EXTINCTION NEWS

EXTINCTION NEWS EXTINCTION NEWS '05

...& See this, for news from before 2005, starting mid-dec 04
Also see exotic species over-population.

Dec 28, 05: The population of a tiny fish that lives near San Francisco Bay has hit an all-time low, a new study shows, troubling scientists, who see it as an indicator of the health of the vast estuary that funnels water to two-thirds of Californians. The population of the delta smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an estuary east of San Francisco Bay, was just a third of what it was last year, according to the new state survey.
. . A new round of studies next year will be aimed at learning what caused the fish populations to fall, with a focus on the effects of water pumping and farming and invasive species such as a clam that is eating the fish's food.

Dec 28, 05: Scientists installing underwater strobe lights at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant say this is no disco —-they're trying to keep fish away from pipes that draw water for the plant. Researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory will soon begin using the strobes at TVA's Widows Creek coal-fired power plant.
. . The Environmental Protection Agency will require that fish killed in water intakes at power plants to be reduced by 80% to 95% by early 2008. More than 500 power plants will be affected. Similar requirements are expected for other industries, such as steel mills and paper plants.

Dec 24, 05: A mass grave of dodos, the famous flightless bird whose name became synonymous with stupidity, has been uncovered in Mauritius, scientists said.
. . The rare find will enable researchers to discover more about what happened to the bird, native to the Indian Ocean Island, which became extinct in the late 17th century. Scientists from the Dutch Natural History Museum in Leiden said the remains were at least 2,000 years old. "This new find will allow for the first scientific research into and reconstruction of the world in which the dodo lived, before Western man landed on Mauritius and wiped out the species", said a statement from the museum.
. . The dodo was discovered by Portuguese sailors in the late 16th century. Its lack of fear of humans, its plump size estimated at about 20 kg and its inability to fly meant the bird became extinct by about 1680. Its name is similar to the Portuguese word for fool.

Dec 22, 05: Talk about a working mother. A Christmas Island frigate bird named Lydia recently made a 26-day journey of about 2,500 miles —-across Indonesian volcanoes and some of Asia's busiest shipping lanes-— in search of food for her baby.
. . The trip, tracked with a global positioning device by scientists at Christmas Island National Park, is by far the longest known nonstop journey by one of these critically endangered seabirds. Previously, the black-and-white scavengers with distinctive pink beaks and wingspans of up to 8 feet were known only to fly a few hundred miles from their nesting sites, staying away for just a few days at a time.
. . Why does she need to go that far? It raises the suspicion that fish resources around Christmas Island are not currently adequate. That might explain the slow and gradual decline of the bird.", whose numbers have fallen by 10 percent over the past 20 years.

Dec 22, 05: A Japanese whaling fleet and Greenpeace environmental activists are involved in a stand-off in the remote Southern Ocean near the coast of Antarctica with the two sides accusing each other of ramming their vessels. Two Greenpeace ships, Esperanza and Arctic Sunrise, launched inflatable boats on Wednesday to harass Japanese "catcher boats", positioning them between the whale and harpoon gun.
. . Despite international disapproval, Japan announced in June plans to nearly double its annual catch of minke whales to 850 and add fin whales and eventually humpbacks --two types of whales conservationists say whose survival is threatened.
. . Australia is a staunch critic of Japan's whaling program and Prime Minister John Howard iterated his opposition in a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last week.

Dec 16, 05: Three environmental groups are suing the U.S. government to force consideration of whether polar bears are a threatened species, saying rising global temperatures threaten to kill off the Arctic predators.
. . An "endangered" species is one that is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range. A "threatened" species is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future, according to the agency.
. . If the suit is successful, there will be two more steps, each of which can take up to a year, before polar bears could be officially listed as threatened. The groups argue that rising global temperatures endangers polar bears by melting the ice floes on which the giant predators prowl and hunt. "As global warming continues, more bears are going to die. This is very predictable, it's common sense," Siegel said. "Their habitat is sea ice. They don't hunt from land, they don't hunt from water. They can't survive if their habitat disappears."

Dec 16, 05: With assault rifles over their shoulders and body armor strapped to their chests, Roberto Paleo and his 17 officers are among the world's most heavily armed park rangers. Yet they guard one of nature's most delicate creatures —-the monarch butterfly.
. . The rangers say they need the weapons to protect the winter nesting grounds of millions of orange and black winged butterflies from armed gangs of illegal loggers in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.
. . The monarchs are not listed as endangered, but scientists say the deforestation could threaten their existence. Last season, 22 million monarchs reached the park, an 80% drop from the previous year, prompting the Mexican government to set up the special police force.
. . Aided by hidden video cameras and communicating with special radios to avoid scanners, the officers speed around in all-terrain vehicles, looking for loggers in the rugged area, which spans more than 124,000 acres. Their arsenal includes AR-15 and Galil automatic rifles, pump-action shotguns and Smith & Wesson handguns.
. . Mexico's illegal logging trade generates millions of dollars a year. And while the rangers have seized eight pickup trucks full of timber, they have yet to catch a logger.

Dec 15, 05: In a warning aimed at festive season party-goers, international conservation groups said today that a thriving illegal trade in caviar across Europe was pushing sturgeon species toward extinction.
. . Pressure group WWF and wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC also accused European Union governments of dragging their feet on a labeling system showing the origin of traded caviar, due to start early next year.
. . About half of the 27 sturgeon species that produce unfertilized roe eggs, renowned as a gourmet delicacy, are threatened, and two are believed to be verging on extinction. All sturgeon species native to the Caspian Sea and the rivers feeding it have suffered serious declines as their habitats and breeding grounds are polluted and destroyed and fisheries are mismanaged, the groups said.

Dec 14, 05: Thousands of salmon, tuna and other fish with electronic tags are revealing mysterious Pacific Ocean migration highways that may give clues about how to rebuild dwindling stocks, scientists said. Marine experts also found 78 new species of fish in 2005 along with scores of other creatures ranging from a 3-meter rocket-shaped jellyfish in the Arctic to a tiny carnivorous sponge in the South Atlantic.
. . "Fish with chips" --hi-tech implants that enable either satellite or seabed tracking-- were one of the breakthroughs to uncover ocean migration paths, scientists in the 73-nation Census of Marine Life (COML) said.
. . One bluefin tuna swam the Pacific three times in 600 days according to satellite records --an enormous 40,000 km --equalling the distance around the world. That indicated that Japanese and American tuna stocks were one and the same.
. . 2,700 salmon were implanted with electronic chips the size of a little fingernail, to see where they go after leaving rivers where they are born.
. . Apart from salmon, about 1,838 animals --including sharks, turtle, tuna, sea lions and birds-- have devices that report in by satellite when they go near the surface.
. . Of new species found in 2005, one of the strangest was the rocket-shaped jellyfish known as a physconect siphonophore. O'Dor said that several pear-shaped jellyfish propelled the long, thin structure containing the orange reproductive organs --like ants working in a colony for a queen.
. . The discovery of 78 new species of fish, from the depths of the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, raised the total of fish species documented by the COML to 15,717. In total, it has documented 40,000 species of all types --from squid to sea cucumbers-- a fraction of the suspected totals.
. . Among other surveys, scientists found a "dead zone" at the epicenter of the December 26 Indian Ocean tsunami. The COML said that an absence of large animals in a 4,000 meter deep dive off Sumatra was "unprecedented in 25 years of deep sea sampling."

Dec 12, 05: Mexico's volcano rabbit and monkey-faced bats in Fiji are among hundreds of species facing imminent extinction but protecting the remaining scraps of their habitat could save them, according to a new study. Conducted by scientists working with the 52-member Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE), the study identifies 794 species on the brink of oblivion.
. . "Safeguarding 595 sites around the world would help stave off an imminent global extinction crisis", AZE said in a statement. "The study found that just one-third of the sites are known to have legal protection, and most are surrounded by human population densities that are approximately three times the global average."

Dec 3, 05: Commercial fisheries in the U.S. kill a pound of fish for every four pounds intentionally caught, jeopardizing efforts to restore some struggling stocks, scientists said. A tally of the nation's yearly unintentional "bycatch" —-unwanted fish that are caught and, in most cases, die before being thrown overboard-— was conducted by scientists.
. . They found that 1.2 billion tons of fish annually are left for dead with every 4 billion tons caught in commercial nets. The Gulf's shrimpers, for example, catch 114,000 tons of shrimp a year but discard four times that weight in snappers, mackerel, Atlantic croaker, crabs and porgies.

Nov 25, 05: The world's second largest shark, a bird found in the Garden of Eden and Central Asia's only true deer were among 11 new species given the title of "endangered" by countries around the world. Around 95 countries, members of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), agreed that several birds and mammals faced increasing threats to their survival and needed more protection.

Nov 21, 05: Increasing levels of ocean noise generated by military sonar, shipping, and oil and gas exploration are threatening dolphins and whales that rely on sound for mating, finding food and avoiding predators, according to a new report.
. . The report, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, found that the affects of ocean noise on marine life range from long-term behavioral change to hearing loss to death. The report, a follow-up to a 1999 study, included details from necropsies performed on beached whales suspected of being exposed to Navy sonar.
. . Scientists who examined more than a dozen whales that beached in the Canary Islands in September 2002 found bleeding around the brain and ears and lesions in the animals' livers and kidneys.
. . Jasny said noises from oil and gas exploration have also been linked to lower catch rates of halibut, cod and other species of fish. "It's been shown that some species of fish suffer severe injury to their inner ears, which can seriously compromise their ability to survive", he said.

Nov 18, 05: Greenpeace activists will put their lives on the line to disrupt this year's Japanese whaling hunt as part of a 14-month campaign to save the world's oceans, the group said. "Greenpeace will get out there and put ourselves between the whale and the harpoon to defend our oceans."
. . The activist group will leave South Africa in two ships within the next few days to search the vast Southern Ocean to confront the whalers and stop the hunt, he said. The 6-ship Japanese fleet left for the Antarctic last week and plan to double its target catch, spearing more than 900 minke whales, and 10 fin whales --an endangered species second in size only to the blue whale.
. . Tokyo maintains that whale meat is an important part of its culinary tradition, but anti-whaling nations and environmental groups condemn as cruel and unnecessary the practice of hunting the giant marine mammals.
. . Rattenbury said uncontrolled commercial whaling over the past century had wiped out 90% of the planet's whales, and has brought many species to the brink of extinction. "We are facing a growing wave of ocean extinction, our seas have reached a tipping point with scores of species of fish, birds and mammals edging toward extinction."

Nov 15, 05: A federal judge temporarily barred a logging project that would have included a small section of California's Giant Sequoia National Monument. The plan in question would thin trees across 1,322 acres, of which under a quarter are within the Giant Sequoia National Monument, in an effort to protect a small local community against forest fires, said Matt Mathes, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in California.
. . The Monument spans 328,000 acres that are home to two-thirds of all sequoia trees in the world.

Nov 14, 05: The speed of global deforestation has slowed because of new planting and natural forest extension, but the world's forests are still being destroyed at an alarming rate, a U.N. agency said. An average of 18 million acres of forest was lost annually in the last five years, down from 22 million acres a year between 1990 and 2000. The numbers measure net loss, meaning that they take into account forest growth from new planting and natural expansion of existing forests.
. . Deforestation was most extensive in South America, where an average of 10.6 million acres were lost annually over the last five years, followed by Africa with 9.8 million acres.

Nov 9, 05: A new explosive has begun to replace 19th century black powder as Alaska Natives seek more humane weaponry in the traditional hunt for bowhead whales. New: a harpoon-launched grenade loaded with penthrite, a World War I-era explosive used in demolition.
. . The 66-member International Whaling Commission mandated two decades ago that more humane methods be developed. The commission wanted to reduce the number of whales lost at sea after being hit by explosives and to decrease the time it took for a whale to die after being struck.
. . Researchers in 1995 reported Alaska bowhead whales lived about 60 minutes after being hit with black-powder grenades; bowheads hit with penthrite grenades survived only about 15 minutes. Penthrite, short for pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is used in blasting caps and easily detonates. Once the grenade penetrates the whale's skin and explodes, it produces a concussion that lethally shocks the central nervous system. Black powder, which dates to 19th-century Yankee whaling, is a slow-burning explosive that generally kills by causing hemorrhage.
. . Alaska whalers take bowheads from protected stocks that number about 10,000 animals and range in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas. The hunt is overseen by the International Whaling Commission.

Nov 9, 05: Japan's whaling fleet has set sail for Antarctic waters, where it will make its biggest catch in 20 years. The boats will aim to catch nearly 1,000 whales over the coming months. A global moratorium on commercial whaling has been in place since the 1980s, but Japan describes its programme as "scientific." The hunting is condemned by most conservation groups on the grounds that it is inhumane, unnecessary and may harm fragile wildlife populations.
. . There has been talk in Australian government circles of denying Japanese fishing vessels access to Australian ports or of taking legal action; but environment minister Ian Campbell, in comments to an Australian newspaper, appeared to rule out punitive measures.

Nov 9, 05: Congo's hippopotamus population, the world's largest, is being devastated by poaching, conservation officials say. Only about 800 remain in Virunga National Park, in the northeast of the country, down from 29,000 in the mid-1970s, according to Walter Dzeidzic of the World Wildlife Fund in Congo. Dzeidzic says the hippo may soon be extinct in the Central African nation.
. . The poachers are believed to be veterans of Congolese bush wars and former Hutu rebels who fled to eastern Congo in 1994 after killing Tutsis in the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. They machine-gun the animals and even dynamite lakes to bring dead hippo to the surface.
. . Villagers say hippo meat usually comes to markets unannounced. Its sale is illegal and it sells fast.

Nov 8, 05: As many as 200 million Monarch butterflies may migrate to Mexico this year —-a nearly tenfold increase over 2004, when unfavorable weather, pollution and deforestation caused a drastic decline in the population, environmental officials said. Last year, fewer than 23 million butterflies survived long enough to leave habitats in the United States and Canada. The Monarchs' annual 3,400-mile journey from the forests of eastern Canada and parts of the United States to the central Mexican mountains is an aesthetic and scientific wonder.
. . The number of people arrested for illegal logging is on the decline, as is the amount of timber seized from butterfly habitats. Satellite imagery of the sanctuaries also confirms the drop in deforestation, he said, though officials failed to provide concrete data to support the claim.
. . This year, a new 15-officer police force will patrol butterfly areas. In the past, armed logging gangs have responded to anti-deforestation efforts with violence.

