EXTINCTION NEWS, Gaia Church

EXTINCTION
NEWS
'01 thru '04.

An excellent site on extinction, with a plethora of links to articles.

Dec 31, 04: Beaches around South Asia devastated by tsunamis could be restored to their former glory within a few years, but the marine life through which the huge waves passed could take centuries to recover, experts say. "The coral reef system might be totally destroyed." It was degraded before, due to human pressures.
. . The ocean's seagrass bed and mangrove ecosystem would also be affected, but it is the reefs that bore the brunt of the destruction. The health of the reefs and mangroves could in turn dramatically affect the size of fish and other marine life populations which rely on them for their habitat.
. . A major problem would be the amount of silt, sand and organic matter churned into the water which would then "smother" vegetation and marine life. Coral could also have been damaged by exposure to the air as water was sucked back from the shore before the tsunamis hit. In some cases, mangroves, which protect the shore from erosion and often serve as nurseries for young fish, would also have been completely uprooted and destroyed.
. . Apart from the reefs, many of the affected areas also have fish farming operations near the shore which would have been inundated.

Scientists say an estimated 60% of right whales become entangled in fishing lines. There are only an estimated 300 Atlantic right whales still alive after they were hunted almost to extinction by the early 1900s.

Dec 23, 04: A mystery disease is killing off yellow-eyed penguin chicks in New Zealand in a fresh blow to efforts to conserve the world's rarest member of the penguin family, a conservation group said. BirdLife International said the disease, which has baffled local scientists, had killed up to 80% of this spring's chick's in the worst affected areas on New Zealand's South Island.
. . They're running tests to try and pinpoint the extent and nature of the illness, which is thought to be caused by a strain of cornynebacterium. It said there are more than 50 strains of this type of infection, one of which causes human diphtheria. The infection did not seem to be causing any harm to adult birds.
. . There's a global population of just under 5,000 birds.

Dec 23, 04: The Norwegian government announced it will increase the permitted number of whales that hunters can catch in 2005, despite repeated international criticism of its commercial whaling activities. "It is the largest quota that has been granted since the resumption of whale hunting in 1993."
. . Norway, which denies that minke whales populations are threatened, is the only country in the world to authorize commercial whaling. It has defied an international moratorium by International Whaling Commission in force since 1986. Japan and Iceland use a loophole in the moratorium to hunt whales for what they say is scientific research.

Dec 23, 04: Populations of the hamster-like American pika continue to decline in the West and global warming is partly to blame, a new study says. Local populations have gone extinct at more than one-third of sites surveyed since the mid-1990s, according to a study by a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey. They are unable to survive in warm climates. They've been shown to be unable to survive just six hours in temperatures as warm as 77 degrees.
. . Pikas, a relative of the rabbit with small, round ears, are known for their high-pitched whistle.
. . "Population by population, we're witnessing some of the first contemporary examples of global warming apparently contributing to the local extinction of an American mammal at sites across an entire eco-region."

There are only 380 mountain gorillas left in the wild.

There are only an estimated 350 Atlantic right whales still alive after they were hunted almost to extinction by the early 1900s. Scientists say an estimated 60% of right whales become entangled in fishing lines.

One-third of the bottle-nose dolphins swimming off Israel's Mediterranean coast are too thin, apparently due to a lack of food from overfishing, researcher said. Photographs showed that ribs were visible in one-third of the dolphins. Israeli fisherman have also reported a drop in the number of fish in recent years. Bottle-nose dolphins in general have not been doing well in the Mediterranean. Researchers in Greece have found that 40% of the dolphins in the area are very thin.
. . The researchers are hoping to set up nautical nature reserves in the Mediterranean where fishing would be prohibited.

Dec 8, 04: The combined stresses of habitat loss, hunting and an illegal trade in tiger parts have left wild tiger numbers at less than 7,000. By contrast, an estimated 100,000 wild tigers roamed much of Asia in 1900.
. . Analysis of the tigers' mitochondrial DNA revealed that all tigers diverged from a common ancestor that lived 72,000-108,000 years ago.

Dec 13, 04: Pygmy chimpanzees, one of humanity's closest living relatives, have been pushed to the brink of extinction in the war-battered Democratic Republic of Congo, conservation group WWF International said. WWF said recent surveys in Africa's Congo basin revealed that perhaps only 10,000 of the primates, also known as bonobos, remain in the wild compared to previous estimates of around 50,000. The genetic code in the DNA of chimpanzees and bonobos is closer to that of humans than to that of gorillas.
. . While the bonobos in the country's west are reeling from rampant poaching, the lowland gorillas in the east have also taken a beating. Conservationists fear the numbers of eastern lowland gorillas in the region are down to 3,000-5,000 from an estimated 17,000 in 1996.
. . Poverty and conflict are the chief reasons behind the falls in ape numbers. And Congo, where millions of people have died from war-related hunger and disease over the past decade, has had more than its share of both.

Dec 14, 04: 10% of all bird species are set to disappear by the end of this century -- and with them the services they provide such as cleaning up carcasses and spreading seeds, U.S. researchers said.
. . A careful study of extinction rates so far, conservation measures underway and climate and environmental change... shows that at least 1,200 species of birds will be gone by 2100. And that is a conservative estimate, the team at Stanford University said. "Even though only 1.3% of bird species have gone extinct since 1500, the global number of individual birds is estimated to have experienced a 20% to 25% reduction during the same period."
. . This can have severe consequence for people. "In 1997, 30,000 of the world's 35,000 to 50,000 rabies deaths took place in India, where feral dog and rat populations have exploded after the decline of vultures."
. . "Our projections indicate that, by 2100, up to 14% of all bird species may be extinct and that as many as one out of four may be functionally extinct -- that is, critically endangered or extinct in the wild. These assumptions are conservative, since it is estimated that, every year, natural habitats and dependent vertebrate populations decrease by an average of 1.1%."
. . In November, the World Conservation Union reported that it found 12% of all bird species were threatened with extinction, along with nearly one-fourth of the world's mammals, a third of amphibians and 42% of all turtles and tortoises.

Dec 6, 04: About 70% of the world's coral reefs have been wrecked or are at risk from human activities but some are showing surprising resilience to global warming, a report said. The international survey, by 240 experts in 98 nations, said that pollution, over-fishing, rising temperatures, coastal development and diseases were among major threats to reefs, vast ecosystems often called the nurseries of the seas.
. . "20% of the world's coral reefs have been effectively destroyed or show no immediate prospects of recovery", said the report, issued on the first day of a U.N. environmental conference in Buenos Aires.
. . The Status of Coral Reefs of the World 2004 also said that another "24% of the world's reefs are under imminent risk of collapse through human pressures, and a further 26% are under a longer-term threat of collapse."
. . "About 40% of the reefs that were seriously damaged in 1998 are either recovering well or have recovered", it said. It said the 1998 warming had been the most serious in 1,000 years but was likely to happen about every 50 years in future, largely because of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
. . Corals are formed by a build-up of limestone skeletons left by tiny marine animals called polyps. The graveyards can become giant structures like the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, colorful homes to thousands of species from sharks to seaweed.
. . "To save coral reefs, governments must reduce carbon dioxide emissions quickly, but also create marine protected areas." But 75% of coral reefs are in developing countries where human populations are rising rapidly and millions depend on reefs for food.

Dec 5, 04: Elephants in zoos are living as long as those in the wild, but their population in captivity is dwindling because it is so difficult to breed them, according to studies released today.
. . Asian and African elephants in captivity in North America is 45 years and 33 years, respectively. Those figures are similar for elephants in the wild. There are up to 30,000 Asian and half a million African elephants in the wild, according to the foundation. In captivity worldwide, there are up to 16,000 Asian — including as many as 300 in North America —-and up to 700 African elephants —-including 230 in North America.

Dec 1, 04: An area of Amazon jungle larger than the U.S. state of New Jersey has been destroyed this year and work on a new highway is mainly to blame, environmental group Friends of the Earth and the government said. The preliminary figures, based on satellite images, alarmed environmentalists because they suggest that Amazon destruction has surpassed its second-highest level reached in 2002-2003.
. . The data are based on a satellite system which has been monitoring Amazon deforestation on a test basis. The images indicated that from 8,920 square miles to 9,420 square miles, or an area bigger than New Jersey, was cut down this year. The figure was especially worrying because it showed that for the first time in history Amazon deforestation rose despite a slowdown in agriculture during the year. Small farmers have been major culprits in the trend as they hack away at Amazon jungle to expand their fields.
. . The data showed a big jump in deforestation along a road running through the heart of the Amazon that the government has said it wants to pave. "The big reason for this (destruction) is the BR-163 road," Smeraldi said. "The government knew about this; it was warned. What is surprising is that they are not even talking about their anti-deforestation plans." In the region of the road, deforestation soared by more than five times. Settlers have moved in even before the government started paving it.
. . Environmentalists have warned that roads, dams and pipeline projects through the Amazon --home to up to 30% of the planet's animal and plant species-- represent the biggest threat to the forest because they open up access to large-scale development and settlement.

Dec 1, 04: One of Earth's rarest birds might have gone into extinction following the death of one of the last known po'ouli. The remaining two po'ouli, believed to be a male and a female, haven't been seen for nearly a year. They might also have died, moved to another area or have just been missed by wildlife officials.
. . "This species was a unique part of Earth's history", said Eric VanderWerf, the Fish and Wildlife Service's Hawaiian bird recovery coordinator. "We'll never have another one like it if it disappears. I kind of liken it in someway to the loss of the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel. If we lost that, we could never get it back."
. . Tissue samples from the dead bird were saved for cryogenic preservation for possible cloning in the future.
. . The po'ouli's numbers have dwindled because of habitat loss and introduced predators like rats, cats and mongoose. Nonnative diseases carried by mosquitos have also taken a toll on the Hawaiian birds.

