authorities.

It will have a diameter of about 2.5 metres (eight feet) and will stretch east into the Pacific from tanks at the plant containing around 1.27 million tonnes of treated water.

That includes water used to cool the plant, which was crippled after going into meltdown following a huge 2011 tsunami, as well as rain and groundwater that seeps in daily.

An extensive pumping and filtration system extracts tonnes of newly contaminated water each day and filters out most radioactive elements.

But fishing communities fear releasing the water will undermine years of work to restore confidence in their seafood.

The plant’s chief decommissioning officer Akira Ono said Wednesday that releasing the water through a tunnel would help prevent it flowing back to the shore.

“We will thoroughly explain our safety policies and the measures we are taking against reputation damage, so that we can dispel concerns held by people involved in fisheries” and other industries, Ono told reporters.

In a statement, TEPCO said it was ready to pay compensation for reputation damage related to the release.

TEPCO also said it would accept inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency on the safety of the release. The IAEA has already endorsed Japan’s decision.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has called disposing of the water an “inevitable task” in the decades-long process of decommissioning the nuclear plant.

Debate over how to handle the water has dragged on for years, as space to store it at the site runs out.

The filtration process removes most radioactive elements from the water, but some remain, including tritium.

Experts say the element is only harmful to humans in large doses and with dilution the treated water poses no scientifically detectable risk.

Russia’s central regions on Wednesday battled “extreme” wildfires fuelled by an unusual heatwave that comes after forest fires linked to climate change ravaged Siberia for most of the summer. 

Authorities were fighting 15 wildfires in the Urals region of Sverdlovsk, the emergencies ministry said. 

The region — which lies on the border of Europe and Asia — faced “extreme fire hazard” due to a heatwave, it added. 

Images on social media Tuesday showed flames on either side of a federal highway between regional capital Yekaterinburg and the Urals city of Perm, forcing the road shut for most of the day, according to reports.

Fires had meanwhile grown so intense in Mordovia, a region southeast of Moscow, that firefighters were forced to escape from a “ring of fire”, the ministry said Wednesday. 

And in the Nizhny Novgorod region east of Moscow, nine planes provided by the emergencies ministry, the defence ministry and the Russian National Guard had dropped 129 tonnes of water onto a large wildfire spreading to neighbouring Mordovia. 

Authorities had deployed 1,200 firefighters to put out the blaze, the emergencies ministry said. 

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to protect the country’s forests, saying the nation must learn from the “unprecedented” wildfires that engulfed swathes of Siberia.

In the country’s largest and coldest region of Yakutia, fires have burned through an area larger than Portugal.

The emergencies ministry said Wednesday that there were 50 forest fires now buring in the region. 

Officials in hard-hit regions have called for resources and economic support from Moscow to deal with the damage.

Experts blame the huge fires that have ripped across Russia’s vast territory in recent years on climate change, negligence and underfunded forestry management services.

Russia’s forestry agency says fires this year have torn through more than 173,000 square kilometres (67,000 square miles), making it the second-worst season since the turn of the century.

A former sceptic of man-made climate change, Putin has called on authorities to do everything possible to help Russians affected by the gigantic fires.