Oct 29, 05: Private timber companies have been getting "green" certifications for the past decade to boost sales among consumers who want to be assured that forests are not harmed by producing the lumber they buy. Now the U.S. Forest Service, battered by court battles over balancing logging against fish and wildlife habitat, is looking into it.
. . A portion of the Fremont National Forest in southern Oregon and the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania will be the first of several national forests to undergo an audit under the standards of two major systems: the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, developed by the U.S. timber industry, and the Forest Stewardship Council, an international group based in Germany that grew out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
. . The sustainability standards address issues such as making sure new trees are growing to replace those that are cut, controlling erosion and protecting fish and wildlife habitat and clean water. The Forest Stewardship Council standards go further to assure protection of social issues, such as sacred tribal sites; and economic considerations, such as maintaining long-term jobs, in addition to the environment.

Oct 28, 05: The world's second largest rainforest stands a greater chance of being protected after Congo's president finally backed a largely ignored ban on new logging, conservation group Greenpeace said. Democratic Republic of Congo's government imposed a ban in 2002 on the allocation of new logging concessions to prevent rampant deforestation in the vast, central African country but the moratorium has since been widely flouted.
. . Congo has some 100 million hectares (250 million acres) of rainforest, most of which has remained untouched due to inaccessibility and years of war.
. . Environmentalists fear the Congo Basin --more than one million square miles stretching from eastern Congo to the coast of the Gulf of Guinea-- will be carved up without proper environmental planning or consideration for the communities living there. "This is the last place where we can think big in terms of biodiversity so we need to take a break and think about conservation and proper land use planning."
. . With corruption rife and central authority often lacking in Congo's vast interior, environmentalists fear a rapid expansion of logging will be unsustainable and offer little economic benefit for Congo's impoverished people.
. . During the last war, which officially ended in 2003, the belligerents were all accused of taking advantage of the power vacuum to plunder Congo's minerals, diamonds and timber.

Oct 27, 05: About 13 million endangered Olive Ridley turtles have hatched on Mexico's Pacific beaches and scuttled safely into the sea so far this year, protected from poachers by armed guards deployed by the government, environmentalists said. "We're only halfway through the season so there will be a lot more turtles hatching."
. . While only 13,000 of those will live to adulthood and breed, biologists say the numbers are on par with 2004 and show they are winning the battle in Mexico, where men gulp down raw turtle eggs with salt and lime juice as a supposed aphrodisiac.
. . Hundreds of thousands of females come ashore each year to lay their eggs on the beaches where they were born. But after surviving natural predators, bad weather, fishing nets and contamination, hundreds fall prey to poachers who cut out their eggs for sale as an illegal delicacy.
. . The government stepped up protection for the turtles in August by sending two Navy ships to Escobilla beach, Mexico's top nesting ground, after poachers bludgeoned and chopped up some 80 turtles to steal their eggs. Guarding nests, and sometimes taking eggs away to safety, has helped Olive Ridleys make a comeback. Last year, 33 million were born in Mexico.
. . Biologists in Mexico are also working to boost numbers of the much larger Hawksbill turtle and the huge Leatherback, which grows to 8 feet and weighs nearly a ton.

Oct 25, 05: Some 95% of Eritrea's forests have been lost in the past century because of drought, a growing population and --to a lesser extent-- the war for independence from Ethiopia.
. . Better protection for the diversity of the planet's creatures and plants could help shield humans from diseases like AIDS, Ebola or bird flu and save billions of dollars in health care costs, researchers said today. They said human disruptions to biodiversity --from roads through the Amazon jungle to deforestation in remote parts of Africa-- had made people more exposed to new diseases that originate in wildlife.
. . "Biodiversity not only stores the promise of new medical treatments and cures, it buffers humans from organisms and agents that cause disease", scientists from the Diversitas international group said.
. . A factor helping the spread of Lyme disease in the eastern United States, for instance, was the absence of former predators like wolves or wild cats that once kept down numbers of white-footed mice --a reservoir of the infection.
. . China had to employ people in some regions to pollinate apple orchards because the over-use of pesticides had killed off bees. "It maybe takes 10 people to do the work of two beehives."
. . The Australian gastric brooding frog had once been seen as key for anti-ulcer drugs because it bizarrely incubated its young in its stomach after shutting off digestive acids. It has since become extinct, taking its secrets with it.

Oct 25, 05: Nearly half of the world's coral reefs may be lost in the next 40 years unless urgent measures are taken to protect them against the threat of climate change, according to a new report by the World Conservation Union.
. . The Swiss-based organization called for the establishment of additional marine protected areas to prevent further degradation by making corals more robust and helping them resist bleaching. "20% of the earth's coral reefs, arguably the richest of all marine ecosystems, have been effectively destroyed today."
. . "Another 30% will become seriously depleted if no action is taken within the next 20-40 years, with climate change being a major factor for their loss."

Oct 21, 05: Damage to the Amazon rain forest may be twice as large than previously thought due to undetected "selective" logging, U.S. and Brazilian forest experts reported. Conventional methods of analyzing satellite images were capable of spotting only clear-cut swathes of land, where all the trees are removed for farming or grazing. Selective logging means individual trees are picked out of the forest. "The problem is it opens roads to massive clearing for agriculture."
. . Selective logging, the report said, increased the flow of carbon from the Amazon forest into the atmosphere by 25%. It also thins the shady canopy and causes damage to the undergrowth, making forests drier and more flammable.

Oct 19, 05: Environmentalists sued the Navy today, claiming that a widely used form of sonar for detecting enemy submarines disturbs and sometimes kills whales and dolphins. The sonar "is capable of flooding thousands of square miles of ocean with dangerous levels of noise pollution", according to the lawsuit. "Our position is that whales shouldn't have to die for [their] practice."

Oct 18, 05: A famed desert tree used for generations by Africa's bushmen to make quivers for their arrows is threatened by global warming. The quiver tree has iconic status in Namibia, where its blue-green crown vividly stands out against a parched landscape. "The quiver trees are in the early stage of a poleward (southward) range shift."
. . The quiver trees' situation highlighted the fact that climate change was having an impact on desert ecosystems, regions where many people assume the affects should be minimal as they are already hot and dry.
. . A species has three choices when confronted with climate change: die, adapt or migrate. For the quiver tree, any migration it made would have to come about as a result of seed dispersal via the wind or from droppings from birds or other animals that digested them.

Oct 12, 05: Researchers believe the massive die-offs of New Mexico's state tree during 2002 and 2003 could be a harbinger of life in a warming world. High elevation pinon forests that had survived previous droughts endured as much as 90% mortality, according to a team of researchers. "Across a whole landscape, this system got whacked."
. . Drought weakened the trees enough for bark beetles to kill them, but warmer temperatures —-only .5 to 1 degrees C higher than the long-term average-— appear to have contributed, the scientists found.
. . Tree deaths occurred in areas that were relatively unaffected by a drier drought during the 1950s. "This drought was hotter." He said dramatic drought-induced changes in the Southwest landscape since the turn of the 21st century are consistent with global climate change projections. "We're more likely to get more frequent, more intense droughts", Breshears said.
. . U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Julio Betancourt disagreed with conclusions reached by Breshears' team. Betancourt questioned whether scientists know enough about what happened 50 years ago to be sure the recent drought was worse. However, he praised the scientists for trying to quantify effects of warming temperatures. "All of us [see] these temperatures going up, and we know it's going to have an effect", Betancourt said.

Oct 12, 05: Octopus, a delicacy in many Mediterranean cuisines, may be at risk of dying out in EU waters if controls are not enforced to stop overfishing, particularly of younger ones, the EU executive said.
. . Far too many undersized octopuses were being sold in the 25 EU countries, leading to a depletion of stocks, the European Commission said. To curb the overfishing, it called for a minimum size for octopus caught in eastern central Atlantic waters --an area extending into the mid-Atlantic roughly from Morocco down the African coast to Congo, where many EU vessels operate.
. . The minimum size suggested was 500 grams (1.1 lb), below the standard 750 grams allowed within EU waters, but above Senegal's 350 grams. If agreed by EU fisheries ministers, the measure would apply to octopus marketed anywhere in the bloc, whether caught by EU or non-EU vessels.

Oct 8, 05: The broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough is the latest public figure to back saving the albatross. Sir David has given his backing to an RSPB and BirdLife International project which trains fishermen in albatross-friendly fishing techniques.
. . An estimated 100,000 albatrosses die each year on hooks of longline fishing boats. 19 of the 21 albatross species are facing extinction.
. . Marine animals such as turtles are also snared accidentally on the hooks of longline vessels which are hunting for tuna, marlin and other large fish. They trail lines can be 130km long, with hooks every few meters. The birds swoop down to pick up bait from the hooks, become snared, and drown.
. . Yet what Sir David terms "this needless slaughter" can be avoided by the use of fishing methods which do not harm the birds. These include fishing at night, weighting the lines so they stay below the surface, and trailing streamers which float in the air above the lines, scaring the birds away.

Oct 8, 05: A new study suggests natural gas development in western Wyoming is forcing mule deer into less suitable winter range and affecting the animals' movements in an area known as the Pinedale Anticline.
. . The number of mule deer on the Mesa winter range dropped a "disconcerting" 46% from 2002 to 2005. Models and maps indicated that, through at least three winters, deer tended to favor areas further away from well pads. Such behavior suggests that seasonal drilling restrictions may not be achieving what land managers had intended.

Oct 2, 05: Spanish fishermen are devastating stocks of deep-water sharks in the northeast Atlantic, using wasteful and unregulated methods that leave more than half of their catch to rot, according to an investigation by Irish, Norwegian and British marine experts.
. . In two reports produced this year they found that the trawlers frequently leave nets unattended for weeks, even months, in hopes of maximizing profits. They estimate that the practice may have wiped out four-fifths of two threatened species: the leafscale gulper shark and the siki shark, also known as the Portuguese dogfish.
. . "What they're doing is not illegal, and that's the problem." When the trawlers return to each net, more than half of the sharks caught have already died and grown rotten. Often, he said, the trawlers also flout EU regulations by abandoning damaged nets, which can ensnare sealife at the ocean bottom for years.
. . Last month, Rihan said, an Irish Sea Fisheries Board vessel went trawling for dumped or broken deep-sea shark nets in just one section of Irish territorial waters — and pulled up more than 37 kms of nets, which average about 100 meters in length each.

Sept 26, 05: Cocaine is killing the great nature parks of Colombia. Government spraying of coca plant killer is driving growers and traffickers out of their usual territory into national parks where spraying is banned. Here they are burning thousands of acres of virgin rain forest and poisoning rivers with chemicals.
. . Now the government faces a painful dilemma: to spray weedkiller would be devastating, but the impact of coca-growing is increasingly destructive. The question is, which is worse?
. . Colombia is home to about 15% of all the world's plant species and one of its most diverse arrays of amphibians, mammals and birds. Dozens of species that populate its jungles and Andes mountains exist nowhere else on the planet.
. . Environmentalists insist the solution is for government workers to destroy the crops with machetes —-a method that has worked in mountainous areas beyond the spray planes' reach.
. . But the Sierra Macarena and many other national parks are occupied by rebels who threaten to kill anyone involved in manual eradication, officials say.

Sept 23, 05: The struggling parks where Kenya's largest elephant and rhino populations live will get trucks, communication equipment and better roads in a $1.25 million anti-poaching program. Tsavo —-an 8,320-square-mile ecosystem slightly smaller than New Jersey-— accounts for 52% of the protected area in this East African nation.

Sept 21, 05: The price of saving the world's frogs, toads and salamanders from oblivion will top $400m over five years. This is the estimated cost of a global action plan drawn up during an expert summit in Washington DC, and backed by the UN's biodiversity agency IUCN. The money would pay for the protection of habitats, for disease prevention and captive-breeding projects, and for the ability to respond to emergencies.
. . About a third of all amphibian species are at a high risk of extinction.

Sept 21, 05: The city that never sleeps will darken the lights of the famed Manhattan skyline after midnight to help save migrating birds. New York civic leaders today said the lights of buildings above the 40th floor will be turned off after midnight in the fall and spring migration seasons to save birds.
. . Since 1997, more than 4,000 migratory birds have been killed or injured from colliding into skyscrapers, bird experts said.

Aug 18, 05: Coral reef ecosystems, among the oldest and most diverse forms of life, are declining in U.S. waters because of overfishing, climate change, marine diseases, land-based pollution, storms and grounded ships. Such ecosystems "clearly are beset by a wide array of significant threats", the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. Only in one place, Guam, did a threat level go from low to high, because of coral bleaching from rising ocean temperatures.
. . Globally, only about 30% of the world's coral reefs are healthy, according to a study last year by 240 scientists in 96 countries. That is down from 41% in 2002. That report listed global warming —-blamed for higher water temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations-— as the top threat. It found that the Caribbean had lost 80 to 98% of its elkhorn and staghorn coral, which are both among the most common species. Coral reefs provide food and shelter to fish and protect shores from erosion.

Aug 18, 05: Can the pocket gopher be saved? The rodent, a secretive animal that usually goes unnoticed underground, is near extinction in south Georgia, biologists say. They're starting a new push to save the creature ecologists say does important work providing habitat for other animals and aerating the soil.
. . Named for their pocket-like cheeks, the gophers are vital to the ecosystem. The rodent rarely ventures above ground but is considered a "keystone species" because its elaborate network of underground burrows benefit other animals and plants, Ozier said. The gopher is found only in the coastal plains of Georgia, Florida and Alabama.
. . Biologists think the species has been devastated by loss of natural habitat — longleaf pine savannas and naturally vegetated rolling sand hills. The gophers don't migrate and don't adapt very well to new habitat.

A controversial breeding program has improved the genetic diversity of inbred Florida panthers and the endangered animals are on the rebound, scientists announced. Yet while the hybrid cats are spreading their range, they're not out of the woods yet.
. . As few as 30 wild panthers roamed the Florida Everglades in the early 1990s. Abnormalities such as low sperm counts and heart defects were becoming common, studies found, and the kittens had low survival rates. In 1995, researchers outfitted some female Texas panthers with radio collars and introduced them into four sections of the Florida Everglades. Some Florida panthers were also tagged.
. . Researchers monitored the cats and kittens and found that the hybrids had better survival rates, presumably because they were more genetically diverse. "More than three times as many hybrid kittens appear to reach adulthood as do purebred ones."

Aug 18, 05: Europe's rarest songbird is facing extinction, despite being the most promiscuous and energetic lover in the avian world, and concerned scientists are looking urgently for ways to save it. The male aquatic warbler is described as "continuously ready to mate" and able to indulge in record-breaking mating sessions, which in turn gives the females ample opportunity to sample and select the best mates.
. . However, numbers have slumped to less than 20,000 in the past century --a decline of 95%-- and its range has shrunk from continent-wide to isolated strongholds in eastern Europe as humans have ravaged its habitat --disappearing as marshlands are drained and farmland is expanded.
. . In contrast to most birds, which get the business over in a mere one to two seconds' sexual contact, aquatic warblers spend up to 35 minutes copulating!