Nov 27, 04: The world's tiger population has plummeted by 95% from the start of the 20th century to as few as 5,000 now and is further threatened by the lucrative trade in their skins, officials told a forum. In Asia, tiger skins can sell for $15,000 while in Vietnam a skeleton, the bones widely believed by Asians to be an aphrodisiac, can fetch as much as $25,000.
. . "It is believed that about 100 years back, the global population of wild tigers was about 100,000," Dey said. "However, the population dwindled to 8,000 by 1960. Today it stands at around 5,000 to 7,000."
. . Three out of the eight sub-species of tigers were already extinct - the Bali tiger in 1940, the Caspian tiger in the 1970s and Javan tiger in the 1980s. Another sub-species, the South China tiger, could also soon disappear.

Nov 27, 04: New evidence casts doubt on the theory that sabre-toothed cats, mammoths and other big North American mammals were driven to extinction by human hunting. Genetic analysis of bison remains shows their populations started to crash around 37,000 years ago --long before humans arrived in the New World. Researchers claim that climate change and other factors are more likely culprits in the extinction. This so-called "megafaunal extinction" has been blamed by some on human hunters who appear in North America around 12,000 years ago.
. . "Because we have ancient DNA from the specimens, we can actually look at slices of time and see what the genetic diversity of that population was." Using mathematical analysis, the researchers were able to extract information about bison population size through time.
. . Until around 37,000 years ago, there was a large, diverse population living in Beringia. But after this date, the population's genetic diversity began to decline dramatically. The fall in numbers coincides with a warm period in which the steppe tundra that bison like was covered by forests. These forests may have acted as a barrier to bison dispersal and would have provided few sources of food. This warm period was followed by cold, arid conditions.
. . A skeptic points out that, in other areas, bison have managed to shrug off dramatic shifts in climate.

Nov 23, 04: Conservationists launched a three-year project today to protect millions of migrating birds which are indiscriminately targeted by hunters in North Africa and the Middle East. "The number of migratory birds being killed has increased to an almost industrial scale in some countries ... Hunters kill millions of birds annually as they migrate through the Mediterranean region", British-based BirdLife International said.
. . "A significant proportion are shot or trapped in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Most are species that breed in Europe and winter in Africa", it said.
. . Bird hunting is an important socio-economic activity in the region and involves hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom regard the activity as an almost sacred right. BirdLife said the methods used by the hunters were often indiscriminate. Various species of small songbirds are also being slain en masse in the region. Shooting, trapping with nets, and poison are all used. Awash with the automatic assault weapons of war, the region is also loaded with the shotguns favored by bird hunters. BirdLife said a staggering 20 million to 25 million shotgun cartridges were sold annually in Lebanon, which contained lead shot harmful to the environment.

Nov 21, 04: More than 60 countries agreed today to ban the killing of sharks for their fins in the Atlantic Ocean, a move that conservationists hope will increase protection of threatened species around the world. The agreement bans the practice known as shark finning in which fishermen slice off a shark's fin and throw the carcass overboard, leaving room for more fins. Shark fins are a delicacy in Asian countries and command high prices: shark fin soup sells for more than $100 in Singapore, according to WildAid, an environmental group. According to the United Nations, more than 100 million sharks are killed each year. A study last year by Dalhousie University marine scientists estimated that 90% of the world's large fish —-including sharks."

Nov 19, 04: South China tigers, among the rarest of the five remaining tiger subspecies, are on the verge of extinction in the wild with less than 30 remaining. China had 66 South China tigers raised in 19 zoos but the animals are all offspring of six wild tigers seized in 1956.
. . The other four tiger subspecies are the Siberian, Bengal, Indochinese and Sumatran tigers.

Nov 18, 04: Rampant illegal logging in Indonesia and the demands of a rapidly expanding population and economy in Indonesia are killing many of Asia's most exotic and rare birds, conservationists said. "Bird species across the Asian region are in serious trouble. Like amphibians, birds are excellent indicators of wider biodiversity loss. When they're in danger, you can be sure that the environment as a whole is suffering."
. . "At the turn of the last century, 90 per cent of Sumatra was covered in forest. Now it's down to 35 per cent, and if you look just at the lowland forests, that habitat has now almost completely disappeared."

Nov 17, 04: More than 15,000 species, from sharks to frogs to fir trees, are facing extinction and the total is rising faster than ever before, conservationists and scientists said on Wednesday. Despite efforts to slow or reverse the slide into oblivion of many species, one in three amphibians and almost half of all freshwater turtles are threatened, the IUCN World Conservation Union said at the unveiling of its 2004 species "Red List."
. . One in eight types of bird and a quarter of all mammals are also known to be in jeopardy. "Although 15,589 species are known to be threatened with extinction, this greatly underestimates the true number as only a fraction of known species have been assessed."

Nov 12, 04: Mexico and a U.S. environmental group agreed on a plan to protect 370,000 acres of tropical forest on the Yucatan Peninsula in what officials said was the largest conservation project in the country's history.
. . As a result of the $3 million expropriation, published today in the federal registry, the land will be included in the core conservation zone of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, a 1.8-million acre area that contains significant Mayan ruins and is home to hundreds of exclusive plant and animal species, including the largest jaguar population outside of the Amazon.

Nov 12, 04: A strict ban on granting new logging concessions in Congo's rainforest must be maintained while the poor African country struggles to recover from years of war, conservationists said. It has some 250 million acres of rainforest, most of which has remained untouched. A moratorium on new logging rights in the world's second largest rainforest was imposed in 2002.
. . With Congo emerging from a five-year war in which 3 million people died, mainly from hunger and disease, conservationists fear new laws and zoning could result in around 60 million acres --an area the size of France-- being opened up to logging firms.

Nov 10, 04: Satellite tracking data have pinpointed parts of the world where longline fishing trawlers and albatrosses cross paths, often with fatal results for the majestic sea birds, a new report said. More than 300,000 seabirds, including 100,000 albatrosses, are believed to drown each year because they are lured by baited hooks and then pulled under the water.
. . Albatrosses are slow breeding, so there are fears that longliners are killing some species faster than they can reproduce. All 21 albatross species are officially classed as under global threat of extinction.
. . The wandering albatross has a wingspan of up to 11 feet --the broadest in the world.

Nov 10, 04: The forests on Brazil's agricultural frontier will disappear without international financing to provide alternatives to slash-and-burn farming, the farm secretary of Brazil's leading soybean state said. Fires to clear forest --a measure of deforestation-- in Brazil's center-west agricultural frontier on the edge of the Amazon, doubled to 65,499 in 2003 against 2000.
. . Brazil has a long history of poor farmers squatting on land on the frontiers of agricultural expansion, farming it until the fragile forest soils give out and then moving on.

Nov 8, 04: The population of North America's largest salamander is plummeting in Missouri and Arkansas, and scientists from five states met to consider how to prevent the creature's disappearance. Nine out of 10 of the animals found in the Spring River this year had serious abnormalities. "We just don't have a good explanation for what's causing this."
. . Biologists believe that many factors may have hurt the hellbender, including logging, gravel mining, sewage plant effluent, agricultural runoff, introduction of trout, disturbance from boaters, poaching, deliberate killing and scientific collection.

Nov 8, 04: Over 40% of all bird species in Europe face an uncertain future and some are so threatened that they may disappear soon due to intensive agriculture and climate change, scientists said today. Many bird species, including the house sparrow, starling, wood warbler and corn bunting, have been declining alarmingly, BirdLife International said. The report identifies 226 species, or 43% of all European bird types, as being threatened.

Nov 2, 04: The world's list of endangered species is growing at an alarming and unprecedented rate as governments pay less and less attention to green issues. The World Conservation Union said it would release a "red list" of more than 12,000 threatened species at the World Conservation Congress in Thailand. "The scale and pace of extinction is higher now than ever before. Research indicates that the rate could even be up to 1,000 times higher than we would naturally expect."
. . With up to 30 per cent of the world's species facing extinction in the next 50 years, the IUCN said it would also release a damning report on what it says is shrinking government investment in conservation.
. . Up to 3,500 environmentalists, scientists, businessmen and government officials are expected to attend the week-long conference, which is being billed as the largest conservation meeting ever.

Oct 20, 04: Almost 30% of bird populations on the continent are facing a "significant decline", The National Audubon Society said in its first "The State of the Birds" report today. "Like the canary in the coal mine warning the miner of danger ahead, birds are an indicator of environmental and human health."

Oct 18, 04: Catches of cod and other fish stocks must be drastically reduced or even stopped in the North Sea to help populations recover from years of overfishing, an independent expert panel said. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea has 1,600 scientists from 19 countries.
. . There is some good news in the report, including that North Sea haddock stocks are estimated to be at 460,000 tons — a 30-year high and more than three times the recommended minimum. However, the council warned that cod is often caught together with haddock, and the industry needs to find ways of avoiding such by-catches.
. . The council also recommended that fishing for hake in the waters of southern Biscay be stopped next year because of depleted stocks. It also called for catches of plaice in the North Sea to be cut 55% and the harvest of sand-eels in the same waters to be cut by more than 40%.

Oct 15, 04: A northern snakehead fish, known for its voracious appetite and ability to wreak havoc on freshwater ecosystems, was found in Chicago's Burnham Harbor, alarming state biologists.
. . Officials said they would scan the harbor near Lake Michigan with electronic equipment to verify whether other northern snakeheads are present. If so, they are concerned the fish could multiply and gobble up native fish. The northern snakehead can grow to more than 3 feet long and has large teeth and a voracious appetite for other fish. It is usually imported for food or aquariums. Scientists call it a "frankenfish" for its ability to survive in oxygen-depleted water, move from pond to pond and devour other fish.