Aug 16, 05: Internet shoppers in search of the exotic have sparked a booming trade that is threatening the existence of many endangered species, a report said. From a "sweet natured" giraffe to reptile skin handbags, a snapshot survey of the World Wide Web by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) found hundreds of live primates and thousands of rare animal products being offered for sale.
. . The report found, in just one week, 146 live primates, 5,527 elephant products, 526 turtle and tortoiseshells, 2,630 reptile products and 239 wild cat products for sale. Apart from the two-year-old giraffe for sale on a U.S. site for $15,000, there was also a seven-year-old gorilla living in London in need of a new home "due to relocation of owner" offered for sale on a British site for 4,500 pounds. Baby chimpanzees were offered at between $60,000 and $65,000 in the United States, while in Wales a pair of breeding cotton-head tamarins were going for 1,900 pounds.

Aug 10, 05: Mexican poachers bludgeoned and chopped some 80 protected Olive Ridley sea turtles to death for their eggs, believed to be an aphrodisiac, and left their shells scattered on a Pacific beach.
. . The navy has sent two ships to the area to step up protection of turtle nesting areas, the environmental agency said. Killing or capturing Olive Ridley turtles has been banned in Mexico since 1990, with sentences of up to 9 years in prison, and the beach is normally well protected against poachers by the military.

Aug 8, 05: America's national forests are becoming islands of green that are increasingly trapped by an expanding sea of new houses, according to a new study. Suburban growth threatens to cut off natural corridors, or "wild highways", that allow plants and animals to move from one wild patch to another. Isolated forests "cannot function as well for biodiversity."
. . The number of housing units within national forest boundaries increased from 500,000 to 1.5 million. In the Eastern U.S., most land was settled before national forests were established in the late 1800s. As a result, private landowners hold up to 46% of the land within forest administrative boundaries. Nationwide, inholders own about 17% of all national forest lands. Forests may be getting "loved to death."

Aug 7, 05: United Arab Emirates --The Khor al-Beidah lagoon is a pristine tidal flat teeming with wildlife, including endangered birds, sea turtles and manatee-like dugong that swim among its tangles of mangroves. But a bevy of dredges and construction gangs are about to begin transforming a 1,500-acre parcel into a $3.3 billion luxury conglomeration of homes, shops, marinas and beach resorts aimed at foreign buyers and tourists.
. . The crown jewels of the development are private villas to be built on artificial islands with gated access —-and views over one of the few remaining mangrove archipelago left in the Persian Gulf. Developers say the waterfront complex, called Umm Al-Quwain Marina, will skirt the mangroves and leave most of the 20 square miles of wetland untouched.
. . Environmentalists are aghast. They fear construction and people, cars and boats will drive off Khor al-Beidah's internationally famous wildlife, including birds that migrate from Siberia to Africa and the rare socotra cormorant that nests almost exclusively on the Arabian Peninsula. "We've seen it happen everywhere else. When you start to dredge and build marinas, that's the end of it."
. . The once empty Emirates coast is awash in construction that has buried coral reefs, mangrove swamps and other wildlife zones. The tidal lagoon here is one of the last such areas in the country, especially since the partial bulldozing of a mangrove swamp on the east coast. Activists long urged the government to protect the lagoon, arguing it is more valuable as an ecotourism destination than as home to another luxury housing complex.

Aug 6, 05: An estimated one in four whales are spotted by aerial surveys, leaving the rest vulnerable to ship strikes or fishing gear entanglements. But scientists say an underwater listening system they're developing will dramatically improve detection and reduce whale deaths. The "passive acoustic" system would find whales and immediately transmit their location to nearby vessels. The underwater microphones could allow scientists to pinpoint up to 75 percent of whales.

Aug 5, 05: An Indian task force said that the country's tigers were under siege from poachers and people living in protected reserves, and called for thousands of villagers to be relocated to save the endangered big cat. There was national shock after reports in March that the population of 16-18 tigers at a leading sanctuary in western India could be wiped out by poachers within a year, and that the risks were similar at other reserves.
. . The task force called for relocation of thousands of people living in 250 villages located inside India's 28 tiger reserves. India's tiger population has fallen to about 3,700 from roughly 40,000 a century ago, mainly due to rampant poaching. But conservationists suspect the number could be less than 2,000.
. . The task force said India would have to work with China to stop huge illegal trade in tiger body parts. Tiger organs, teeth, bones and penises are used in traditional Chinese medicine. India's conviction rate of those charged with poaching of endangered animals is less than 5%, with many accused of poaching getting off due to lack of evidence.

Aug 4, 05: In a sort of ecological trade-off, conservationists headed into the Arkansas woods today to kill dozens of trees in hopes of helping the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that up until recently was feared extinct. The woodpecker feasts on beetle larvae beneath the bark of dead trees. Killing trees by damaging the bark or administering herbicide could create more food for them and help the species recover.

Aug 4, 05: According to U.S. Forest Service figures compiled for The Associated Press, the acres of forest killed by beetles in 12 Western states jumped from 1.4 million in 1997 to 8.6 million last year. And beetles also are making a comeback in the South, where they chewed up millions of acres of trees several years ago.
. . Beetle outbreaks come in cycles and are determined in part by drought conditions and overall forest health. The extent of the West's current outbreak, however, has many people worried as the dead trees dry out and begin to fall, creating a canopy that can cause long, intense wildfires. Many experts say there is no practical way to reduce beetle numbers. Spraying insecticide is too expensive, and performing prescribed burns in hot, dry conditions is too risky.
. . Black, an entomologist and ecologist, said logging is partly to blame for the uniform forests in the West and for destroying potential nesting areas for woodpeckers, a natural enemy of the beetles. "There's less tree diversity, less diversity in size and age, and that's allowed the beetles to spread easily in large areas," he said.

Aug 4, 05: Weapon-wielding humans, and not warming temperatures, killed off the sloth and other giant mammals that roamed North America during the last Ice Age, a new study suggests. The arrival of humans onto the American continent and the great thaw that occurred near the end of the last Ice Age both occurred at roughly the same time, about 11,000 years ago. Until now, scientists were unable to tease apart the two events. They used radiocarbon to date fossils from the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, where humans didn't set foot until more than 6,000 years after their arrival on the American continent.
. . The West Indian ground sloth, a mammal that was the size of a modern elephant, also disappeared from the islands around this time. "If climate were the major factor driving the extinction of ground sloths, you would expect the extinctions to occur at about the same time on both the islands and the continent since climate change is a global event." This could also explain why more than three-fourths of the large Ice Age mammal species --including giant wooly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and giant bears-- that roamed many parts of North America became extinct within the span of a few thousand years.
. . Steadman said that temperature changes might have still played an important role in their demise, however, making some animal species more vulnerable to humans than they might otherwise have been.

Aug 3, 05: Birds and bats and wild plants are thriving on Britain's organic farms, a study by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) said. On organic farms, there are 109 percent [more than double] more wild plants and 85 percent more plant species than on non-organic farms. Organic farms support 32 percent more birds and 35 percent more bats than non-organic farms, the BTO, a charity carrying out independent research on birds, said. There are also 5 percent more bird *species on organic farms. Just three percent of English farmland is organic.

Aug 1, 05: [more proof that you can never do just one thing.] The loss of once-plentiful wolves in a part of Canada's west allowed the elk population to mushroom, pushing out beavers and songbirds and showing the importance of top predators, Canadian researchers said. Although scientists have long noted that the loss of even one species can have profound effects, the report is one of the first large-scale studies to show clearly the widespread consequences of losing a predator at the top of the food chain.
. . Elk populations were 10 times as high in areas where there were no wolves. The elk browsed on tender young willows, leaving little for beavers and willow-dwelling birds. Aspen trees seemed less affected. "We also found that as elk populations climbed, active beaver lodges declined, probably because beavers could no longer find sufficient trees with which to build their dams."

July 30, 05: Jacqueline Miller, cocurator of the museum's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, is using its more than 3.5 million specimens to create a detailed national butterfly database.
. . Butterflies are good environmental indicators, biologists say. Tracking the types and numbers of butterfly species across time and space can provide early warnings when something is amiss. That's why they want to create a detailed national butterfly database. If it succeeds, the United States will have in place a biological gauge to measure everything from the health of prairies to changing weather patterns. It will also be following in the footsteps of Canada and Mexico, which already have butterfly databases.
. . Many butterfly species rely on one family of plants for survival. Often, these plants are found only in a particular habitat (such as prairie or tropical rain forest), and in a certain temperature range. So by tracking the butterfly population in a certain area, scientist can tell, for example, that the tall-grass prairie is quickly disappearing from a broad swath of North America. Or that the long-term weather patterns in an area have shifted over several decades.

July 28, 05: The recent Millennium Ecosystem Assessment showed that invasive species were responsible for the greatest loss of biodiversity on islands; and second only to habitat loss globally as a major cause of extinctions.

July 28, 05: Scientists say the variety of tuna, marlin, swordfish and other big ocean predators has declined up to 50 percent over the past half-century due to overfishing. For the first time, ecologists and oceanographers mapped the hotspots with the largest concentrations of many big fish species, then and now.
. . Researchers who had previously reported an overall decline in the abundance of big fish now say there has also been a significant drop in the number of different types of fish such as tuna and billfish being found in many areas.
. . "The peak in big fish diversity is at middle temperatures", said co-author Ransom A. Myers, a fisheries scientist also at Dalhousie. "Ocean animals don't like it too hot, or too cold, they like it just right" —-at about 77 degrees F. They also found that concentrations of many big fish lined up closely with the only other known global mapping of ocean life —-that of single-celled zooplankton.
. . The study could help policy-makers and conservationists determine where best to locate marine-protected areas on the high seas — an issue being debated by the United Nations.

July 28, 05: The endangered gray nurse shark is its own worst enemy --its young eat each other in the womb-- so Australian scientists have a radical rescue plan to artificially inseminate and breed the ocean predator in test-tubes.
. . The gray nurse is one of the fiercest-looking but most docile marine creatures, and despite it being declared endangered in 1984 and its habitat protected, it could become extinct along Australia's east coast within 20 years.
. . Nicknamed the "labrador of the sea" due to its docile nature, gray nurse numbers plunged after being wrongfully blamed for many attacks on swimmers off Sydney beaches and it was brutally hunted until the 1960s.
. . Their plight has now become critical. Breeding programs have been used to conserve the endangered cod trout in Australia, the Mexican gray wolf and Californian condor, but scientists here say this will be the first attempt at shark breeding. The sharks have two wombs in which a dominant pup will consume its siblings, leaving only two surviving pups every two years when the shark breeds. There could be 60 or more pups, originally.
. . "Once the embryos have developed to a certain size (10 cm) they actually have a fully functional set of jaws and teeth. Artificially inseminating gray nurse sharks will not avoid intra-uterine cannibalism, so marine scientists at the New South Wales (NSW) state fisheries department have come up with a radical plan to breed the embryo sharks in individual test tubes.
. . With only one embryo pup surviving in each womb, the female shark then produces unfertilized eggs for it to feed on until it grows to about one meter in length and is born. Each pup consumes an estimated 17,000 pea-sized unfertilized eggs. Once inserted into the artificial wombs, the embryos will be fed artificial shark eggs until they reach birth size and then released into the wild.

July 26, 05: Nairobi National Park is rather different. Just yards behind the safari park outside the Kenyan capital, factories belch gray smoke into the sky while a slum pushes ever closer to the fence. Aircraft roar over the park from a nearby airport, though there is barely a rustle from the animals below, so used are they to noise pollution. On the other side, where the park melds into the plains of the Rift Valley, hundreds of homesteads dot the landscape, blocking the migration in and out for thousands of wild animals.
. . This is the only natural park right next to a city on earth. Once teeming with animals, and famous for its unique black rhino population, the park is already becoming a shadow of its former self as a major tourist attraction and animal sanctuary. A mere eight or so lions remain in the 117 square km park. Wildebeest numbers have dropped from 9,742 in 1990 to just 64 in 2002. Zebras are down from 2,566 to 1,403 over the same period, while impala are down to 419 from 1,298.
. . Kenya Wildlife Service, which runs the park, says it has begun aggressive measures to save the sanctuary. It wants to subject the 30 or so factories on the northern city side to annual "environmental audits" to reduce pollution. It is negotiating with settlers on the southern side --where the animals used to migrate in huge numbers-- to at least avoid fence structures on their land.
. . There is also the perennial problem of poaching for lucrative bush-meat. Poachers lace the park with snares and also use torches at night to stun animals. The growing proliferation of flower farms upstream are also threatening the park's water supplies. "They are boring holes which are destroying the water basin. If this continues, we will have a barren aquifer. The government has to regulate this."

July 26, 05: Sea turtles are being killed by the thousands by commercial fishermen in Nicaragua, according to a new report. Turtles that have been tagged have a nearly 50% chance of being dead a year later. "Green turtles cannot take this relentless pounding by the Nicaraguan sea turtle fishing industry." About 11,000 green sea turtles are harvested annually in Nicaragua for local consumption. To sustain the fishery, that number would have to drop to 3,000 or less, the study concludes.
. . Costa Rica in particular has worked hard to protect nesting turtles from poachers. There's a world famous turtle-nesting beach in Costa Rica. "Nicaragua plainly needs to do more to protect what is an international resource."

July 26, 05: A deadly fungus used to control the spread of unwanted varieties of blackberries overseas has landed in the United States, infecting numerous fields in Oregon, the capital of America's blackberry industry. First spotted this spring on the southern Oregon Coast, the rust fungus has spread to seven counties. One grower has reported losing his entire crop. It's already crossed into southwestern Washington.
. . The fungus —-which prior to its appearance in Oregon had never been detected in North America-— has not attacked the Marionberry, Oregon's state berry and one of the region's most lucrative berry crops. It's a huge problem because it's something that can be battled and fought, but it takes a pretty rigorous spray program to do that.

July 25, 05: Greenpeace issued a fresh call today to stop the practice of bottom-trawling, saying the international organizations that manage fish stocks were doing nothing to stop the destruction of ocean beds. The conservation group says trawlers hunting for fish such as the orange roughy let their nets drag along the seabed at depths of up to 2 km, destroying everything in their wake.
. . "We have documented an enormous range of the deep sea life that's coming up in these nets, including 500-year-old pieces of coral that are just ripped out of the seabed and (then) tossed back over the side."

July 25, 05: "Supersize" mice are eating seabird chicks alive on Gough Island, one of the most important seabird colonies in the world, UK conservationists report. The rodents are taking out one million petrels, shearwaters and albatrosses each year on the UK Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says the mice infestation puts some species in danger of extinction.
. . "There are also potential diseases for mice we could introduce --the equivalent of myxomatosis for rabbits."
. . Gough Island is some 8km long and 6km wide and is the most southerly of the Tristan da Cunha group. It is used as a nesting ground by 22 bird species, of which 20 are seabirds; 10 million individuals can be found there at any one time.
. . Until passing sealing ships moored up in the 19th Century, the birds were largely safe from predators. But mice aboard the ships have infested Gough, and grown large, partly because of the abundant new food source on which they have recently started to indulge. "Mice and other small animals often do get bigger when they are put on islands, particularly islands at higher latitudes."
. . The albatross chicks spend eight months sitting waiting for food from their parents. They are nearly a meter tall and 250 times the weight of the mice but are largely immobile and cannot defend themselves. The mice gnaw into the birds' flesh as they sit on the ground. Researchers have seen as many as eight or 10 rodents feasting on a single ailing chick.

July 22, 05: More than eight in 10 right whale deaths may be going undiscovered, according to marine scientists who called for emergency action to help prevent humans from accidentally killing the rare animal. Researchers estimated that deaths of North Atlantic right whales may be underreported by as much as 83 percent annually. At least eight whales have died in the last 16 months, and only 350 are believed to exist.
. . There isn't time for proposed protections to slog through the federal rule-making process, Amy Knowlton, a New England Aquarium researcher and one of the article's 18 co-authors, said. The Science article, citing the Endangered Species Act, called for emergency rules to protect against ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements, the two primary ways that humans kill right whales. Proposed rules include slowing down ships in whale-heavy areas and reducing the amount of floating fishing line in the water. Gear and voluntary speed restrictions are already in place, but the new rules would significantly broaden requirements and improve their effectiveness, advocates say.
. . The North Atlantic right whale was nearly hunted out of existence in the late 18th century and has struggled since.

July 22, 05: The manager of the Cocodrilos Continental crocodile farm in Honduras hopes to attract busloads of tourists for the adrenalin-packed experience, held every week. Yet visitors might be less enthusiastic to learn that for the 1,000 crocodiles wallowing in the farm's mud-filled ponds, there are another 9,000 who will never see the light of day. Instead, they go from an incubator shed to pitch-black swelteringly hot "fattening tanks" --artificially heated to make the hatchlings grow faster. Once fully grown they are taken out, killed and skinned to make handbags.
. . What set out to be a conservation project in the 1990s, amid concern that hunting was killing off the native population of American crocodiles, has become a lucrative business that so far has not returned even one of the reptiles to the wild. The farm sold roughly 2,500 skins last year for about $200 each and its goal is to sell 10 times as many. It also sells the tasty white meat to classy Honduran restaurants.
. . IFAW is pushing for an animal welfare law in Mexico, where exotic species are at risk from smuggling and deforestation, but tiny Honduras has enough on its hands fighting poverty, AIDS and violent criminal gangs.

July 22, 05: One in five pet shops in Singapore are selling endangered turtles, an animal welfare group said. The Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Acres) said protected turtles were found in 20 shops and that several were repeat offenders, whose owners could be fined up to S$10,000 and jailed up to one-year if they were caught by police. In recent years, the AVA has confiscated hundreds of animals, including turtles, tortoises, snakes, lizards and rare birds such as the cockatoo.
. . Despite having strict regulations on animal trade, Singapore is a hub of illegal wildlife trade because its location and busy harbor and airport make it a good transshipment point.

July 21, 05: Squadrons of Gray whales could be winging their way across the Atlantic within a decade to restock British waters under plans put forward by two conservation scientists. Gray whales, known as the "friendlies of the deep" because of their tranquil nature, were once common in the seas around northern Europe but have been extinct for 400 years.
. . But the 15-meter long, 40-ton leviathans are in plentiful supply off the coast of California. Ramsey and Nevin propose airlifting 50 surplus Gray whales from the Californian population for release off the coast of northern England, starting in 2015. Ramsey said cargo aircraft can easily accommodate adult Gray whales and the journey from California to Britain would take less than 12 hours.

July 21, 05: Reyna Mojica saw her two boys shot to death just weeks ago, an attack she traces to a vendetta she says began in 1998 when her family helped block hundreds of logging trucks in Mexico's Sierra Madre. After the month-long blockade, international lumber firm Boise Cascade canceled contracts for massive cutting operations in the Petatlan mountains, citing supply problems, and 15 logging permits were revoked.
. . They call themselves the Peasant Ecologists of the Petatlan Sierra and their fight to save a swath of forest near the Pacific coast is among the world's most important struggles against deforestation, Greenpeace says.
. . The peasants have largely won. But they have paid dearly. Since then, at least a dozen peasant leaders have been targeted. Some have been arrested and jailed on what are widely seen as bogus charges engineered by political and economic interests profiting from logging. Others have gone into hiding and some have been killed.
. . Environmental groups say wealthy landowners and power brokers profited from logging that between 1992 and 2000 destroyed 40 percent of 558,000 acres of woodland here, some of the worst deforestation on the planet. As old-growth forest was clear-cut, peasants saw streams and rivers drying up and knew something was wrong. Stripping the land of trees depleted the watershed. For subsistence farmers, the stakes were vital. They set out to educate neighbors, armed with Catholic teachings about preserving nature, and came up against powerful interests including a party boss with family ties to the army.
. . The group's mission has turned largely from protest to reforestation. They have planted 177,000 trees and formed firefighting brigades. Shiny green baby firs now huddle on once bare mountainsides. Spindly young cedars crowd the lower altitudes. Some farmers harvest the trees' seeds for sale, and as the watershed rises they dream of marketing river shrimp.
. . Labeled "eco-guerrillas" by prosecutors, two ecologists were arrested and tortured into confessing to gun and drug crimes and another was killed in that raid, rights groups say. The jailing of Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera became an international rights cause until President Vicente Fox pardoned them in 2001 under mounting pressure. The ecologists had hoped such persecution would stop with Fox's 2000 election, which ended 71 years of one-party rule. Instead, leader Felipe Arreaga has been jailed since November on what rights groups say are false murder charges, and in May three more ecologists were arrested on gun charges.

July 20, 05: They call him "the lucky royal turtle" — a rare and endangered reptile that was saved from a likely fate in a Chinese soup pot by keen-eyed wildlife officers and a microchip. Poachers snatched the animal from a Cambodian river two months ago and toted it across the Vietnamese border with other, more common, turtles.
. . Conservationists said that at 33 pounds, the animal was sure to have fetched a good price in China, where turtle meat is a delicacy often made into soup. A raid was the turtle's first stroke of good luck. About 30 turtles were confiscated and transported to a wildlife inspection center. "My staff said they had never seen a turtle that big. Its head and eyes were also different from the regular turtles." The officials consulted an endangered species book, then called Doug Hendrie, an Asian turtle specialist for the New York-based World Conservation Society. They told him they thought they had a Batagur baska, or Asian river terrapin.
. . At first, Hendrie thought the wildlife officers must be joking. But a photo soon confirmed it was indeed a Batagur baska, a species thought to have disappeared in Cambodia until it was rediscovered in 2001. Conservationists eventually began tagging the animals with tracking devices and monitoring their nests, and King Norodom Sihamoni ordered their protection.
. . When officials inspected it in Ho Chi Minh City, they found a tiny microchip implanted under its wrinkly skin, pinpointing its exact home on the Sre Ambel River in southern Cambodia. Hendrie said there are only about two to eight females remaining there, making the return of this adult male turtle even more vital. It had been tagged in Cambodia for research two years ago but not seen again until its discovery in Vietnam.
. . Vietnamese and Cambodians officials worked together to repatriate the turtle. He was shipped back to Cambodia last week and is undergoing health checks before being returned to the wild.
. . On one river in western Malaysia, 690 Batagur baska turtles were found in 1999 compared to only 40 last year.

July 20, 05: Africa must stop pushing out wildlife to make way for farming or it will lose out on crucial tourism revenue, Kenya's Deputy Environment Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai said. If used properly, Africa's wildlife could bring in enough cash to massively improve public services, Maathai said in Johannesburg, after giving the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in front of the former South African leader, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and other dignitaries.
. . "We are sacrificing wildlife for agriculture", she said. "In Kenya, we would be able to provide free secondary education if we manage our wildlife better and manage our tourism better instead of encroaching on savannah and wildlife." Most wildlife reserves in Kenya are owned by foreign operators or white Kenyans, and local people should see more money from tourism coming into their communities, said Maathai.

July 19, 05: The Eastern Oyster may be in trouble in the Chesapeake Bay, but any move to protect it as an endangered species could devastate thriving oyster fisheries from Maine to Louisiana, fishermen told Congress. The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to decide by January whether the oyster should be listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, a move that could prohibit it from being harvested nationwide. The agency took up the review after an environmental consultant, Wolf-Dieter Busch, argued that pollution, disease and overharvesting makes such protection necessary.
. . The Eastern Oyster harvest has declined from 161 million pounds in 1890 to 2.4 million pounds in 2003, according to the fisheries service. [That's 161 down to 2!]
. . Busch's petition pointed to conditions on the Chesapeake Bay, where oyster harvests are at 1% of their historical levels, but it overlooked other areas such as New England and the Gulf Coast where oyster fisheries are thriving, fishermen and academic experts told Congress.

July 20, 05: South African authorities are keen to resume culling --a practice they halted over a decade ago in the face of public outrage-- to cut growing elephant numbers in the country's flagship Kruger National Park. Experts questioned the wisdom of using culls to contain swelling populations of African elephants, saying the science was dubious.
. . No decision has been made, but government scientists say the animals, whose numbers are estimated to have almost doubled in a decade to close to 12,000, are now eating themselves and other animals out of house and home in the 2-million hectare park.
. . Culling is also being mooted as an option in other parks, which in South Africa are enclosed by fences, meaning the big animals only have limited space to breed and feed in. [MOOTED?! Wow; I believe this is the *first time I've seen this word used correctly!! A moot is a place to debate, & a moot point IS to be debated!]
. . But experts at a workshop in Johannesburg said the science behind such reasoning was questionable and could even have an adverse impact on other species. "It's not just elephants that affect vegetation and the abundance of plant species. Other herbivores such as giraffes and kudus eat the same things as elephants and will fill that niche if elephants are removed."
. . Ecologist Keith Lindsay also questioned the conventional view that limiting populations of elephant --the world's largest land mammal-- would give other creatures more space, promoting biodiversity. "Some species of antelope prefer open grassland patches on the edges of woodlands," he said. "If you control elephants to the point where they don't keep grassland patches open you could lose species which prefer such areas."
. . Much opposition to culling is based on grounds of cruelty. The operation typically involves the rounding up by helicopter of entire family groups which are shot from the air, a process that even its staunchest advocates admit is nasty. Intelligent, highly-social animals with long lifespans, the culling of elephants strikes a chord with the public in the way that it would not with other species.
. . [In an area prone to starvation, it's fair to ask if they used the meat!]

July 19, 05: Wading birds in south-east England look set to be amongst the casualties of this year's drought, the RSPB has said. The numbers of lapwing, redshank and snipe have dropped by about 80% at five reserves. The birds need boggy grassland or damp meadows in which to nest and find food. Their numbers have tumbled over the last 25 years, particularly in lowland areas, because of climate change and low rainfall.
. . According to a survey completed in 2002, snipe numbers in the south-east of England were down 96% to just 10 pairs; lapwing were down 61%; and redshank were down 42%.

July 16, 05: A wildfire that charred 29,400 acres on Mount Graham last year may have contributed to a decline in the population of endangered red squirrels, whose numbers are now at their lowest levels since 1991. The red squirrel population has been estimated at 214 --50 fewer squirrels than last fall's estimate.
. . But their concern has centered on how the blaze affected the habitat used by the red squirrels, which have been stranded atop southern Arizona's tallest mountain range since the end of the last Ice Age.

July 6, 05: Mountain gorillas in Uganda and Rwanda, an endangered species, are dying from respiratory illnesses, according to a study. Poaching is the biggest killer of the gorillas but new research shows that a quarter of 100 gorilla deaths dating back to 1968 were due to illnesses such as influenza and other viruses. "In a bid to cut the risk of people passing these diseases on, eco-tourists who trek to see the gorillas in the wild already have to stay at least 7 meters away, and keep their visit to no more than an hour."
. . About 700 mountain gorillas live in two separate groups in Uganda and Rwanda. Both populations are monitored and protected.

June 30, 05: Hedgehog numbers across the UK are falling, particularly in the east of the country, a survey has found. According to the Mammals Trust UK, hedgehog numbers have dropped steeply since 2001, when a survey to spot animals on roads began. The idea behind the study is that the quantity of hedgehogs on roads can indicate the size of the UK population. In England as a whole, hedgehog numbers along roads have dropped by over 20% since 2001. They blame it on gardens that are *too *neat for habitat.

June 29, 05: Sri Lankan biologists have found dozens of new species of tree frog over the last decade in the island's dwindling rainforests, but warn many known species are either extinct or on the verge of disappearing because of man.
. . Researchers from Sri Lanka's privately-funded Wildlife Heritage Trust found 35 new species of frog --increasing the number of known frog species on the Indian Ocean island by a third-- but also found 19 species are now extinct.
. . The Sri Lankan government has banned rebuilding on a narrow strip of land along much of the island's coastline after December's disaster killed nearly 40,000 people here, and the new coastal buffer zone will offer some species sanctuary.
. . "What is most staggering is that out of the 34 species of frogs altogether that are extinct worldwide, half should happen to be in this tiny little island", Pethiyagoda said. His team also found 17 new types of freshwater crabs, while fellow international researchers have also identified 50 new species of snail and seven new lizards.

June 28, 05: Many scientists at NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for balancing hydroelectric dams against endangered salmon, say they know of cases where scientific findings were altered at the request of commercial interests, according to a survey released today by two watchdog groups --the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The survey posed 34 questions and was sent to 460 NOAA Fisheries scientists across the country. Responses came back from 124, or 27%.
. . "The conclusion is that political interference is a serious problem at NOAA Fisheries", Lexis Schulz, Washington representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said from Washington.

Among the findings:
. . - 58% of respondents said they knew of cases where high-level Commerce Department appointees or managers inappropriately altered NOAA Fisheries determinations.
. . • 53% said they were aware of cases in which commercial interests inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of NOAA Fisheries scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention.
. . • 13% said they knew of cases where environmental interests inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of NOAA Fisheries scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention.
. . • 44% said NOAA Fisheries routinely makes determinations using its best scientific judgment, even when political pressure is applied, while 37% disagreed.

June 22, 05: Before the arrival of Spanish colonizers some 500 years ago, Indians in what is now Ecuador dipped their arrowheads in venom extracted from the phantasmal poison frog to doom their victims to convulsive death, scientists believe.
. . More recently, epibatidine --the chemical which paralyzed and killed the Indians' enemies-- has been isolated to produce a pain killer 200 times more powerful than morphine, but without that drug's addictive and toxic side effects.
. . Pharmaceutical companies have not yet brought epibatidine to market but hope to discover other chemicals with powerful properties in frogs, which are a traditional source of medicine and food for many of Ecuador's Indians.
. . They may want to hurry because the treasure trove of the world's frogs and toads is disappearing at a catastrophic rate. And it's not just potential medicines which could be vanishing but creatures of beauty. "Frogs and toads are becoming extinct all over the world. It's the same magnitude event as the extinction of the dinosaurs", said Luis Coloma, a herpetologist.
. . Scientists fear they could be indicator species --a sign of possible future damage to other parts of the ecosystem because frogs and toads are especially vulnerable and thus are the first to disappear. "Disappearing amphibians break links in the food chain, with often unpredictable effects on other organisms", the report said.