Oct 14, 04: They may thrive on land and in water, but amphibians everywhere are in serious trouble and up to a third of species are threatened with extinction, a troubling new study said. Scientists say this is an ominous sign for other creatures, including humans, as amphibians are widely regarded as biological "canaries in the coal mine" since their permeable skin is highly sensitive to changes in the environment. In short, they go first and others follow.
. . The first comprehensive survey of a grouping that includes frogs, toads and salamanders, the Global Amphibian Assessment says that at least nine species have become extinct since 1980. It says 113 more have not been reported in the wild in recent years and are believed to have vanished. "Their catastrophic decline serves as a warning that we are in a period of significant environmental degradation."
. . Air and water pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, the introduction of invasive species and consumer demand are the biggest global threats. About one-third --at least 1,856 amphibian species or 32% of them all-- are threatened with extinction. By comparison, only 12% of bird and 23% of mammal species are endangered.
. . "The fact that one third of amphibians are in precipitous decline tells us that we are rapidly moving toward a potentially epidemic number of extinctions." Dirt-poor and conflict-ridden Haiti has the highest percentage of threatened amphibians with 92% of its species facing extinction.

Oct 14, 04: The Army Corps of Engineers will in two weeks begin building a permanent electric barrier to keep the invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, officials announced. The $9.1 million project in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, is expected to be completed by April. The carp can migrate across Illinois from the Mississippi by various other rivers and then the canal. "Asian carp can completely disrupt the biodiversity and ecosystem of the lakes", said EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt. "We've got to stop them where they are."
. . The announcement comes more than two years after a temporary electric barrier was installed amid concerns that the voracious carp — which can grow to 150 pounds and eat 40% of its body weight a day — would devour so much food it could starve native species. That barrier proved effective but it is now deteriorating.

Oct 13, 04: Biologists gathered at a field day devoted to the restoration of Georgia's official game bird blamed loss of habitat, primarily from development and modern farming practices, for a 70% drop in the Southeast's quail population over the past 20 years. Biologists say it's disappearing in the Southeast, but can make a comeback and add millions of dollars to the rural economy if landowners are willing to make changes in the way they manage their crops and timber to protect the birds' habitat.

Oct 11, 04: Experts say few migrating monarch butterflies have been spotted in Vermont this year, where once they were common autumn sights. "Probably the worst year in a decade", said Kent McFarland, a conservation biologist at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. "I went to some of my favorite spots, and I've seen maybe two in Vermont this entire season."

Oct 11, 04: Despite a federal rule changing the type of hooks that longline fishermen may use, the sea turtle population is declining, officials say. The change to a circle hook, which has a point bent inward toward the hook shaft, was supposed to help protect loggerhead sea turtles. But some say the federal rule which took effect in August just made fishing tougher while the number of turtles is still dropping. In longline fishing, a single fishing line holds miles of baited hooks.
. . While the number of nesting loggerheads in South Carolina has declined about 60% during the past two decades, there was an even sharper drop this year. There were 2,576 nests last year but only 747 this summer.
. . Use of the circle hook resulted from a three-year study that showed as much as a 90% drop in the number of turtles hooked or tangled. But turtle project officials question the research and said some results showed little difference in the type of hooks used.
. . Turtles are protected in several ways, including monitoring such things as dimmer lights on the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston. Lights can disorient hatchlings as they try to leave the beach for the sea. Shrimpers use excluder devices to let turtles out of their nets and harbor dredging is scheduled to avoid turtle nesting season.

Oct 10, 04: Japan has pushed hard for backing from some of the 166 signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) for its plan to ease the total trade ban on some minke whale populations. But conservationists have vowed to block the plan.
. . Japan's delegation has vowed "never" to give up a campaign it says affects a 1,000-year whaling tradition, but environmental groups say any change to CITES rules will undermine the authority of the IWC.
. . Japan, which is to hunt some 820 whales next year under its "research" whaling program in a loophole to the 1986 ban, says in its proposal that three northern hemisphere minke stocks are not in danger. There are more than one million minke whale worldwide, according to CITES.
. . The conservationist International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) challenged Japanese data, which cites surveys that go back to 1995 as "outdated, selective and misleading".
. . The focus will be on the ivory trade, with Namibia calling for an annual export quota of two tons of ivory. Another African nation, Kenya, has proposed a 20-year moratorium on ivory trading. Namibia also wants to press ahead with a one-off auction of accumulated ivory piles from elephants that died a natural death, only the second since international ivory trade was banned in 1989.
. . But the ban does little to address Africa's domestic ivory markets. A continent-wide plan to crack down on the practice which is blamed for the deaths of up to 12,000 elephants a year will also be discussed.

Oct 9, 04: The number of tigers in Bangladesh's mangrove swamps has risen by more than 50 to 419 in the last decade, thanks to greater surveillance against poachers and reduced human interference with wildlife had helped the tiger population to recover, the Environment and Forest Minister said.
. . The Sundarbans, as the mangrove swamps are known, form a fragile ecosystem that is being ravaged by the pressures of population and the weak enforcement of environmental regulations.
. . About three million people live in the portion of the swamps that belong to Bangladesh, and 3.5 million more in the Indian portion in the neighboring state of West Bengal.

Oct 8, 04: A sweeping wildlife preserve in southwestern Arizona is among the nation's 10 most endangered refuges, due in large part to illegal drug and immigrant traffic and Border Patrol operations, a conservation group said.
. . The Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, home to the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, has been damaged by excessive human presence, according to a report by Defenders of Wildlife. The report calls for construction of a vehicle barrier on the southern edge of the refuge along the Mexican border.
. . Escalating industrial and corporate development close to and even inside refuges is the most pervasive threat, now that about three dozen refuges have more than 1,800 active oil and gas wells, the report said.
. . The United States has 540 wildlife refuges encompassing nearly 100 million acres.

Oct 6, 04: The bald eagle was on the brink of extinction in America's lower 48 states four decades ago, when its numbers stood at just 417 nesting pairs. Anti-poaching measures, a reduction in the use of lethal pesticides and the transfer of eagles from Canada have seen its numbers rise in the lower 48 to several thousand.
. . In Alaska and British Columbia there are believed to be close to 100,000 of the birds.
. . BirdLife International has classified about a quarter of the planet's roughly 305 known raptor species as threatened.
. . As top predators, birds of prey often suffer heavily from contamination as the poison works its way up the food chain.

Oct 7, 04: Many large mammals were wiped out in the last Ice Age but the Eurasian giant deer managed to survive, scientists said. Unlike saber-toothed tigers, mastodons and woolly mammoths, which are thought to have become extinct about 10,000 years ago, the giant deer lived on in the Ural mountains another 3,000 years, according to scientists at University College London.
. . They used radiocarbon data to show that giant Eurasian deer, which had antlers that weighed 40 kg (88 pounds) and spanned 3.25 meters (10').
. . "We still can't tell what actually killed off these beasts."

Oct 5, 04: A U.N. meeting on endangered species could help secure the survival one of humanity's closest living relatives, the orangutan, by saving its forest home from loggers, a leading CITES expert said. (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species)
. . Indonesia is proposing to impose restrictions on trade in all species of ramin, a hardwood in high demand for furniture production. "Orangutans do not feed on ramin but its removal greatly disturbs them. Loggers also build canals to float the logs out of the forest and these canals drain the peat swamps where the orangutans live."
. . Orangutans are only found today on the Southeast Asian islands of Borneo and Sumatra and Redmond said the most recent scientific estimates put their number at 45,000 -- higher than some but still alarming.
. . Redmond said the situation was critical in the face of habitat destruction, the trade in wild bushmeat and the ebola virus in Africa. Millions of chimpanzees were once found in Africa but now their fragmented populations are believed to number only between 100,000 and 200,000 between Senegal and Tanzania. Eastern lowland gorillas may only number a few thousand. A decade ago the western lowland gorilla was believed to number 100,000. Only a few hundred mountain gorillas are left in the lush volcanic hills straddling Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And there are believed to be only between 15,000 and 50,000 bonobos left, Redmond said.

Oct 5, 04: Kelly Rigg of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) said deep sea bottom trawling destroyed whole marine communities for the sake of catching a few fish which fetched premium prices in the world's top restaurants.
. . "We are advocating a moratorium on all bottom trawling on the high seas", she told a news conference. One 15 minute trawl can lay a deep seabed habitat to waste, destroying cold water corals which have taken millennia to grow."
. . Such was the indiscriminate nature of their methods that 95% of the material caught by the steel nets dragged along the seabed at depths of up to 2km was simply thrown overboard again, dead, destroyed or dying.
. . The scientists said only about 11 nations including Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland and Norway were the main culprits.

Oct 2, 04: North Pacific right whales may not be going extinct after all. Scientists have found twice as many right whales in the Bering Sea as previously spotted, giving them hope the rare whales are making a comeback.
. . Right whales in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were hunted nearly to extinction before coming under international protection in 1949. Many scientists considered the illegal harvest the death blow to the species. The number in Alaska waters probably is in the dozens. More than 100 are in waters off Russia and Japan.
. . There were very few sightings of Pacific right whales from 1900 into the mid-1990s. Scientists were puzzled by the rarity of whale sightings in Alaska until finding out in 2000 that the Soviets had illegally harvested several hundred in the Bering Sea and south of Kodiak in the mid-1960s.