June 21, 05: Japan lashed out at anti-whaling nations today after its proposal to resume limited commercial hunting was voted down by an international commission and its "scientific" harvesting heavily criticized. Japan had sought the approval of the 66-member International Whaling Commission for a management scheme it said would promote sustainable commercial whaling, but critics said the plan was riddled with holes and would allow for more whales to be killed.
. . A Japanese proposal to change voting procedures to a secret ballot was narrowly defeated.
. . Anti-whaling states say Japan exploits a loophole in the 19-year-old ban on commercial whaling to hunt the giant mammals in the guise of science, and that much of the whale meat ends up on store shelves and on the tables of gourmet restaurants. "It is commercial whaling by any other name", said Leah Garces, campaigns director for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, while Conall O'Connell, the head of Australia's delegation called it "an outrage."

June 21, 05: The destruction is obvious through much of southeastern Massachusetts: Trees stripped of their leaves dot the landscape. Faced with outbreaks of two moth species known for their steady diet of leaves, experts are working to control the pesky critters and discover what is causing their spiraling numbers and widespread defoliation.
. . Winter moths and forest tent caterpillars have been eating leaves and buds around the state this spring, causing concern among scientists who are trying to figure out what's causing their numbers to skyrocket.
. . This year, a fungal infection is keeping the gypsy moths at bay, but winter moths aren't susceptible to the fungus. Experts are particularly concerned about a population explosion among winter moths, first discovered in the United States about five years ago. Scientists are working on ways to control winter moths naturally, including using a small fly that is a parasite of the winter moth.

June 20, 05: Malaysia's coastal mangrove swamps and both are disappearing as the country redoubles it attempts to boost agriculture. Commercial farmers are turning swamps north-west of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, into shrimp farms and threatening a delicate ecosystem that is home to hundreds of species, environmentalists say. Wood and marine products from the swamps provide a source of income for villagers and the swamps themselves form a natural protective buffer against rough seas or tsunamis.
. . Despite the threat to the ecosystem, the Forestry Department says the farms are legal as part of the Kuala Selangor swamps are now classified as agricultural land rather than the forest reserve they were formerly.

June 20, 05: Japan said today it would dramatically expand its research whaling, doubling the number of minke whales it kills annually for scientific study. The announcement came on the opening day of the International Whaling Commission's annual plenary session, the group that regulates global whale hunts. The Cambridge, England-based commission, which has 66 members, banned commercial hunts in 1986.

June 17, 05: Federal scientists are planning to shoot a small number of barred owls they say are crowding out the threatened spotted owl in northern California --an experiment that could lead to killing thousands of the larger owls on the West Coast.

June 16, 05: The latest weapon for fighting pests is natural and safe to humans. And here's the sweetest part - it's sugar! Well, it's not so sweet to some insects and mites. This isn't your grandmother's table sugar. While safe to humans, this sugar pesticide kills them quite effectively. It coats the leaf's surface with a solution which can get in the trachea of insects and suffocate them, particularly small insects. The synthetic sugar kills from the inside out. Once it gets through small holes in an insect's hard, protective exoskeleton, the extra chemical group --called an ester-- causes the insect to lose water, shrivel, and die of dehydration.
. . The main use right now is to kill the parasitic Varroa mites that are devastating the honey bee industry. By using a low dose, scientists can kill the mites but not the bees. But that's not all that protects the bees. "The bees have a different cuticle than the mites", Puterka said. "Bees are also protected by the hairs that cover their body."

June 15, 05: The extinction of New Zealand's giant, flightless moa birds may have been hastened by the long time they took to reach maturity, experts believe. UK and New Zealand scientists studied growth rings (similar to tree rings) in leg bones from the giant birds. They found that moa took about 10 years to reach full size and then several more to reach sexual maturity. This left them vulnerable to human hunters who got to New Zealand 700 years ago. The hunters may simply wiped out the birds by picking them off before they had a chance to become parents.
. . "However, if birds evolve in the presence of predators, the emphasis is instead on more rapid reproduction." In contrast with moa, living birds tend to reach adult size within 12 months. The largest moa, called Dinornis, could reach 2m tall and and weigh up to 240kg.

June 13, 05: An ancient tradition of beekeeping on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula is on the verge dying out, due to cultural change and loss of habitat. Long before Europeans introduced honeybees (Apis mellifera) to the Americas, Mayan beekeepers harvested honey from the log nests of stingless bees that inhabit the tropical forests. "For thousands of years, Mayans were expert practitioners of bee husbandry, and honey was an essential forest resource: as a sweetener, as an antibiotic and as an ingredient in the Mayan version of mead."
. . It's one of 500 or so species of stingless bees in the tropical world. [Despite the danger...] most beekeepers these days have replaced native species with the Africanized honeybee, which produces more honey. [Not that they had much choice!] On the Yucatan, native bees have been hurt by deforestation, forest fragmentation and hurricanes.

June 14, 05: Four giant catfish will be released back into the wild in Cambodia to try to boost numbers of the species thought to be on the verge of extinction. The fish, which weigh about 110 pounds each, have been raised in captivity for the past seven years and will hopefully reproduce after they are returned to the Mekong River, said Seng Teak, country director of the World Wildlife Fund. They can grow to 3 meters long and a weight of 300kgs.
. . In recent years, its population has dwindled due to overfishing, dam building and navigation projects. It has been listed as critically endangered after research showed its numbers had fallen by at least 80% over the past 13 years.

June 14, 05: They survived the dinosaurs, but leatherback turtles may have moved one step closer to extinction when last December's tsunami washed away some of their most important nesting beaches in India's Nicobar islands. The remote Nicobars, more than 1,300 km (800 miles) east of the Indian mainland, are one of the world's four most important nesting sites for the critically endangered leatherback, the largest living marine reptile.
. . The leatherback is fast losing its battle with man, the global population of adult females falling from 115,000 in 1980 to fewer than 25,000 today. It is already close to extinction in the Pacific, and could disappear entirely in a matter of decades. Fishing is a major culprit, with nets snagging the turtles and propellers slicing through their flesh. Development and disturbance of their nesting sites is even more of a threat.
. . That is why the relatively undeveloped Nicobars are so important. A recent survey found at least 3,000 nesting there. But the islands, close Indonesia's Sumatra, sank up to 2 meters into the sea after the tectonic shifts which caused the Dec. 26 earthquake. The world-renowned Galathea beach on Great Nicobar, where tourists would come to watch the leatherbacks haul themselves up onto the sand every year to nest, has been largely washed away. Three other turtles, including the hawksbill and the olive ridley, also nest on the islands.
. . The monsoon may also create new beaches this year. But the larger leatherback, which can grow to more than 2 meters long and weigh up to 500 kg (1,100 lb), could find it harder finding new nesting sites.
. . Fishing kills up to 3,000 of them every year in the archipelago. One survey found 40% of leatherbacks nesting on Great Nicobar had propeller gashes, some bleeding profusely. Sand mining for buildings has also destroyed 16 nesting beaches in the Andamans alone since 1981. Feral dogs, domestic pigs and tourism are also deadly threats.
. . When the Nicobars *sank, the Andaman group was *raised by the earthquake, exposing reef flats around many islands. That has made several important nesting sites inaccessible.

June 14, 05: A butterfly which died out in Britain when the elaborate con trick it depends on for its survival went awry is making a reappearance this summer. The rather unimaginatively named Large Blue butterfly has been re-introduced to 10 secret sites and one which is being opened to the public.
. . The Large Blue begins life as a normal caterpillar and the young larvae feed on wild thyme flowers. From then on, its life depends on its con trick. As each larva drops to the ground, it secretes a sticky sugary substance which is irresistible to ants. The ants are tricked into thinking that the larva is a lost ant grub and take it into their underground colony. But not any old ant will do, only large colonies of a single species of red ant can act as a suitable host.
. . An incredible phase in the caterpillar's life then begins, where for 10 months it turns into a carnivore --eating the ant grubs while the hapless ants feed and care for it as one of their own. The caterpillar pupates in the ant nest, finally emerging for a few brief days in the last stage of its remarkable life as a beautiful butterfly.
. . Changing farming techniques led to the decline of the red ant the butterfly depends on and in 1979 the Large Blue became extinct in Britain.

June 13, 05: The South Rim of the Grand Canyon has long been a favorite of human visitors gawking at the stunning views and taking advantage of the manmade services. As it turns out, the South Rim also is a favorite of endangered California condors — for many of the same reasons. The large birds often gather to watch people, socialize with one another and drink from a leaky water pipe. They've a wingspan up to amost 3 meters (~9 1/2 feet).
. . On some days, as many as 25 to 30 condors soar over the canyon area — more birds than were in existence a generation ago when officials decided to capture and breed them. The condors, which may live up to 60 years, were driven to near extinction by the early 1980s. Shootings, poisonings and crashes with power lines combined with their naturally low reproductive rate. Releases began in 1992 in California. Today, there are about 118 birds in the wild in Arizona, central and southern California and coastal Mexico.

June 11, 05: Conservationists are warning that the south-east Asian island of Borneo could lose almost all its lowland forest within a decade. A report from the WWF says illegal logging and clearance for oil palm plantations is destroying the habitats of several animals. The biggest culprits are the illegal loggers. In the Indonesian south of the island, the trade is believed to be controlled by the army.
. . According to the WWF, 1.3m hectares of Borneo's lowland forest is being destroyed each year. At that rate, it says, by 2020 the remaining pockets of jungle may be too small and broken up for some species to be genetically viable. In other words, each tiny area of woodland that remains will not support a healthy breeding population of large animals like pygmy elephants or orang-utan.
. . Just 55 orang-utan are thought to remain in Borneo. Orang-utan and pygmy elephants could become unviable in just 15 years.
. . More than 350 new species have been discovered there in the last 10 years and the island is home to at least 44 types of mammal found nowhere else on earth.

June 9, 05: Almost 1,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die daily in fishing nets and urgent changes are needed in trawling methods to save nine populations under immediate threat, conservation group WWF said. "Some species are being pushed to the brink of extinction. Urgent action is needed." The report says nine dolphin and porpoise populations --10 species in total-- need immediate action if they are to survive the threat of commercial fishing nets. "Most of the species on the list are threatened by the widespread use of one type of fishing gear -- gillnets."
. . Air-breathing mammals, dolphins and other cetacea drown if they get trapped underwater by fishing gear --becoming what the industry refers to as "bycatch."

June 8, 05: An environmental coalition urged the United Nations today to take steps to protect whales, dolphins and other marine life from the powerful sound waves used in oil and gas exploration and by the world's navies to navigate and detect submarines. Marine scientists believe there is a link between the use of high-intensity sound and recent mass strandings of whales and dolphins in waters off Greece, Hawaii, New Zealand and elsewhere around the world since 1985, said the Ocean Noise Coalition.
. . In each of these cases, the strandings took place near high intensity sonar or near the use of high-powered industrial "air guns" used in oil and gas exploration, the coalition grouping over 120 different organizations told a news conference at U.N. headquarters.
. . Intense sound can also seriously injure or kill fish and drive down the catch rates of commercial fishing operations, according to scientific studies cited by the coalition Some governments including the United States, however, have argued that sonar use cannot be regulated internationally as it is a matter of national security.

June 7, 05: Authorities are on the lookout for pistil-packing activists who apparently planted endangered wildflowers in order to block a housing development. The state Department of Fish and Game has determined that Sebastopol meadowfoam discovered in the Laguna Vista subdivision in Sebastopol was deliberately transplanted from another location. "This is a very unusual situation", said department botanist Gene Cooley. "I've never known a rare plant to be introduced to a site to thwart development before."
. . The 145-unit Laguna Vista site, which borders a Fish and Game preserve, has been hotly contested by environmentalists concerned about nearby wetlands. A Sonoma State University conservation biologist who first identified the 22 plants spotted on the 21-acre site, said he did not believe they were transplants.

June 6, 05: Federal regulators have done too little to save the overfished red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, a new lawsuit by environmental groups alleges. Red snapper is a highly valued reef fish that has been in trouble for over 20 years. It was officially declared overfished in 1997. The fishery is already regulated with fishermen having to abide by laws that dictate how many fish can be taken. But the plaintiffs argue that those measures have not gone far enough and that a sound rebuilding plan has not been adopted. The NMFS adopted a final plan last week.

June 5, 05: Costa Rica and more than 1,000 scientists from around the world will ask the United Nations to ban a form of industrial fishing they say menaces an endangered sea turtle and other marine creatures. The technique, known as longline fishing, is used by large fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean that trail lines studded with hooks that can stretch out as long as 60 miles behind them. The main problem with the technique is that it is indiscriminate, according to its foes.
. . Tuna and swordfish are the most common targets, but the lines also snag as many as 4.4 million sea turtles, bullfish, sharks, marine mammals and seabirds every year, according to a study of the practice.
. . One of the hardest-hit creatures is the migratory leatherback sea turtle, whose numbers in the Pacific have declined by 95% since 1980, according to Ovetz. Scientists warn the leatherback could disappear in five to 30 years unless fishing techniques are altered. Because it is migratory, traveling thousands of miles every year to nest, international action is required to save it.
. . Longline fishing is practiced by vessels from many nations including the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Spain and other Asian and Latin American nations. The value of its take at dockside is estimated at $4 billion to $5 billion a year.
. . Supporting Costa Rica's stand, 1,007 scientists from 97 countries have signed a letter to meeting participants urging decisive U.N. action to ban all fishing techniques that menace the leatherback "until such activities can be conducted without harm to the species." Also backing the initiative are 281 private organizations from 62 countries.
. . The conference will also focus on trash in the ocean and how to discourage dumping.

June 3, 05: Australian scientists will attempt to breed gray nurse sharks in artificial wombs under a plan to boost the critically endangered species' numbers, an Australian state fisheries minister said. Embryos harvested from female sharks in the wild will be reared separately in artificial wombs designed to stop the ravenous fish from devouring each other before birth in what is known as "intrauterine cannibalism."
. . "This is literally survival of the fittest at work, but unfortunately it means that, in the wild, each female gray nurse shark produces only two pups every two years — not enough to increase species numbers." Scientists believe only about 460 gray nurse sharks remain in eastern Australian waters and fear they could vanish from the region altogether within 20 years. The gray nurse shark feeds primarily on other fish and is not considered dangerous to humans, was decimated by overfishing and hunting until 1984.

June 2, 05: Brazilian police said they had broken up the biggest illegal logging operation in the Amazon in a move environmentalists saw as a sign the government was serious about beating the corruption that hampers the fight to save the rain forest. A total of 89 people were arrested in the crackdown, nearly half of them from the government agency charged with protecting the forests from a gang that had illegally cut down an estimated $370 million of Amazon timber since 1990. They included the head of the government agency, known as Ibama, in the state of Mato Grosso. Businessmen, loggers and 40 Ibama employees were among those arrested.
. . An area of jungle larger than the U.S. state of New Jersey was cut down last year. That deforestation was the second-highest level on record for the world's largest tropical forest.

June 1, 05: More than a fifth of the planet's bird species face extinction as humans venture further into their habitats and introduce alien predators, BirdLife International said in its annual assessment. While there have been some success stories of species that reappeared or recovered, the overall situation of the world's birds is worsening.
. . "The total number (of bird species) considered to be threatened with extinction is now 1,212, which when combined with the number of near threatened species gives a total of exactly 2,000 species in trouble --more than a fifth of the planet's remaining 9,775 species."

May 24, 05: Alarmed by reports of a fall in the population of endangered tigers, Indian Prime Minister Singh toured a tiger reserve today and vowed to protect the national animal from poachers. Singh, who saw a tiger in the wild in a sanctuary in western India, has taken personal interest in the tiger crisis after a national uproar over a report that poachers had wiped them out in another reserve. "We have a problem at hand and if we don't tackle it effectively, I think we would be doing irretrievable damage to our heritage."
. . One non-government group said in February that at least 18 of the 47 tigers there could have disappeared in the past year. A century ago, there were some 40,000 tigers in India. Now, officials estimate there are about 3,700 although some environment groups put the number at less than 2,000.
. . Singh said the task of protecting tigers involved better management of sanctuaries and dealing with the pressure that growing human population puts on forests.

May 23, 05: Cayman Island scientists are calling for assistance to pull a unique species of blue iguana back from the brink. The animal has a long history: DNA evidence suggests it has been around for the past three million years. However, the mere 25 of them left on Grand Cayman seemed recently to face a dismal future.
. . The blue iguana's problems stem from humans, though for the most part the damage to the iguanas has been quite unintended, tho they were once shot and eaten by people. The first European settlers arrived nearly 300 years ago, and the pets that they brought with them, such as dogs and cats, have continued to push the iguanas back from the coast and into less hospitable inland areas. The displacement and land-use change has accelerated with a major human population boom in the last half-century.

May 24, 05: Australian officials are working to prevent a resumption of commercial whaling and halt Japan's scientific research whaling, a Cabinet minister said today. Even Prime Minister John Howard has joined the push, sending a letter to his Japanese counterpart, saying Australia believes there is no basis for killing whales.

May 23, 05: In the heart of what is known in Brazil's Amazon as the "arc of deforestation", it is clear that the fight to save the jungle is being lost. During a tour by plane of the area, you can see vast tracts of cleared land with grazing cattle or cultivated fields that have been gouged out of the forest. The arc is the front line in the battle over the Amazon. The land is irresistible for farmers seeking to expand and benefit from Brazil's agricultural boom.
. . In 2004, the government decided to make a stand in this half-moon shaped area stretching along the southern and eastern edges of the Amazon. A year later, environmentalists and government officials have little to show for the effort. An estimated 350 logging companies operate in the region.
. . Just under 20% of the world's largest tropical forest, which is home to an estimated 30% of the world's animal and plant species, has now been destroyed.
. . A preliminary report by Greenpeace found that just three of 19 Ibama posts earmarked to get extra funding have received anything from the government's plan to fight deforestation since it was launched in March 2004
. . Environmentalists say deforestation is driven by illegal loggers first moving in, followed by land speculators or farmers. In the Alta Floresta region their arrival is spurred by the planned paving of a road linking Cuiaba in Mato Grosso state to Santarem, hundreds of miles further north through virgin forest. Environmentalists say the pattern is familiar --when loggers and farmers know roads are coming they race to cut down forest to get land which they will make a profit on. The building of a highway from capital Brasilia in the center of Brazil to Belem on the mouth of the Amazon River several decades ago led to mass destruction of the eastern Amazon.

May 20, 05: If we continue with current rates of species extinction, we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished. That is the stark warning to come out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most comprehensive audit of the health of our planet to date. The message is written large in Ecosystems and Human Well-being: the Biodiversity Synthesis Report.
. . Organisms are disappearing at something like 100 to 1,000 times the "background levels" seen in the fossil record. Scientists warn that removing so many species puts our own existence at risk.
. . It will certainly make it much harder to lift the world's poor out of hardship given that these people are often the most vulnerable to ecosystem degradation, the researchers say.
. . A third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction. It is thought 90% of the large predatory fish in the oceans have gone since the beginning of industrial trawling. And these are just the vertebrates --the species we know most about. 90% of species, maybe more, have not even been catalogued by science yet.
. . The distribution of species around the globe is becoming more homogenous, as invasive creatures hitch a ride on fast human transport and trade routes. Genetic diversity, also, is declining rapidly. This is most obvious in domesticated plants and animals where the pursuit of high yields and the pressures of global markets have pushed farmers towards a limited range of cultivars and breeds. And so it is not simply that species are fewer in number, their changed circumstances may also have reduced their resilience and their ability to cope with future change.

May 9, 05: Fewer British fields are bursting into yellow each summer, with 20% of native flora species declining at rates that put them at risk of extinction. The absence of yellow flowers in summer fields is a result of the decline of corn marigold —-just one of 345 native British plant species identified as facing the threat of extinction in The Vascular Plant Red Data List.

May 4, 05: [Let's *hope for the extinction of these things!] Pit bull terriers, Japanese tosas and other "killing machine" dogs will be banned in Australia's most populous state after a spate of brutal attacks, state officials said. New laws will prohibit the sale, acquisition, breeding or giving away of pit bull terriers, American pit bulls, Japanese tosas, Argentinian fighting dogs and Brazilian fighting dogs. The ban is expected to take effect from June or July. Current owners of the breeds must have their dogs desexed. This ban matches last year's ban on pit bulls by the Canadian province of Ontario. "We want to see these dangerous creatures bred out of existence."

Apr 30, 05: Lake Okeechobee was in trouble before last year's hurricanes churned up a thick layer of pollution from the bottom, turning the water the color of day-old coffee. But the worst may be yet to come.
. . Environmentalists are expecting an onslaught of toxic algae, which blooms from the pollution spreading through the lake. Besides threatening Okeechobee's fish and plants and nearby water supplies, the algae jeopardizes an $8.4 billion project to restore the Everglades.
. . Okeechobee, covers 730 square miles, second in size only to Lake Michigan within the contiguous US. It's critical to the health of the Everglades. It sits in the middle of the Everglades project, which aims to restore the natural water flow from the Kissimmee chain of lakes in central Florida to Florida Bay, at the peninsula's southern tip.
. . Water managers use pumping stations and canals to mimic nature, but they have nowhere to put the extra 1.7 meters of water that the hurricanes dumped on Okeechobee in August and September. They say dumping so much fresh water could shock the fragile ecosystems. Lake Okeechobee felt all four hurricanes that swept over Florida. It took direct hits from Frances and Jeanne, a near hit from Charley, which drenched the Kissimmee basin that drains into the lake, and was soaked again by the remnants of Ivan. Winds at least 79 mph and devastating storm surges left the shoreline littered with carcasses of alligators, fish and birds.
. . Now, the prospect of toxic algae is drawing alarming comparisons to an ecological disaster at central Florida's Lake Apopka, which succumbed to similar problems caused by a 1940s hurricane. It still hasn't recovered and is undergoing a costly restoration.

Apr 30, 05: Over 360 new species have been discovered in Borneo over the last decade, highlighting the great need for conservation in the area, the WWF says. A new report suggests thousands more species remain undiscovered. However, these newly introduced and yet-to-be-uncovered species are also under threat, WWF claims, because Borneo's forests are being cleared.
. . The WWF says it is working with Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia on a new initiative to conserve the area known as the "Heart of Borneo" --a total of 220,000 sq km of equatorial rainforest-- through a network of protected areas and sustainably managed forest.

Apr 22, 05: Australian scientists said they had discovered new coral reefs stretching 100 kilometers in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria off the country's rugged north coast. Geoscience Australia said the reefs, estimated to be at least 100,000 years old, were a major discovery. The reefs were previously unknown because they were about 20 meters (66 foot) under water, making them invisible on satellite photographs.
. . However, coral reefs worldwide have been under threat in recent years from coral bleaching, believed to be caused by rising sea temperatures that result from global warming.

Apr 19, 05: The population of the endangered great Asian one-horned rhinoceros in Nepal's biggest wildlife reserve has fallen to 372 from 544 five years ago, mainly because of poaching, an official said. It's home to the second largest number of single-horned rhinos in the world after India.
. . Poachers sell rhino horns, hooves and other body parts to criminal syndicates producing powders and ointments for Asian buyers who believe they will cure a range of illnesses and increase sexual potency in men. "The horns are also in great demand by rich people in the Middle East who use them for dagger handles."
. . Nepal has tough anti-poaching laws and anyone found guilty can be jailed for up to 15 years. Officials refused to reveal the numbers of poachers arrested in recent years.
. . India's rhino population has been steadily increasing after decades of slaughter with numbers now estimated at 1,500, thanks to conservation efforts. But poaching for horns is a threat in both Nepal and India and killing methods include electrocution, environmentalists say. Last month, Indian Prime Minister Singh ordered a police probe after more than two dozen tigers vanished from a sanctuary in less than two years.

Apr 18, 05: Millions of waterfowl, including flamingos and pelicans, are facing death, as lakes in Kenya's central Rift Valley dry up due to poor land use policies, wildlife officials said. Hundreds of species of birds are at risk as their habitats fall victim to deforestration in water catchment areas, the obstruction of key rivers and changing weather patterns. "If nothing is done, around 1.5 million flamingos --about 10% of world population-- and at least 50,000 crater white pelicans will die away." As many as 500 different species of birds could be affected.
. . Farmers damming rivers have caused water levels in Lake Elementaita --a main pelican breeding habitat-- to fall, while deforestration and water diversion had affected water levels in Lakes Nakuru and Naivasha. According to officials, Lake Nakuru has shrunk by 10.4 to 15.5 square kilometers since the 1970s, and, as the water level has dropped, levels of toxic elements like zinc, mercury and copper have all increased. In the past two years, several thousand flamingos have died as a result of chemical and metallic waste from a nearby industrial belt, they said.

Apr 18, 05: There is a long-running debate over what drove elephants to extinction in some parts of the world and completely wiped out two other proboscideans, mammoths and mastodons. The two most argued hypotheses for their decline are climatic changes and over-hunting by humans. A recent archaeological expedition dug up information that may support the latter.
. . Exploring 41 sites ranging from 1.8 million to 10,000 years old, Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming found that interactions between humans and elephants matched up with successive waves of human population expansion. As the human populations in those sites continued to grow, the number of elephants shrank and, in some sites, disappeared.
. . The findings suggest that the geographic expansion of prehistoric humans resulted in localized extinction events. Over-hunting was a key factor in these extinctions, Surovell figures, but range fragmentation likely played a role too. "If, for example, human hunting fragmented what were once large continuous populations of elephants into small isolated populations, extinction can come about due to various demographic problems that plague small populations."
. . Climate changes probably had an effect. Between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, the artic ecosystems switched from being cool, dry grasslands --which mammoths liked-- to being cool, wet tundra.

Apr 14, 05: The biggest of Earth's mass extinctions may have left animals gasping for air, a new study finds. The Great Dying, as it is called, occurred some 250 million years ago. Roughly 90% of all marine life died, as well as nearly three-quarters of all land plants and animals. It marks the transition from the Permian geological period to the Triassic.
. . While fossils reveal the extinction in concrete terms, its causes are less well known. Scientists have blamed the massive die-off on an asteroid, volcanoes, global warming, and any combination thereof.
. . Now Raymond Huey and Peter Ward of the University of Washington have shown that a reduced supply of oxygen could explain high extinction rates that preceded the Great Dying, as well as the very slow recovery that followed.
. . Currently, oxygen makes up about 21% of our atmosphere, but in the early Permian period it was 30%. From this invigorating level, it fell to about 16% at the time of the Great Dying and over the next 10 million years continued to drop to 12%. At 12%, the corresponding elevation would be 17,400 feet. "Animals that once were able to cross mountain passes quite easily suddenly had their movements severely restricted", Huey said.

This contradicts the prevailing view of Pangea, the super-continent that existed back then and which later broke apart to form all the modern continents. Most paleontologists considered it a "superhighway" on which species could range freely, Ward said. But with so little oxygen, high elevations would act as barriers. Secluded populations would be more vulnerable to other environmental challenges, like severe climate change. It would also take longer for isolated organisms to bounce back.

Apr 14, 05: Usually by now the Columbia River's spring chinook salmon are heading upstream over fish ladders in the tens of thousands to spawn. But not this year. "It's a never-before-seen scarcity."
. . It's this bad: For centuries the treaty Indian tribes on the river have caught salmon for the ceremonial First Foods celebration marking the return of the fish. This year they had to get their salmon somewhere else.
. . Fish biologists had predicted a spring run of about 229,000 chinooks at Bonneville Dam, about 140 miles upstream from the Pacific. But as of Tuesday, near the usual midpoint of the spring run, only about 200 had been counted there. Scientists say they don't have an explanation.

Apr 14, 05: Indonesia said illegal logging was now costing the country over three billion dollars per year. Conservation International Indonesia warned that timber barons were now targetting remote Papua province as previous forests on Java and Sumatra islands had been exhausted. The figure did not include the cost of environmental damage caused by illegal tree felling.
. . The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency EIA said 300,000 cubic meters of merbau hardwood is being smuggled out of Papua every month to feed China's timber processing industry. The agency said illegal logging in Papua involved Indonesian military and civilian officials, Malaysian logging gangs and multinational companies as well as brokers in Singapore and dealers in Hong Kong. The military has already declared one of its officers in Papua a suspect in an illegal logging case. He is under detention awaiting trial.
. . Indonesia is losing forest areas equivalent to half the size of Switzerland every year, according to the EIA. Rapid deforestation has had devastating environmental consequences for both Indonesia and the Southeast Asian region, causing floods and landslides and shrouding nearby countries with haze from illegal fires set to clear land.