Sept 29, 04: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is looking for volunteers with rifles to help rid the park's new 116,000 acres of thousands of feral sheep.
. . Mouflon sheep, native to Corsica and Sardinia in the Mediterranean, were brought to the ranch for hunting in the 1960s. Their population has multiplied over the years because they have no natural predators. "Their grazing inhibits the regeneration of Hawaii's endemic plants, which are defenseless against sheep, goats and other chompers and stompers", the park service said.

Sept 28, 04: Last year, fewer than 10 baby cheetahs were born in Europe, said Manfred Heidenreich. This is despite strong interest in breeding the endangered felines whose numbers in the wild are thought to have dropped to between 12,000 and 15,000.
. . One of the main obstacles to successful breeding is the habits of females, who are in heat for very short periods, solitary by nature and fastidious about who they will mate with. Nor is artificial insemination likely to work, as a female cheetah releases her eggs only on penetration. Popular as hunting animals and elegant pets with rulers ranging from Charlemagne to Akbar, the 16th century emperor of Mughal India, cheetahs are the only big cats that can be trusted not to turn on their owners if tamed, according to Heidenreich. "Taming a cheetah is very easy, they are different to other big cats, never aggressive ... In 5,000 years there have been no accidents reported between cheetahs and humans. "They never look for a fight because even if they get a very small injury on just one foot, they cannot run again and will die."

Sept 28, 04: The urchin season in midcoast and southern Maine now ends after only 10 fishing days. Not long ago, the urchin season was a derby of hundreds of ragtag boats racing out at first light from all points along the coast. A decade ago, the state had more than 2,700 urchin harvesters and a peak harvest of nearly 40 million pounds. Last year, the harvest had dwindled to just 6.4 million pounds.
. . For some time, scientists have said that years of aggressive harvesting has affected not only the urchin population, but also the ecology of the Gulf of Maine. Scientists say the removal of urchins has allowed for rapid growth of seaweeds, which the urchins previously ate. Scientists say the seaweed provides ideal habitat for crabs and other predators which feast on urchins and, in turn, are probably preventing urchins from replenishing themselves. The result may mean the underwater habitat has flipped to an "alternate stable state."
. . Recent management actions —-such as requiring divers to cull urchins on;y underwater, along with a decrease in the maximum legal size and increase in the minimum size — are designed to protect these urchin beds.

Sept 20, 04: Two-thirds of spectacular coral reefs ringing Thailand's top holiday island have been destroyed because of overzealous development. Officials said that large sections of the 14.4 square kilometers of colorful reefs off the tropical resort of Phuket in the Andaman Sea have been killed and less than one fifth remain in acceptable condition. Sludge and debris washed into the sea from building work across the island was the main factor responsible.
. . Phuket, famed for its white sands and seafood, is Thailand's biggest tourist draw. It attracted four million visitors last year. The government has set an ambitious target of 20 million annual arrivals by 2008.

Sept 15, 04: Sea turtles are spawning in record numbers along Mexico's Pacific coast this year, thanks largely to stepped up protection against poachers, the nation's environmental watchdog said. Some 27.2 million Olive Ridley turtle eggs are under guard in nests at main breeding beaches in Oaxaca state, the environmental protection agency Profepa said. Of those, about 9 million are likely to hatch, the highest numbers in 20 years. An important breeding ground, Mexico has 120 beaches where Olive Ridley turtles lay eggs.
. . Of the 27 million eggs under guard, perhaps 30,000 turtles will grow up to lay eggs of their own, Fueyo said. Adults are believed to return and lay eggs on the same beach where they were born. Mexican authorities are tracking the offspring.

Sept 15, 04: The majestic saker falcon is being pushed toward extinction because of soaring demand from wealthy Gulf Arabs who prize the animal for its hunting prowess, conservation group BirdLife International said. BirdLife said recent surveys show its population has fallen to around 4,000 pairs in 2003 from about 10,000 pairs in 1990 -- a decline of 60%. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have seen the sharpest drops with their populations down by around 90% over the period.
. . The saker falcon is the traditional species used by Gulf falconers when hunting the houbara bustard -- with devastating consequences for both species.
. . Conservationists say enforcement will not be easy. "The wealth of the buyers, the poverty of the trappers, and the sums involved down the chain of purchases, are so great that no legal instruments can really control events on the ground."
. . On the brighter side: "If the figures on the decline rates are accurate, then consumers are likely to turn to captive-bred birds, which can be supplied abundantly --and at a certain point, it will be cheaper to do this than pay for (rare) wild-caught ones."

Sept 15, 04: Malnutrition and starvation have drastically reduced moose numbers in northwest Wyoming, according to the author of a new study that debunks the belief among some that wolves are a leading cause of the decline.

Sept 10, 04: Brazil launched an emergency plan to save what remains of its vast tropical savanna, much of which has been cleared for farming in recent decades. Up to 70% of the savanna has already disappeared, but Brazil hopes to preserve remaining grasslands, forests and dense scrublands that are home to ancient communities and many species of wildlife.
. . The program is similar to one the Brazilian government has introduced for the Amazon. It will establish reserves, ecological corridors and ecotourism projects and hopes to promote sustainable use of savanna fruits, animals and medicinal plants. As with the Amazon, Brazil aims to prevent disintegration of rural communities and the loss of species that could become valuable medical cures or commodities. Activists say the savanna is disappearing faster than Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic rain forests because of uncontrolled development of roads, rivers and railroads.
. . The savanna is the only continuous agricultural area in the world that can be expanded to meet growing global food demands. Much of it has been cleared in recent decades into a vast grain-growing area. "Our savanna is turning into a desert and all this is being done for agribusiness profits."

Sept 9, 04: Aluminum could be an unusual savior for Atlantic salmon in prized Scandinavian and Russian fishing rivers because it kills a voracious parasite, researchers said. An unprecedented test in western Norway this summer showed that tiny concentrations of ground aluminum, dripped into the Batnsfjord river, apparently killed the parasites stuck on the salmon skin without hurting the fish or other riverlife.
. . Salmon have been almost wiped out in some of the about 40 rivers in Norway containing the parasite, which attaches itself to the fish with tiny hooks. It then eats through the skin, often bringing ulcers and infections that kill the fish. The parasite dies in salt water where salmon spend most of their lives.

Sept 9, 04: Thousands of croakers have washed ashore at beaches in recent days, the latest mass deaths of the popular sport and food fish. Researchers have not been able to isolate or define any suspected aquatic bug or explain why only Atlantic croakers have been struck along the Atlantic coast, south to Florida. A team of scientists from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Florida is digging for answers. The croakers are apparently suffocating, their gills left bleeding. In some cases, they have been seen swimming near the water's surface — odd behavior for a bottom-feeding fish.

Sept 9, 04: Booming global trade in rare forms of wildlife ranging from tropical fish and trees to African lizards is threatening many of them with extinction, conservation group WWF said.
. . The Swiss-based body urged governments at a global conference next month to agree to restrict trade in obscure species, which have a high market value as culinary delicacies, aphrodisiacs or pets.
. . But the WWF said such unlikely candidates as the humphead wrasse -- a bulbous-headed reef fish displayed live in tanks for diners in East Asia -- and the giant freshwater pig-nosed turtle, popular with pet-owners, also faced extinction.

Sept 9, 04: Conservationists concerned about the extinction of plants and animals may be overlooking the danger to thousands of other species that depend on the threatened ones. A team of researchers led by Lian Pin Koh of the National University of Singapore studied some 12,200 plants and animals considered threatened or endangered, and calculated that an additional 6,300 dependent insects, mites, fungi and other species could be considered endangered.
. . In many cases, species facing coextinction tend to be things like mites and lice. But some others are more likely to be missed by humans, such as a type of butterfly from Singapore that disappeared after the vines that had provided food for its larvae became extinct.
. . Overall, the researchers said, the loss of one species when a different one becomes extinct shows how interconnected the world is.
. . "It would be easy if there were always a one-to-one relationship with a host and its affiliate; however, not all parasites, for example, are restricted to a single host species."
. . Using their model, the group calculated that extinction of the 6,279 plants listed as threatened or endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources would also result in the loss of 4,672 species of beetles and 136 types of butterfly. Loss of the 1,194 threatened birds could also mean disappearance of 342 species of lice and 193 types of mites.
. . If the 114 endangered primates were to go extinct, they said, there could also be the loss of 20 types of nematodes, 12 lice and nine fungi to depend on the primates.

Aug 26, 04: People fishing for sport are doing far more damage to U.S. marine fish stocks than anyone thought, accounting for nearly a quarter of the catch from overfished species, researchers said. The researchers said recreational fishing takes 59% of the red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, 93% of red drum in the South Atlantic and 87% of bocaccio on the Pacific coast.
. . The anglers, who often head out to sea in boats operated by professional guides and equipped with sonar devices and global positioning systems to locate the fish. "Recreational anglers are operating below the radar screen of management. While the individual may take relatively few fish, we show that a few fish per person times millions of fishermen can have an enormous impact." The researchers call for more effective regulation of sport fishing.
. . Catch-and-release programs may not help, either. The report cites NMFS data that show 20% of released fish end up dying. And many individual fish are caught repeatedly. "A Goliath grouper near one of my study sites had 20 hooks in its mouth."