Apr 7, 05: Human activities such as hunting and logging have driven nearly one quarter of the world's primate species —-man's closest living relatives-— to the brink of extinction, according to a new report. While listing 25 species as most endangered, the report said that one in four of the 625 primate species and subspecies are at risk. Fifty experts from 16 countries cited deforestation, commercial hunting for meat and the illegal animal trade —-including for use in traditional medicines-— as the biggest threats.
. . Without concerted action, great apes such as the Sumatran orangutan of Indonesia and the Eastern gorilla of central Africa are at risk of disappearing. The threat is especially perilous in Madagascar, one of the planet's biodiversity hotspots that has lost most of its original forest cover. "More than half its lemurs, none found anywhere else in the world, are threatened with extinction.

Apr 7, 05: Darting about the plains in packs of 10, the Jeyran gazelle of the Caucasus looks to be the picture of health, but a rickety genome and an encroaching oil company may threaten the species with extinction. Found almost exclusively in the Shirvan National Park on the Caspian Sea coast, the elusive Jeyran number only five thousand heads.
. . The animals' low level of genetic diversity means they could be vulnerable to a host of illnesses. Their small numbers forced them to inbreed, weakening the population's chances of winning the fight for survival.
. . Their supposedly protected habitat is also a commercially attractive oil-rich area that is being exploited by a Chinese-Azeri company.

Apr 6, 05: The Dalai Lama has called for an end to illegal wildlife trafficking between Nepal, Tibet, India and China. He is appealing to exiled Tibetans, who are increasingly involved in the bloody trade, to remember their dedication to Buddhist non-violence. "We Tibetans are basically Buddhists, we preach love and compassion towards all other living beings on Earth."
. . Last year, Tibetan officials intercepted 32 tiger, 579 leopard and 665 otter skins in one single shipment. This prompted the Dalai Lama and a pair of wildlife charities to launch an awareness drive around the Himalayas.

Apr 2, 05: Based on a review of historical and archaeological evidence, a group of federal biologists has concluded that salmon definitely spawned in waters far above a series of hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River that have blocked fish since 1917.
. . The report comes as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission considers whether to grant the utility Pacificorp a new license to operate four dams straddling the Oregon-California border as they are, or go along with Indian tribes, commercial fishermen and conservationists who want the dams removed or altered to open access to hundreds of miles of spawning habitat.
. . The report will be included in Fish and Wildlife recommendations to the Interior Department, which will decide whether to demand fish passage as part of a new operating license for the dams. PacifiCorp wants to relicense four dams built between 1917 and 1962 that produce 147.2 megawatts. PacifiCorp has put the cost of fish ladders and fish screens on the dams at $100 million.
. . "It confirms what we have been saying all along —-the Klamath was the No. 3 salmon-producing river in America historically, and the Klamath dams divided it in two and killed all the salmon that once spawned in abundance above the dams", said Glen Spain of Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

Apr 1, 05: The greatest mass extinction recorded in Earth history did not occur as a result of one single cataclysmic event. A joint UK-Chinese team tells Nature magazine the disaster that befell the planet 250 million years ago must have happened in phases. Their conclusion is based on the abundance of "organic fossils" found in rocks at Meishan in southern China. These suggest there were at least two episodes to the mass die-off that saw up to 95% of lifeforms disappear.
. . The prevailing theory is that several factors --including supervolcanism and extensive climate warming-- combined over thousands of years to strangle the planet's biodiversity. Earth may well have been hit by extraterrestrial objects, but it is unlikely there was some killer punch from space.
. . This view is based on the traces left in rocks by cyanobacteria. These photosynthetic, mostly single-celled organisms existed in vast blooms in the Permian oceans. They are one of the major groups of phytoplankton, which form the basis of the marine food chain.
. . The Permian-Triassic mass extinction killed off about 95% of all marine species and about three-quarters of all land families. The Permian saw the creation of the Pangean supercontinent, and the geological evidence suggests this landmass experienced huge volcanic turmoil. The Siberian Traps were built during the period --millions of cubic kilometers of basalt lavas were spilled on to the Earth's surface.

Mar 30, 05: Salmon farms help stock supermarkets but also breed parasitic sea lice that infect young wild salmon and could endanger other important ocean species such as herring, scientists said. Adult salmon can survive such infections, but the younger salmon are more vulnerable.
. . Citing concerns over declining populations of native juvenile salmon off northern Vancouver Island, the government announced plans last week to do more research on the matter.

Mar 28, 05: The asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago presumably initiated the extinction of the dinosaurs. The huge collision also unleashed a worldwide downpour of tiny BB-sized mineral droplets, called spherules.
. . The planet-covering residue left behind may tell us something about the direction of the incoming asteroid, as well as possible extinction scenarios, according to new research. The falling spherules might have heated the atmosphere enough to start a global fire, as one example.
. . How the spherules formed in the first place, though, has been a bit of a mystery. One theory is that these half-millimeter-wide globules precipitated out of a giant cloud of vaporized rock that circled the planet after the collision. Chemical differences in spherules from the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean imply that the vapor plume initially moved east, which might pinpoint the arrival direction of the asteroid. Probably somewhat from the west.

Mar 24, 05: There are only 540 or so yellow-eared parrots left on the planet. They exist only in Colombia. Their sole habitat is the wax palm, which grows on the misty flanks of the Andes Mountains to heights of 225 feet, making it the world's tallest palm tree.
. . But for centuries, Colombians have used the fronds of the wax palm for Palm Sunday, which commemorates Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, where residents greeted him by waving palm fronds. When Colombian peasants cut off the fronds from the young wax palms —-Colombia's national tree-— to sell to worshippers, the trees die or their growth is stunted. The practice has led to a dramatic thinning of the towering palms.

Mar 24, 05: Conservationists say that the population of three species of South Asian vultures has fallen by 97% in 12 years, and they are now at risk of extinction. The veterinary drug blamed for them has been banned by the Indian government. The livestock painkiller diclofenac, consumed by vultures when they eat a carcass, has been blamed for the fall. Studies in India, Pakistan and Nepal have found extensive evidence of diclofenac in dead vultures. The birds succumb to kidney failure and visceral gout.
. . Vultures have an important ecological role in the Asian environment, where they have been relied upon for millennia to clean up and remove dead livestock and even human corpses.

Mar 21, 05: Asia's dwindling populations of river dolphins are under increasing threat from pollution, dam construction and entanglement in fishermen's nets, global nature conservation body WWF said. The warning said only 13 of the dolphins were known to be left in China's Yangtze River where they once proliferated. The fate of the dolphins is also a warning for people leaving near the rivers. In India's vast Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems, there were only 2,000, and only 1,100 along the Indus River and its delta in southern Pakistan.

Mar 18, 05: Born in a Chinese zoo and named "Hope", he was brought to South Africa as a cub with his mate "Cathay" for a groundbreaking experiment that may be the last chance to save the species from extinction -- a "rewilding program" aimed at encouraging the animals to hunt on their own. The ultimate goal is for them to breed and impart their hunting skills to their offspring --who will be then be sent to a reserve in China.
. . With only about 10 to 30 left in the wild and another 60 in captivity, the Chinese sub-species of the tiger clan is perched precariously on the brink of oblivion. All five tiger sub-species, including the Bengals of India and the huge Siberians of Russia's Far East, are highly endangered.

Mar 17, 05: Despite their huge size, the bones of manatees are as brittle as fine porcelain, making them extremely vulnerable to being broken when struck by a boat, a University of Florida researchers said. The bones of the endangered sea cows have no marrow cavity, which is why their bones are so dense. But that density makes them more fragile. From 1974 to 2004, 5,329 manatee deaths were reported in Florida, of which 1,164 were attributed to watercraft collisions.

Mar 16, 05: A voracious, fast-breeding South American snail that is a problem in four states and Indonesia has been discovered for the first time in Georgia. It was identified as a channeled apple snail, similar to those raising environmental concerns in at least nine Florida counties. With yellow-to-brown shells that can grow to the size of a baseball, the large snails ravage many types of aquatic plants that provide food and shelter for native species. They can multiply quickly because they lay thousands of eggs and have no natural enemies.

Mar 7, 05: Researchers using a sophisticated sensor aboard an aircraft flying at the edge of space were able to spot an invasive tree species starting to take over native forests near the Big Island's Kilauea Volcano, according to a study. The sensing instrument pinpointed where Myrica faya trees, originally from the Canary Islands and the Azores, are starting to take over native ohia trees in and around Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The study indicates the remote sensor can spot infestations at their very beginning stages when there is still a chance of controlling them.

Mar 4, 05: Farmers will be rewarded for protecting the environment under a new initiative launched by the government. Under the Environmental Stewardship Scheme, every farmer in England will be able to earn payments for making their land more hospitable to wildlife.

Feb 21, 05: Whale songs can travel thousands of miles, but an increasingly noisy ocean is drastically cutting down their ability to communicate, shows new research that suggests ever-increasing noise could impede the beasts' ability to navigate and find mates. "If females can no longer hear the singing males through the smog, they lose breeding opportunities and choices." Whales sing at a low frequency, at the very bottom of the range of human hearing. By singing at low frequencies, whales are able to communicate across oceans – it’s how they keep track of their pod and alert friends of a good place to eat.
. . Using an underwater sound surveillance system more typically employed for tracking submarines, Clark and his colleagues zero in on specific whale songs and even track whales based on where the songs originate from. "If we went to the shelf-edge of Puerto Rico we could hear blue whales off Newfoundland 1,600 miles away."
. . But Clark and other scientists are concerned that the growing "acoustic smog" in the world’s oceans, and particularly the waters near popular migration and feeding routes, is interfering with whales’ ability to communicate with songs. "A blue whale, which lives 100 years, that was born in 1940, today has had his acoustic bubble shrunken from 1,000 miles to 100 miles because of noise pollution", said Clark. "The noise pollution is estimated to be at the industrial noise level where OSHA would require us to wear headphones."
. . Noise pollution is doubling every decade in an urbanized marine environment, Clark claims, mostly due to shipping traffic. Clark suggested that the shipping industry overhaul their ships and begin using quieter propellers. A more economically feasible fix might be to reroute shipping traffic so that it no longer passed through popular whale habitats, he said.
. . Whale sonar is also important for navigation. "Whales will aim directly at a seamount that is 300 miles away, then once they reach it, change course and head to a new feature", Clark said. "It is as if they are slaloming from one geographic feature to the next. They must have acoustic memories analogous to our visual memories."

Feb 21, 05: Iraq's devastated marshlands can be partially revitalized, say writers in the journal Science. Saddam Hussein ordered the extensive draining of the wetlands, in part to punish the native Marsh Arabs who opposed his rule. Local people reflooded the marshes after the fall of Saddam, re-flooding nearly 20% of the marshes. The wetlands had been home to the Marsh Arabs for at least 5,000 years. They once covered an area of 20,000-15,000 sq km --twice the size of the Florida Everglades. The wetlands now stand at just 7% of their original size.
. . The quality of water now flowing into the marshes is better than expected and researchers say 30% of the former wetlands could be restored. About 60% of the wildlife has since returned to the marshes. But although some areas are flooded and well-vegetated, others remain as baked mudflats or salt pans. They also found abnormally high levels of selenium, a naturally occurring toxic metal. The researchers fear that this could accumulate in the food chain and poison the ecosystem.
. . Regardless, engineers will need to flush the soil with clean water to remove salt and hydrogen sulphide. The question is whether there is enough water to do this. "Turkey could cut off almost all of the Euphrates' flow and Iraq has no basis at the moment to negotiate hard with them."

Feb 21, 05: Destruction of Brazil's Amazon rain forest will slow down in 2005 after the murder of a U.S. nun prompted the government to launch an unprecedented crackdown on illegal loggers and ranchers, the head of Brazil's environment agency said. Brazil created vast environmental reserves and sent its army and federal police to fight deforestation last week after international outrage at the murder of prominent U.S. human rights activist Dorothy Stang on Feb. 12.

Feb 16, 05: The population of Monarch butterflies has suffered a drastic decline, but Mexico — where deforestation has long devastated Monarch wintering grounds — is now blaming the United States and Canada. Mexico's Environment Department said that 75% fewer Monarch butterflies have appeared in 2004 compared to previous years. It blamed cold weather and intensive farming —-including genetically modified crops-— in areas of the United States and Canada where the butterflies spend the summer and reproduce. In past years, Mexico acknowledged the butterflies were affected by illegal logging of the central Mexico fir forests that make up the winter nesting grounds.
. . Activists and researchers suggested Mexico may be trying to offload some of the blame, after its own highly-publicized efforts to stop illegal logging ran up against often violent resistance from logging gangs.

Feb 15, 05: The Australian Museum has abandoned an ambitious attempt to clone an extinct marsupial known as the "Tasmanian tiger", or thylacine. The project to clone the animal using DNA recovered from a pickled thylacine pup was started in 1999. They admitted today that the quality of the DNA was too poor to work with. While the museum had the expertise needed to construct a DNA library for the thylacine, it lacked the facilities and skills to conduct "further stages requiring cell culture". "In fact, further investigation has now revealed that the thylacine DNA is far too degraded to even construct an DNA library. The technology to make it happen is improving all the time. And I believe science has a duty to continue to assemble the building blocks that will be needed to do it."
. . The last known thylacine, a striped, dog-like marsupial --animals which keep their young in a pouch-- died in captivity in 1936 and was believed to have been extinct on the Australian mainland for 2,000 years. [There is one piece of film of the last live animal!]

Feb 11, 05: A federal fishing council moved to ban bottom trawling on more than 370,000 square miles off Alaska's Aleutian Islands to try to protect coral beds and other sensitive fish habitat. The unanimous vote of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council covers more than half the fishable water around the Aleutians and pockets in the northern Gulf of Alaska. Bottom trawling is already off-limits over more than 100,000 square miles in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea.
. . Environmentalists called the ban a landmark, saying coral beds, sponge gardens and underwater peaks known as seamounts will be ruined without more protection from bottom trawlers. The trawlers scrape the ocean floor with weighted nets in search of species including Pacific cod and black rockfish.

Feb 11, 05: In Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, West Virginia University biologist McGraw says natural, slow-growing ginseng could be extinct within 100 years if deer keep grazing at current rates. He contends there are two ways to ensure its survival: Reintroduce mountain lions, wolves or other natural predators to the Appalachians, or loosen hunting restrictions to reduce the deer herds. "Nature is out of balance here because we've killed off the top predators, so the obvious solution is to restore them."
. . Buddy Davidson, spokesman for the state Department of Agriculture, says it's also unnecessary. "Don't worry about the ginseng", he says. "The coyotes will take care of the deer." The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports an explosion in the number of coyotes, a non-native species that has migrated eastward, in West Virginia. The agency suspects there are 20,000 to 50,000 coyotes in the state.
. . Ginseng is a protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a global treaty to which the United States has agreed. The federal government must certify each year that harvesting the root will not threaten its existence.