Aug 22, 04: Starting in the late 1990s, in the southern reaches of its near-shore commercial range, the big-clawed American lobster —-prized for its delicate, sweet flesh-- has been withering at an alarming rate from New York state to Massachusetts. Signs of decline have now crept as far north as the southern Gulf of Maine, the edge of the country's lobster breadbasket.
. . Finding an explanation has been a problem. Government biologists have said the lobster is overfished off the Northeast, but that doesn't account for Maine's extravagant abundance. Researchers in various localities have blamed the trouble on diseases, pollutants, and predators. But that fails to explain any larger pattern.
. . In recent months, a scientific consensus has begun to congeal. It centers on the familiar process of global warming. The theory holds that warming is already killing off the American lobster in its southern near-shore range, where it lives near its heat tolerance. In Maine, where it is well within its comfort zone, more warmth —-up to a point-— may be making it proliferate.
. . If temperatures rise too high, though, even Maine may ultimately turn less hospitable to lobster, some researchers say. Last year's state catch fell back almost 14% to 53.9 million pounds.
. . The more southern a state, the more its catch has dwindled, according to an Associated Press analysis of the latest complete state data. New York's take collapsed by 75% between 1999 and 2002. Moving progressively northward, the drops attenuate: Connecticut, 59%; Rhode Island, 53; Massachusetts, 14; New Hampshire, 3.
. . If overheating made the lobsters sick, excess acid should accumulate in their blood, like a human sprinter building up acid in his muscles. Dove's research team began testing lobsters for the telltale acid. In September '03, they found it. It was such striking evidence. Other scientists showed higher temperatures strain lobsters and may make them more susceptible to infection and pollutants. Maybe too much warmth is weakening their immunity to disease while making harmful microbes flourish, they reasoned. It could be luring warm-water predators into the Northeast and chasing cold-water ones from Maine. It could explain much of what lobstermen have encountered.
. . 62.3 million pounds in 2002 had set a record —-triple the typical catch during the 1980s. That's more than $200 million worth of lobster and by far the dominant share of the Northeast's most valuable fishery.

Aug 18, 04: Around 100 polar bears are shot every year in Greenland, according to North American non-profit organization Polar Bears International, which puts the global population of the potentially threatened species at 22,000-25,000.

Aug 17, 04: The number of butterflies fluttering around the Chicago area has dropped dramatically this summer, experts and enthusiasts say. Scientists can't pinpoint why the Red Admirals, Orange Sulphurs or Painted Ladies seem to have disappeared. Many experts said a hot and dry early spring, followed by a couple of rainy months and a cold summer probably have contributed to the problem. [expect worse, as the planet heats up more.]

Aug 17, 04: Toward Extinctions: Environment activists piled thousands of dead fish at the foot of Berlin's biggest tourist attraction, the Brandenburg Gate, in a demonstration against over-fishing and pollution in the North Sea.
. . Visitors to the famous neo-classical landmark were greeted by the smell of 11,000 rotting fish displayed on a 100 meter long table under banners bearing the slogan "Don't waste life!"
. . The dead fish on display --some 95% of the catch, including endangered species of octopus and sea urchin-- were those that commercial crews would normally throw back overboard for failing to meet traders' criteria.
. . "Some 700,000 tons of dead fish are thrown back into the sea each year --this waste problem will affect future generations if no one takes action", said a Greenpeace marine biologist.

Aug 14, 04: The European Eel, a snakelike fish with a mysterious life cycle, has managed to survive in rivers and on farms despite overfishing and a loss of natural habitat, thanks to artificial restocking with "glass eel" —-tiny eel fry.
. . But for reasons not entirely clear, the eel population is collapsing. For the 25,000 eel fishers and countless animals that live off them, the future is uncertain. The eel feeds cormorants, herons, otters and other European wildlife.
. . "The eel population fell to 10% of its former levels in the last half century", Dekker said. "Now it's going from 10% to 1%." Dekker, who has devoted his career to studying eel at the Netherlands' Institute for Fisheries Research, believes the decline in glass eel is due in part to over-harvesting. Asian farms are increasingly buying European glass eel to satisfy the Japanese market. But he said there also are problems elsewhere in the eel's life cycle, parts of which remain a mystery. Dekker predicted the species will survive, but that commercial fishing soon will be impossible.
. . Eel live in fresh water for 15 to 20 years, then, turning from yellowish green to silver, swim far out into the Atlantic Ocean and are believed to spawn somewhere in the vast kelp bed of the Sargasso Sea. Eel larvae then apparently ride the ocean currents until they arrive on European and American shores as glass eel.
. . Because the American Eel population is also in decline, some scientists believe the real problem may be changes in ocean currents due to global warming or a parasite or virus in the breeding zone.
. . After years of debate, the European Union plans action this autumn to protect the eel.

Aug 7, 04: About half the usual number of loggerhead turtles have nested between North Carolina and Florida this season, and scientists have no explanation for the drop. Other southeastern states where loggerheads primarily nest —-South Carolina, Georgia and Florida-— report similar declines. Loggerheads, the most common sea turtle, are listed as threatened.
. . Scientists have several theories about the decline. They range from changes in water temperature that would affect reproduction to climate fluctuations that influence food supply. Crowder suspects a variation in climate. "That would influence how much food there is for turtles —-crabs, shrimp, crustaceans, algal production."

Aug 5, 04: People must drop traditional fish dishes like cod, hake and haddock to save them from extinction and switch to more plentiful species like pollock, flounder and mullet, environmentalists said. The Marine Conservation Society (MCS), launching a new Web site, published two lists each of some 30 species of fish which it said were either in plentiful supply and well managed or in danger of being wiped out by overfishing. See www.fishonline.org
. . Among fish in the danger zone are Atlantic cod and halibut and wild salmon, as well as monkfish, plaice, swordfish and snapper. At the other end of the scale are Alaskan pollock, sea bream, cuttlefish, flounder, gurnard and red mullet.
. . The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization calculates that 70% of the world's fish stocks are now at the limit of sustainability or already over the edge.

July 23, 04: Scientists have shown that --within groups of reptiles and birds at least-- the bigger an animal's collection of DNA, the greater its risk of extinction. But the picture is more complicated in amphibians, fish and mammals. In mammals, genome size does not affect extinction risk. When the raw data is analysed for fish, reptiles and amphibians, threatened species do, on average, tend to have larger genomes.
. . Genome size had no effect at either the family or order level in amphibians and fish. But it still held true at lower "taxonomic levels" in reptiles and birds. In mammals, no significant effect was seen at either the higher or lower taxonomic levels.
. . A genome is the name given to an organism's collection of "life code". Genomes comprise long strands of DNA, into which genes are written.
. . Genomes vary in size between organisms. Human have about 30,000 genes, rice contains 60,000 genes, and some bacteria contain less than 1,000 genes.
. . Dr Vinogradov also proposes that for some animals, the cost of accumulating non-coding DNA in their genomes is probably balanced by other benefits. These may include having a low metabolic rate in ecosystems where energy is in short supply.

July 23, 04: Two dead whales have landed in Spain's Canary Islands, raising fears they may have been hurt by NATO military exercises off Morocco and that more could have died, officials said. The two whales arrived in the area within 24 hours and were dead for several days before their bodies drifted ashore. "There is a strong suspicion that their deaths were related to the NATO exercises that finished a few days ago."
. . Fourteen whales beached in the Canaries in 2002 during multinational military exercises there. It was one of several mass strandings of whales that scientists have linked to the use of naval sonar systems.

July 22, 04: The International Whaling Commission put the brakes on a plan that critics said might lead to lifting a ban on commercial whaling that has been in place for 18 years. Environmentalists welcomed the resolution, saying it ensures a transparent and fair process. The plan would include a five-year phase-in period when commercial whaling would only be allowed on coastal waters. It envisioned measures to ensure whalers do not exceed quotas. The commission passed a resolution urging nations to find more humane methods for killing whales —-a victory for anti-whalers in their battle against the grenade-tipped harpoons used to kill whales.

July 19, 04: The craving for sashimi in Japan and the world beyond has taken its toll, but that is only part of it. Marine biologists say not only bluefin tuna but also other fish stocks are plummeting across the world, upsetting delicate natural food chains. Some fear irreversible damage has already been done.
. . Even worse, international law experts add, little is being done to stop it. Despite all the evidence, high-tech fleets probe the last deepwater refuges, hardly troubled by authorities. Legal quotas are too high, specialists say, and in any case are often pointless because too many crews lie about their catch.
. . Carl Safina, founder of the conservationist Blue Ocean Institute on Long Island in New York: For decades, he said, the world has moved blindly toward a precipice. "We have been confronted with signs and warnings and a clear view of the danger. And now we have fallen off. We may deserve it, but our children do not."
. . With a single bluefin worth as much as $150,000 on the Tokyo market, Italian and Russian organized crime is now involved, U.N. experts say.
. . University of British Columbia researchers sounded the alarm in 2001, reporting that some fish populations had fallen by as much as 85%. They said China drastically under-reported its catch.
. . Tuna is a particular problem. Such common varieties as skipjack, found canned in supermarkets, fetch lower prices and are not in immediate danger. But prized bluefins are hunted down. "It's warfare out there, complete with military technology."
. . Some experts put hope in tuna ranches, which have grown fast since 1997. These are not breeding centers, as are common for salmon, but rather holding pens for wild tuna that are caught but not landed. At 30 Mediterranean sites, captured tuna are held in net corrals for five to 20 months until they fatten.

July 12, 04: CHASE LAKE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, N.D. - The air here this time of year usually is filled with the grunts and squawks of thousands of white pelicans and their chicks. The giant birds have made the refuge their home for at least 100 years. Now their nesting grounds are quiet. The pelicans are gone —-and no one knows why. The number of pelicans had tripled at the refuge in the past 30 years. A record 35,466 breeding pelicans and 17,733 nests were tallied in 2000.
. . The nearly 28,000 birds that showed up to nest here in early April took off in late May and early June, leaving their chicks and eggs behind. Normally, the pelicans stay at the refuge through September, raising their young and feasting on crawfish, small fish and salamanders from small ponds known as "prairie potholes."
. . Researchers had found botulism in two of the dead pelicans from the reserve, Converse said. None of the pelicans had tested positive for West Nile or other viruses.
. . The white pelican is one of the largest birds in North America, measuring six feet from bill to tail. They weigh up to 20 pounds and have a wingspan of nearly 10 feet. While awkward on land, white pelicans are acrobats in the air.

July 12, 04: The duck population in the United States and Canada dropped 11% from a year ago as drought dried up breeding grounds, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Canadian Wildlife Service.

July 6, 04: The United Nations) urged Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Tuesday to protect vital ape habitats on their borders after a huge swathe of forest was cut down on the Congolese side. Six square miles of mountain gorilla habitat had been cleared in the Congo part of Virunga National Park, threatening one of the planet's rarest and most magnificent wild animals.
. . There are only about 700 mountain gorillas left in the world in the lush mountains straddling Rwanda, Uganda and the anarchic Congo, and any loss of remaining habitat could push one of humanity's closest relatives to extinction.
. . In all of Virunga, there is only about 164 square miles of suitable gorilla habitat and so the loss of even six square miles is huge. "Evidence from satellite, aerial and ground surveys indicates that habitat destruction has occurred in some areas at a rate of up to two sq km (0.77 sq miles) a day."

July 4, 04: Rampant deforestation in the Great Lakes region of Africa is threatening the survival of hundreds of mountain gorillas, the global environmental group WWF warned. The group said the damage was being done in Virunga National Park, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Since April, there has been a large influx of labourers from the DRC and Uganda who have begun clearing large swathes of the forest --up to 1500 hectares-- to create agricultural and grazing areas.
. . "Several thousand people moved in to the area to farm illegally in Virunga, with support from local influential individuals who sold plots of land within the park", the group said. The park is home to more than one half of the approximately 700 surviving mountain gorillas, currently one of the most endangered species in the world.

June 26, 04: Fertility techniques that have enabled millions of couples to have children are helping scientists to save endangered species. From killer whales and giant pandas to cheetahs and black-footed ferrets, assisted reproductive technology (ART) has allowed scientists to breed wild animals in captivity and learn more about how they reproduce.
. . "We have used ART to understand the reproductive biology of cheetahs, and have learned, for example, that they produce more than 70% abnormally shaped sperm per ejaculate."
. . "In the case of the black-footed ferret, which used to range across America's Great Plain and which was reduced to only 18 individuals, we have used AI to produce offspring that have been used for reintroduction of this species back into nature."

June 22, 04: Despite nearly two decades of conservation efforts, the world's biggest sea turtle species continues to disappear from Mexican waters and is sliding toward extinction worldwide, federal officials said. The leatherback can grow 6-8 feet long and weigh between 1,200 and 1,500 pounds. In Mexico, an adult population of 115,000 in 1982 dwindled to between 20,000 and 30,000 by 1996.
. . Laws designed to protect sea turtles in Mexico were first approved in 1988 and were tightened last year. Those caught trafficking turtles now can face up to nine years in prison. During 139 sting operations in 2003, federal agents confiscated 231,975 turtle eggs and 101 products made using turtles and arrested 59 people.
. . Mammoth nets used for commercial fishing —-especially aboard those vessels trolling Mexican waters for shrimp and sharks-— often inadvertently trap turtles, further threatening their fragile populations.

June 22, 04: Throughout the world, frogs are dying en masse, a phenomenon that concerns scientists because the extremely sensitive amphibians are among the first species to react to wider environmental problems. Global warming, increased solar radiation, windblown pesticides, pollution and diseases all are being explored as possible reasons why the populations are croaking.
. . One major cause: They're being eaten by trout air-dropped into pristine mountain lakes across the West and in areas as remote as the Andes in South America, on every continent except Antarctica. It's another example that interfering with nature brings unforeseen consequences.
. . The good news is, once the fish are removed, Vredenburg found frogs repopulated the lakes to normal levels within three years. The National Park Service is removing fish from 11 high altitude Sierra lakes to see if frogs will return.

June 18, 04: Koalas, an iconic symbol of Australia, face extinction as rapid urbanization along the eastern seaboard destroys their fragile habitat, environmental activists have warned. The Australian Koala Foundation has written to the government urging it to declare the koala a vulnerable species after a survey of 1,000 koala habitats found 30% no longer had a koala in them and 60% had suffered widespread destruction.
. . There are about 100,000 koalas in Australia, down from an estimated seven to 10 million at the time of white settlement in 1788. In the 1920s, three million koalas were shot for their fur.

June 18, 04: A new jumbo class of fishing boat used by mainly Taiwanese operators is threatening the long-term future of the world's richest tuna stocks in the Pacific Ocean, experts say.

June 8, 04: Humanity's closest relative, the chimpanzee, could be extinct in around 50 years because it is hunted for meat and threatened by deforestation and disease, researchers said. Only 8,000 remain of the most vulnerable chimpanzee subspecies, the Pan troglodytes vellerosus, which is found predominantly in Nigeria, and it could be extinct in two decades.
. . They predict that the vellerosus subspecies will become extinct in the next 17-23 years. The other three chimpanzee subspecies face slightly better odds, but all are expected to disappear in 41-53 years, at current rates of decline.
. . "The numbers at the sanctuaries don't lie. You don't get the kind of steady stream of orphaned chimpanzees we're seeing without a devastating drop in the wild population", said Rosen.
. . One recent UN study said less than 10% of the forest home of Africa's great apes will be left relatively undisturbed by 2030 if road building, construction of mining camps and other infrastructure developments continue at current levels.

June 4, 04: Scientists in Seattle have performed the first artificial insemination attempt on the world's smallest and perhaps most threatened species of bear, the Malayan sun bear. "Most biologists think the sun bear is the species of bear most likely to go extinct."

May, 04: Scientists hope about 500 half-inch long caterpillars released in two national parks will lead to a rebound in the population of the Miami blue butterfly, which was once thought to be extinct in Florida. The tiny insect, barely the size of a quarter, once ranged from Key West to Orlando.
. . "It seems like an innocuous little butterfly. It has some extraordinary features of its life history that may play a bigger role in the ecosystem than we realize." Hurricane Andrew was believed to have swept away the last colonies from a few islands in Biscayne Bay in 1992.

May 26, 04: Most dinosaurs were incinerated in a matter of hours after an asteroid impact 65 million years ago kicked up a global rain of broiling debris, according to a new study. The survivors burrowed underground or were protected from the firestorm by swamps or oceans, says the study leader. Robertson and his colleagues argue that superheated stuff was blasted from the crater into a suborbital path around Earth, generating a "heat pulse" upon re-entry. "The kinetic energy of the ejected matter would have dissipated as heat in the upper atmosphere during re-entry, enough heat to make the normally blue sky turn red-hot for hours", Robertson said. "All unprotected creatures were "baked by the equivalent of a global oven set on broil."

May 26, 04: Australians have spent a great deal of time devising ways to protect themselves from sharks, but the government unveiled a major plan aimed at saving sharks from Australians. The campaign will notably involve better monitoring of shark populations and cooperation with neighboring countries in keeping the shark catch at sustainable levels.
. . "It is estimated a staggering 50,000 sharks are caught on Australian longlines every year, when they are supposed to be catching tuna and billfish." They take about 8,500 tons of shark a year, a catch which together with the banned practice of "finning" --removing a shark's fin and then leaving the fish to drown in the water-- has contributed to a sharp fall in shark numbers in recent years. The practice is driven by demand from the lucrative Chinese market, where shark fin is considered a delicacy.

May 20, 04: Six men found guilty of poaching marine turtles in Seychelles were sentenced to two years in jail as part of a drive to crack down on the illegal trade, police said. The Indian Ocean archipelago hosts globally important populations of marine turtles, with four of the world's eight species found in the region. They were sentenced to two years in jail --the maximum penalty for poaching offences.

May 20, 04: The northern white rhino, one of the world's most endangered animals, could be extinct in the wild within months unless poaching by Sudanese rebels stops, conservationists said Thursday as they launched an urgent appeal for funds.
. . The world's 25 or so remaining wild white rhinos all live in the Garamba National Park, a United Nations World Heritage Site on the northern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo with Sudan. Poaching had increased as Sudanese rebels said to be from the area of conflict around Darfur hunt down the rhinos for their valuable horns and tusks.

May 15, 04: A recently discovered layer of glassy fragments could only have been made by a meteor slamming into Earth and helps prove such an impact nearly wiped out life on the planet 250 million years ago, scientists said --much as an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, forming what is now the Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. They outlined what they believe is an ancient crater left by the impact off the coast of what is now Australia. "What we found is a melt sheet which is defining the top of this very large feature out in the ocean." "For years, we've [observed] evidence that a meteor or comet hit the Southern Hemisphere 251 million years ago, and this structure matches everything we've been expecting.
. . During the Permian extinction, 90% of life in the seas and up to 70% of the species on land died off very quickly. No one has been able to show what caused it.
. . In 2001, Poreda and Becker found specific isotopes, or varieties, of helium and argon trapped inside a 250 million-year-old layer of carbon shells called buckyballs, which could only have come from space. They have also found larger pieces of what they believe could be the meteorite scattered in Antarctica. They include "shocked" quartz that looks like it was splattered by a powerful force --something called impact breccia.
. . Now they describe a 125-mile- wide crater called Bedout off the northwestern coast of Australia. Bedout and Chicxulub look to be about the same size.