Dec 11, 04: The pygmy chimpanzees are so rare they cannot be found --our closest relatives are being wiped out. Just 75 years after being discovered, our closest living relative is on the verge of extinction. A comprehensive survey of the bonobo, or pygmy chimp, indicates that it may have been hunted so intensively that it cannot survive.
. . Bonobos live only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in central Africa. Until now, the best guess was that between 10,000 and 50,000 individuals inhabited the country's forests. But the most thorough survey of the species ever undertaken has failed to spot a single ape. It recorded the vocalizations of just one individual and found evidence of the ape's presence, such as nests and dung, in just nine of 44 areas studied, and at much lower densities than expected.
. . So few traces of bonobos were found that experts are unable to extrapolate from the survey to guess how many individuals are left. "Bonobos are in crisis."

Feb 10, 05: Cambodia's former forestry monitor Global Witness claimed the World Bank was bolstering illegal logging in the kingdom during a visit here by its president James Wolfensohn. The independent watchdog, which was sacked from its job monitoring the trade by the Cambodian government over its aggressive reporting in 2003, said the bank was turning a blind eye to the source of logs being traded here.
. . A three-year moratorium on log transportation in Cambodia was lifted in December by the international donor community at the persuasion of the bank, London-based Global Witness said. "The World Bank has repeatedly revealed its blinkered determination to help the logging concessionaires resume operations", the group's Jon Buckrell said. "The fact that many of these logs are resin trees that the companies stole from Cambodian villagers seems to be of no consequence to the Bank, despite its professed focus on poverty reduction and good governance."

Feb 10, 05: A team of international scientists launched an ambitious project on Thursday to genetically identify, or provide a barcode for, every plant and animal species on the planet. By taking a snippet of DNA from all the known species on Earth and linking them to photographs, descriptions and scientific information, the researchers plan to build the largest database of its kind. The information it collects can be used to identify pathogens, carriers of disease, pests and to monitor endangered species. "We have discovered that it is quite possible to have a short DNA sequence that can characterize just about every form of life on the planet."
. . Less than a fifth of the Earth's estimated 10 million species of plants and animals have been named. Researchers working on the Barcode of Life Initiative hope that genetically identifying all of them in a standardized way on a global scale will speed up the discovery of new ones. Current techniques used to identify minute differences between species are complicated, time consuming and require specialist knowledge. "What we are looking at is a new method which will allow just about anyone, in any part of the world, to recognize organisms without recourse to a particular specialist."

Feb 10, 05: A bat can devour 600 mosquitoes per hour, helping prevent the spread of West Nile virus. Texas, has an official bat: the Mexican free-tailed bat. The Virginia big-eared bat moved one step closer --on a unanimous voice vote, the state Senate General Laws Committee endorsed a Delegate's bill designating the endangered species as the official state bat.

Feb 4, 05: An unseasonable outbreak of red tide has scientists worried that migrating manatees may swim into the potentially deadly algae. Red tide normally occurs from August through September. A winter bloom spells peril for manatees, which start moving out of warm water in rivers and estuaries in late February and early March. There is a danger of a repeat of 2002 and 2003, when red tide killed 34 and 96 manatees, respectively. Scientists have been able to save every manatee but one effected by red tide that has been reported to the institute.
. . Scientists are speculating that nutrients flushed into coastal waters by last year's four hurricanes could be responsible for the January red tide. Red tide is formed when Karenia brevis, a microscopic algae, reproduces at an explosive rate, forming a bloom. Nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen are known to fuel that explosion.
. . Red tide is known to cause breathing problems in people when the algae's toxic spores become airborne. The effects can be serious for people with breathing problems such as asthma.

Feb 4, 05: Africa's second largest forestland faces being wiped out if illegal logging and quota-busting are not brought under control, Cameroonian authorities and environmentalists warned ahead off a key summit on forest conservation. Non-governmental organizations blame the denuding of Cameroon's forests on endemic corruption and the state's inability to control the sector for lack of funds. "How can you expect inspectors who don't even have boots to check up on multinational corporations that overrun the area and respect no rules?"

Feb 3, 05: Stretching across 190 million hectares and six states, the Congo Basin forests are home to half the continent's wild animals --including gorillas, chimpanzees and forest elephants-- as well as more than 10,000 plant species. But if deforestation goes on at its present pace, about 70% of the forests may be gone by 2040, global conservation group WWF says.

Jan 31, 05: Hong Kong is considering importing anteaters to fend off an infestation of potentially dangerous ants but will first weigh the ecological implications, the environment chief said.
. . The long-nosed creatures may be called in to roam parts of the territory invaded by red fire ants, a native South American insect pest which in rare cases can inflict a sting lethal to humans. "I think now we have a foreign species introduced to our ecosystem --our staff are doing very detailed research on what best to be done."

Jan 28, 05: China's endangered pandas, who grab world attention each time they give birth, are now going to have their own blood bank to help to keep their numbers up. "Initial studies have found that pandas have different blood types. But researchers have not conducted in-depth studies and do not know a lot about the matter."
. . Pandas have boosted their numbers in the wild by almost half to about 1,600 in just a few years thanks to enlarged habitat and improved ecosystems.

Jan 27, 05: An isolated community of endangered gorillas in Democratic Republic of Congo is managing to hold its own and may even be growing despite the constant threat from poachers and civil war. A new census by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) counted 168 Grauers, or eastern lowland, gorillas in a remote area of the southeastern Kahuzi-Biega National Park, up from an estimated 120 to 130 in 2000. The society, based at New York's Bronx Zoo, attributed the gorillas' resiliance to the bravery of Congolese rangers in the mountain highlands of the park near the Rwandan border where the security situation is highly unstable.
. . "The fact that this Grauers gorilla population may actually be increasing is a tribute to the park guards who have stood their ground against rebel armies and poachers", said Jefferson Hall, a WCS researcher. "I'm absolutely convinced that if the guards did not remain in Kahuzi-Biega, there would be no animals left."

Jan 11, 05: In AUBURN, N.Y., a huge flock of crows has been pestering people for years. Officials are fighting back with a hazing program aimed at disrupting the birds' sleep with noise and light and driving them into the countryside. They'll continue through the week using hand-held lasers, pyrotechnics and amplified crow distress calls. The scientists counted some 63,800 birds before hazing began.

In the past five years, the United States has imported more than 144,000 Burmese pythons. Some of those snakes are now wrestling alligators in the Florida Everglades -—and breeding. [I'm sure they mean w other snakes...]

Jan 24, 05: Scientists called for the creation of a top expert panel on species loss, aiming to give the planet's looming extinction crisis the same headline-making punch as global warming. "Biodiversity is being destroyed irreversibly by human activities", said the appeal. "Almost everywhere, animals and plants are under threat from loss or degradation of habitat, from pollution of the soil, water and the air, from the exhaustion of soils, water tables and rivers by over-exploitation, "and, more recently, signs of long-term climate damage."
. . The appeal was launched at the first day of a conference gathering 1,200 experts and policymakers on species loss. Sources said the panel's format would mirror that of a highly successful scientific committee on global warming set up in 1988. The task of the Paris conference is to focus on action on combating the planet's alarming loss of biodiversity, as wild species are battered by habitat loss and climate change. The graphic opinion of these scientists is that the world is facing its biggest mass extinction in 65 million years.

Jan 22, 05: A quarter of Norway's tiny population of wolves are to be shot to protect the country's sheep.

Jan 22, 05: The river otter, that wily and playful critter adored by the public, is overrunning Ohio. Now, wildlife officials there are finding themselves in the same predicament as their counterparts in other states: killing a species once on the verge of vanishing.
. . In Florida and New Jersey, it's the black bear. The Rockies and Alaska have the gray wolf. Nearly everywhere else, it's the white-tailed deer and Canada goose.
. . "In a human-dominated landscape, it's really tough to keep wildlife in the numbers we feel are appropriate", said Greg Butcher, a zoologist with the Washington-based National Audubon Society. "We have affected the environment so much that a lot of natural checks and balances are gone."

Jan 20, 05: Another Global warming and not a giant asteroid may have nearly wiped out life on Earth some 250 million years ago, an international team of scientists said. The mass extinction, known as the "Great Dying", extinguished 90% of sea life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals.
. . There has been recent evidence that a big asteroid or meteor hit the Earth and triggered the catastrophe, but researchers say they now have evidence that something much more long-term --global warming-- was the culprit.
. . They studied sediment cores drilled off the coasts of Australia and China and found evidence the ocean was lacking oxygen and full of sulfur-loving bacteria at that time. This finding would be consistent with an atmosphere low in oxygen and poisoned by hot, sulfurous, volcanic emissions, they wrote in the journal Science.
. . A second team led by Peter Ward at the University of Washington looked at fossil evidence in South Africa and found little evidence of a catastrophe, and instead, signs of a gradual die-off. They found two patterns, one showing gradual extinction over about 10 million years leading up to the time of the extinction, and then a spike in extinction rates that lasted another 5 million years. "Animals and plants both on land and in the sea were dying at the same time, and apparently from the same causes --too much heat and too little oxygen."
. . Ward also believes mass volcanic eruptions may have pumped greenhouse gases into the air, which would have trapped heat in the atmosphere and raised temperatures. "I think temperatures rose to a critical point. It got hotter and hotter until it reached a critical point and everything died", Ward said. "It was a double-whammy of warmer temperatures and low oxygen, and most life couldn't deal with it."
. . Most experts agree there is a great deal of evidence to show an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, forming what is now the Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Some researchers have argued that the Great Dying might also have resulted from such an impact, but Ward's team said it could find no evidence for such an event. Scientists have long debated the cause of this calamity —-which occurred before the era of dinosaurs, some 250 million years ago, when 90% of all marine life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals went extinct.
. . "Some of us have been toying with the idea that dinosaurs evolved to be a low-oxygen adaptation", resulting from this era, Ward said. "We know birds can live at much lower oxygen concentrations than we do, and we and think there were similar lung adaptations in dinosaurs." Currently, the atmosphere consists of about 21% oxygen, but the addition of gases at that time could have lowered levels to 16% or less.

Jan 20, 05: The world's rarest cat, the Amur leopard, is facing extinction in the wild, conservationists have warned. It is estimated that only about 30 of the animals survive in the wild. They have blamed a recent decision by the Russian government to approve an oil pipeline through the leopards' only habitat, on the harsh eastern coast. Human settlements and forest fires have already pushed the Amur leopard to the brink of extinction - there are more in captivity than there are in the wild.

Jan 19, 05: Mayor Harry Kim is looking for $2 million to begin controlling the spread of the nocturnal coqui frog, a beloved native in Puerto Rico but considered an annoying pest in Hawaii since hitching a ride over in shipments of tropical plants around 1990. The frogs have been mating easily —-and shattering quiet island nights-— ever since.
. . Aside from the noise, the frogs have a voracious appetite for spiders and insects, competing with native birds and fauna. And coqui frogs are adaptable to many ecosystems and breed heavily in Hawaii. More than 150 communities on the Big Island are now infested with the coin-sized frogs, named after their high-decibel "ko-KEE, ko-KEE" chirp.

Jan 18, 05: Britain's seas are in crisis, with key species in serious decline, according to conservationists. A report by the WWF blames inadequate planning and poor management. The Marine Health Check report says 13 of the 16 species and habitats investigated are in decline, including reefs and salt marshes. The majority of damage to marine habitats is due to coastal development, fishing, aquaculture and oil and gas exploitation, claims the WWF.

Jan 19, 05: Researchers who surveyed coral formations in South Andaman island for five days, said coral reefs that survived the Dec. 26 disaster are in danger of being smothered by sand deposits. The sand prevents light from reaching the micro-organisms living on the coral. The Andaman coral reefs are a treasure trove of biodiversity, second only to Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Jan 13, 05: About 3,000 polar bears live around the Arctic Barents Sea off northern Europe, according to a first census on Thursday that sets a benchmark to judge bears' vulnerability to pollution and melting ice. The survey, by Russian, British and Norwegian researchers, showed that bear numbers in the region were at the bottom of previous rough estimates of 3,000-5,000. The total is about 12% of an estimated global population of 25,000 polar bears.
. . "The count gives us a good starting point for further protection of this creature. We know that polar bears are exposed to environmental poisons and climate change in the Arctic", Environment Minister Knut Arild Hareide said.

Jan 13, 05: Gray-headed albatrosses, famed for flocking to the South Georgia Islands near Antarctica to mate and raise chicks, routinely circle the globe between breeding seasons in a restless search for fish, British scientists discovered. The researchers found that more than half of the birds flew completely around the world, following the chilled oceans below 30 degrees latitude south. One bird circled the globe three times in 18 months, and another flew more than 13,000 miles in just 46 days.
. . Learning about their migration and feeding habits could lead to policies protecting them from long-line fisheries that kill an estimated 300,000 of the birds annually.

Jan 11, 05: Urban sprawl is gobbling up open spaces in fast-growing metropolitan areas so quickly that it could spell extinction for nearly 1,200 species of plants and animals, environmental groups say. The National Wildlife Federation, Smart Growth America and NatureServe projected that over the next 25 years, more than 22,000 acres of natural resources and habitat will be lost to development in 35 of the largest and most rapidly growing metropolitan areas. According to the groups, as many as 553 of the nearly 1,200 at-risk species are found only in those areas.

Jan 10, 05: For the first time in three decades, critics of the Endangered Species Act are building momentum to rewrite the law implemented to save America's threatened flora and fauna, from the star cactus to the grizzly bear. Weakening the law has been a priority for Republican Western governors, and a second Bush term provides critics of the act a prime opportunity to push the U.S. Congress for changes that would help open up vast stretches of wilderness for development.
. . Rep. Richard Pombo of California, chairman of the House of Representatives natural resources committee, is expected to introduce legislation this session to revamp the law.
. . Activists on both sides of the issue say there is little chance of truly gutting the act given its mission of saving plants and animals, but environmentalists fear it could become significantly watered down.

Jan 5, 05: As the gray wolf hovered on the brink of extinction a decade ago, U.S. officials embarked on a controversial plan to open the vast refuge of Yellowstone National Park to the pack-based predators in the hopes of rebuilding the species.
. . Seeking to reintroduce an animal that had been an icon of the West even though it was reviled by ranchers, the Clinton administration 10 years ago this month released gray wolves imported from Canada into Yellowstone with great fanfare. The following year they introduced more into nearby Idaho.
. . The effort has been a resounding success. From just 14 when the program began, the population has risen to 165 wolves in 15 packs in Yellowstone.

Early Jan, 05: Endangered animals in China, including the giant panda, Chinese alligator and rare crested ibis, are making a comeback due to enlarged habitats and improved ecosystems, state media said. Of China's 189 rare and extremely endangered species of wild plants, 71% have been stabilized, Zhou said.
. . The number of giant pandas, one of the world's most endangered species, increased by 40% to 1,596 over the number recorded before 2000. The number of crested ibis, a bird related to the heron of which there were only seven known in the world at one point, had leapt to 740. The number of Eld's deer, found only in south China's Hainan island, also rose to 1,600 last year from just 26 in 1975.

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