May 5, 04: Scientists, including acclaimed wildlife biologist Jane Goodall, joined environmental groups in petitioning the government to add 225 plants and animals to the endangered species list. The species are not new to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; four-fifths have been on the agency's waiting list for a decade. Some have been waiting since 1975. The average is 17 years.
. . "Wildlife is facing serious threats almost everywhere", Goodall said. She accused the Bush administration of seeking to undermine the Endangered Species Act.
. . Kenyan environmentalist Richard Leakey said mankind's closest animal relatives --the Great Apes-- are facing extinction and need urgent action to ensure their survival. Leakey said the combined threat from human population expansion, poaching for bushmeat and uncontrolled logging was such that gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans should even have large tracts of land fenced off for their safety. Experience showed in Kenya, where Leakey was head of the Wildlife Service from 1989 to 1994, that fencing an area dramatically reduced the population pressure and poaching. He said there were some successes including Rwanda, but they were vastly outnumbered by the bad-news stories.
. . The United Nations estimates there are some 450,000 Great Apes left in the world, and conservationists fear they could become extinct within 10 to 15 years if no action is taken.

Apr 29, 04: Years of civil strife in eastern Congo have decimated the habitat of the eastern lowland gorilla, cutting the apes' population by more than 70% in the past decade, experts said. [actually, that's 7 times worse than mere decimation, which is 10%) With the number of apes estimated to have dropped to 5,000 —-down from about 17,000 in 1994-— a U.S.-funded program is trying to stem the habitat loss by creating community nature reserves.
. . Military camps hunted for food in the forests. The spread of small-scale mining for gold, precious stones and columbine tantalite, a mineral used to make cell phones and other high-tech gadgets, compounded the problem. The clearing of land for farms and pastures also took a toll.

Apr 21, 04: An asteroid may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago not simply by changing the world's climate and causing years of dark skies, but also by causing too many of them to be born male, U.S. and British researchers said.
. . If dinosaurs were like modern-day reptiles such as crocodiles, they change sex based on temperature, David Miller of the University of Leeds in Britain and colleagues noted. And even a small skewing of populations toward males would have led to eventual extinction.
. . In mammals, if a baby gets an X and a Y chromosome, it will be male; and if it gets two X chromosomes it will be female, with a few very rare exceptions. Similar mechanisms work for birds, snakes and some reptiles such as lizards. But in crocodilians, turtles and some fish, the temperature at which eggs are incubated can affect the sex of the developing babies.
. . But crocodiles and turtles had already evolved at the time of the great extinction 65 million years ago. How did they survive? "These animals live at the intersection of aquatic and terrestrial environments, in estuarine waters and river beds, which might have afforded some protection against the more extreme effects of environmental change, hence giving them more time to adapt", the researchers wrote.

Apr 23, 04: Nearly half of the 114 species that have become extinct in the first 20 years of the federal Endangered Species Act were in Hawaii. The report by the Center for Biological Diversity says the federal government's failure to protect species "has been spectacular" and accuses the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of knowingly delaying listings "to avoid political controversy even when it knew the likely result would be the extinction of the species." A statement from the Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency "denies the inflammatory claim".

Apr 12, 04: Tasmanian devils on Australia's southern island state of Tasmania, the only place where these carnivorous marsupials are found in the wild, are being wiped out, with grossly disfigured animals dying within months of contracting a disease. Early signs of Devil Facial Tumor Disease, which scientists say could be a form of retrovirus, include small lesions and lumps. Animals appear to die from starvation and the breakdown of bodily functions within three to five months. Researchers are monitoring the spread of the disease while scientists work to identify its causes, diagnosing it early so as to quarantine populations.
. . Devil numbers have crashed and recovered in the past, rebounding to numbers estimated at around 150,000 by the early 1990s and raising some hopes that the new problem may be another turn in a natural population control cycle.
. . The devil's decline opens the door for the spread of European red foxes into Tasmania, which could threaten a prolific range of less well-known wildlife that has thrived in relative seclusion. Foxes have caused environmental destruction on the Australian mainland since their introduction for hunting in the 1850s. It is believed devils have acted as a buffer, stopping them taking hold in Tasmania. "That is what makes this disease episode far more alarming than it would otherwise be." Farmers say they prefer the devil, which has a role cleaning up the carcasses of dead animals, to the more destructive fox.

Apr 7, 04: More than 300 of the world's rarest and most esoteric creatures, including flying foxes in the Comoros Islands and yellow-eared parrots in the Colombian Andes, are completely unprotected, scientists said. All could disappear in future decades because global efforts to protect them are inadequate, the scientists believe.
. . Although 11.5% of the Earth's surface is a protected zone, conservationists have discovered huge gaps in coverage that could lead to the extinction of unique species. Nearly 150 threatened mammal species, 411 types of amphibians, 232 bird species and 12 turtle and tortoise species live in unprotected areas.

Apr 5, 04: The state Department of Fish and Wildlife has added Puget Sound's orcas to the state's endangered species list.

Mar 30, 04: The population of Africa's eastern lowland gorilla has slumped by more than 70% in the past decade, from 17,000 animals in 1994 to fewer than 5,000 today, a conservation group said. Virtually all of the world's population of this highly endangered species lives in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a region ravaged by years of war, over-hunting, mining and pressures from increasing human populations.
. . "The staggering and almost immediate disappearance of the eastern lowland gorilla underscores the alarming decline of an entire ecosystem", Conservation International said. Other species in the region, including the chimpanzee, forest elephant, Nile crocodile, Congo peacock, Congo bay owl, okapi and leopard "are also experiencing severe declines."
. . This has been a protected zone since 1938, but habitat loss and poaching have long made it only a "paper park".

Mar 28, 04: Hawaii could become the first state to stake a legal claim to hundreds of potentially valuable animal and plant products discovered on state lands, under a bill being considered by the state Legislature.
. . Hawaii is a good place to establish a system to protect government property rights to its plants and animals, supporters of the bill say. Of more than 22,000 known species on the islands, 8,850 are found only in Hawaii.
. . Hawaii follows last year's lead by China, Brazil, India and nine other of the world's most biodiverse countries, who signed an alliance to fight "biopiracy" and press for rules protecting their people's rights to genetic resources found on their land. Three years ago, Yellowstone National Park began collecting royalties on the commercial results of scientific research in the park.

September, 2003: Lion populations have fallen by almost 90% in the past 20 years, leaving the animal close to extinction in Africa, a wildlife expert has warned. There are now only 23,000 left, compared to an estimated 200,000 two decades ago.

Mar 24, 04: An unidentified flesh-eating disease is killing staghorn coral in the Florida Keys. Since the 1970s, 80 to 90% of the island chain's reef tract has died, according to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Pollution, algae blooms, sediment and a host of diseases have been blamed, among them coral bleaching, black-band and white-band disease and white plague. But this coral-tissue-eating disease appears to be a newcomer.
. . The scientists determined that the disease could be spread by the small coral snail, which eats coral, but do not yet know whether humans can transmit it too.

An estimated 60% of right whales become entangled in fishing lines.

Mar 22, 04: A lichen native to the Rockies has been blamed for the deaths of at least 300 elk in southern Wyoming, a mystery that had baffled wildlife scientists and cost the state thousands of dollars, the state said. The ground- dwelling lichen, known as Parmelia molliuscula, produces an acid that may break down muscle tissue. Elk native to the area weren't affected by the acid, but those killed in the die-off apparently had moved in from Colorado and may have lacked microorganisms needed to neutralize the acid.
. . The die-off killed up to 5% of the Sierra Madre herd's breeding females.

Mar 18, 04: Environmentalist groups seeking a suspension in the international trade in beluga caviar from four Caspian Sea countries on Friday voiced alarm over a U.N. decision to allow them to carry on sturgeon fishing this spring.
. . A U.N. spokesman said an extension had been granted until mid-June following closed-door talks in Geneva. But the spring season usually accounts for 70 to 80 percent of the annual catch. The global caviar market has placed a premium on Caspian sturgeon, prompting over- fishing and illegal trade that have driven the ancient species to the brink of extinction, according to the groups: the Natural Resources Defense Council, Seaweb, and the University of Miami's Pew Institute for Ocean Science.
. . Environmentalists estimate Caspian Sea sturgeon stocks have plunged about 90% since the late 1970s.

March, 04: A new report by BirdLife International says more than 1,000 of the world's birds face extinction and that agricultural expansion in Africa and unsustainable forestry in the tropics pose grave threats. The report, "State of the World's Birds 2004", brings together for the first time in one document the existing research about the status and distribution of the world's birds.

. . Some of its key findings include:
. . - One in eight of the world's birds -- or 1,211 species in total -- faces extinction.
. . - Over 7,500 sites in nearly 170 countries have been identified as important bird areas.
. . - Agricultural expansion and intensification threaten 50% of important bird areas in Africa.
. . - 64% of globally threatened birds, most of them in the tropics, are threatened by unsustainable forestry.
. . - Alien invasive species threaten 67% of the endangered species on oceanic islands.
. . - In total, 129 bird species have been classified as extinct since 1500. "State of the world's birds presents firm evidence that we are losing birds and other biodiversity at an alarming and ever increasing rate."

Mar 18, 04: Fears that the earth is undergoing a mass species wipe-out similar to that which destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago gained new ground with the publication of two British studies. In a series of population surveys that combed virtually every square yard of England, Scotland and Wales over 40 years, more than 20,000 volunteers counted each bird, butterfly and native plant they could find. They found that the rate of loss of insect and plant species across Britain was running at several times what would be considered normal, and had been doing so for a long time.
. . "The world is experiencing a new mass extinction." Planet earth has already undergone five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years. "The current rates of extinction over recent centuries are a couple of hundred times greater than normal."
. . "If it wasn't for global warming, the species loss would have been even greater." "As far as we an tell this one is caused by one animal organism -- man."

Mar 17, 04: Sea turtles in the Northern Mariana Islands are facing extinction as locals continue to kill and eat them. The population of sea turtles here is very low. The estimate is less than 200. On top of that, sea turtles need to be at least 20 years old to become sexually mature. Many of these sea turtles that are being caught right now are just juveniles.

Mar 16, 04: The Sumatran tiger is threatened with extinction unless the Indonesian government takes steps to stop poaching and the "rampant" destruction of the animal's natural habitat, the rainforest, environmental groups warned. Only an estimated 400 to 500 remain in the wild on Sumatra, one of Indonesia's biggest islands. Two other species of tiger in Indonesia, the Bali tiger and Javanese tiger, are already extinct, disappearing in the 1940s and 1980s respectively.

Mar 3, 04: A common fungus could blanch dandelions out of existence by robbing the pesky weeds of the green-colored chlorophyll they need to live, Canadian researchers said. The fungus could replace some chemical herbicides, which have been banned because of environmental and health concerns in a growing number of cities. The naturally occurring fungus, called Phoma macrostoma, can be spread on soil to prevent weeds from growing, without harming grass. The fungi was isolated from sickly Canada thistles across the country.

Mar 3, 04: The head of India's premier tiger sanctuary has accused "politically influential hotel owners" of endangering the park's future and warns there will be no big cats left to see in five years unless the number of visitors are controlled. The park sprawls over a 1,334- square-kilometer area but the core, where most animals dwell, spans 300 square kilometers. It contains not only the 40 tigers but 37 other types of mammals such as leopards, bears and antelopes and more than a dozen reptile species, including crocodiles and pythons. There are also some 315 bird varieties.

Feb 17, 04: Private environmental groups estimate that at most 1,500 dolphins now live in India's rivers, down from 5,000 in the mid-1990s and a fraction of the figure a century ago. India banned the poaching of dolphins in 1972, but the mammals continue to be killed for their meat and oil, which is used in traditional medicine, and by fishermen using nets. Pollution has also threatened their habitat.

Feb 16, 04: Indonesia pledged to help critically endangered leatherback turtles by creating a marine protected area for a Papua nesting beach that attracts a quarter of the remaining population in the Pacific.
. . An official with the Ministry of Forestry said Indonesian turtle conservation measures to date included halting Bali island's commercial trade in turtle products in 2000 and the seizure of more than 15 turtle boats in recent years.

Feb 9, 04: More money and urgent action are needed to combat the threats faced by protected forests around the world, according to a major study released by the WWF conservation group. Described as "the largest ever global assessment of the management of forest protected areas", the survey was presented on the sidelines of a conference of parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in the Malaysian capital.
. . It shows that "poaching, agricultural encroachment, illegal logging and over-harvesting of non-timber products are the main threats" to the protected forests. It warns that poor governance and law enforcement, which results in sanctions not being applied, "saps the motivation of rangers and encourages illegal acts by criminal groups such as those involved in illegal trade of rare species".
. . A lack of funding also leaves many forests vulnerable, with Europe spending on average eight times more per protected area than Latin America, where staff look after areas 40 times larger.

Feb 9, 04: Tens of thousands of animals and plants are being driven to extinction as countries fail to meet conservation targets set more than a decade ago, U.N. officials said at a major conference on biodiversity.
. . The EU released figures showing 52% of freshwater fish, 42% of mammals and 15% of birds are threatened across the European continent.
. . Award-winning Canadian scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki told the opening session there was a need to rein in human technology and stop "bludgeoning nature into submission". "Nothing has really happened since Rio", he told reporters later. "They are acting as if we've got all the time in the world. There is no sense of urgency that we are in a crisis. "Oceans are collapsing, the atmosphere is building up carbon dioxide, species are vanishing. This is an absolute crisis and I don't sense that here."

Feb 5, 04: The Interior Department said the survival of sea otters in southwest Alaska is threatened and proposed adding them to the government's endangered species list. "No one is certain yet what is causing this, but listing this population as 'threatened' under the Endangered Species Act will be an important step in discovering the reasons and reversing the decline", Interior Secretary Gale Norton said.
. . Threatened species are considered likely to become endangered; endangered species are thought to be in jeopardy of extinction. Commercial hunting from the mid- 1700s to the early 1900s drove sea otters to near- extinction in southwest Alaska. They began recovering after commercial harvests were banned under a 1911 international treaty.
. . By the mid-1980s, about 55,000 to 74,000 sea otters inhabited southwest Alaska —-almost half the world's total. Since then, aerial surveys suggest the population has fallen again by at least 55%, and possibly as much as 67%, and that the trend is continuing.

Feb 4, 04: The population of oceanic whitetip shark, once among the world's most common tropical sharks, has plummeted by 99% since the 1950s and the species is nearly extinct in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists reported. The study blamed overfishing and called for new restrictions, but federal fisheries officials said the study was flawed and further assessments are needed.

Jan 30, 04: Eighteen African antelopes bred in North America have arrived in Kenya in an effort to save the species from extinction in its native habitat, where fewer than 100 survive, a United Nations agency said.
. . The shipment of the elegant mountain bongos from a breeding program in U.S. and Canadian zoos, home to some 400 bongos, was the first time large African mammals bred overseas have been repatriated to the continent. The 18 are the first batch of 60 that will be taken to Kenya by 2006 in a project backed by the U.N. Development Program and several conservation organizations.
. . The average male bongo weighs about 250 kg (550 lbs) and its horns can grow to a length of one meter.
. . WWF, an international conservation group, says that by the year 2025 the earth could lose as many as one fifth of all species known to exist today due to human activity.

Jan 25, 04: Deforestation is threatening the monarch butterflies' winter refuge despite a crackdown on illegal logging, a U.S. researcher said. In an effort to protect hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies that migrate to Mexico from the United States and Canada each fall, authorities closed down illegal sawmills and arrested 28 people in November.
. . "The Mexican law enforcement effort to protect these butterflies is not effective", said Lincoln Brower, considered a leading expert on the butterfly. The monarch butterflies return each year to carpet fir trees in Michoacan and neighboring Mexico state, an aesthetic and scientific wonder that attracts about 200,000 visitors annually --a seasonal economic boon to the landowners.
. . Brower said when he flew over legally protected butterfly areas this month, he saw working logging trucks, suggesting that illegal timbering continues. He said the rate of deforestation is more rapid than ever and the logging appears to be more brazen.

Jan 21, 04: European states agreed on proposals aimed at saving hundreds of species from extinction --covering fish farming, shipping and protecting the high seas-- but environmentalists said they were not enough. Environment ministry officials from Europe, Russia and several central Asian countries met in Madrid to fix a common proposal to take to an annual U.N. conference on biodiversity in Malaysia next month.
. . Aiming to halt a global decline in biodiversity by 2010, they agreed to develop protected natural areas, including parts of the high seas, which fall outside national jurisdictions. They agreed to clean up sea shipping --a sore point in Spain just over a year after a wrecked tanker coated its beaches in oil-- and fish farms. The network of protected areas --which the concluding document said was an important part of "adapting to climate change and mitigating its effects"-- should be established by 2010 on land and 2012 at sea.
. . Scientists say the rate at which species are dying out may be thousands of times higher than it would be without man's intervention.

Jan 19, 04: One of the world's rarest species of mammal, the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Highlands of central Africa, has seen a surprising upturn in numbers, conservationists revealed. There are 380 gorillas today, a 17-percent rise since the last extensive estimate, carried out in 1989, they said.
. . The gorillas' home straddles Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (news - web sites) (DRC), a region that was gripped by warfare for most of the 1990s, unleashing floods of refugees who encroached on the animals' habitat.

Jan 20, 04: Laws barring the killing of protected sea turtles and the sale of their eggs have been as effective as anti-drug trafficking programs: driving the practice underground but failing to stop it. The latest threat is a horseback-riding gang whose members wield Kalashnikov rifles to drive away police and unarmed environmental activists.
. . Centuries-old traditions make the turtles, and especially their eggs, highly prized in Mexico, where officials have spent decades trying to protect the sea creatures. One member of the local team showed reporters hundreds of shells of turtles killed by a blow to the head. "It's a very cruel death", Mario Espinoza Amaro said. "They cry, shriek like the squawking of birds and bleed to death."
. . During a campaign against turtle smugglers in the late 1990s, the environmental prosecutor's office repeatedly announced interceptions of shipments containing tens of thousands of contraband turtle eggs.

Jan 12, 04: "Borneo and Sumatra, home to the world's last orangutans, have lost a staggering 91% of their populations over the past 100 years", WWF-UK said. (World Wildlife Fund) "There are now fewer than 30,000 orangutans left and it is likely that they will become extinct in the wild in as little as 20 years' time if this decline continues." Almost 80% of the orangutans' forest habitat in Malaysia and Indonesia has been destroyed by commercial logging and clearance for oil-palm plantations.

Jan 7, 04: Over one million species of plants and animals - -a quarter of all life on land-- could becoome extinct in just decades due to man-made climate change, scientists say. Thomas's team studied six regions rich in biodiversity, representing 20% of the planet's land area, and made projections for the survival of 1,103 species between 1990 and 2050, using elaborate computer models.
. . Three scenarios for expected climate change were used in the computer models --a minimum expected rise between 0.8 and 1.7 degrees Celsius per year until 2050; a mid-range scenario with temperature increases of 1.8 -2.0 degrees; and the maximum rise, when the Earth's average climes rise by over 2.0 degrees per year.
. . The six regions studied by the scientists were Australia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Europe, Mexico and South Africa. Australia, one of the regions studied, would lose over half of its more than 400 butterfly species by 2050. Brazil's Cerrado area, a savannah-type area with a wealth of plant and animal species, could lose between 39 and 48 percent of its flora --thousands of plants whose medical or scientific benefits will never be known.
. . "The figure of one million may be an underestimate", since it only counts the extinction of species due to climate change, without taking into account a "ripple effect" that could also kill off inter-dependent plants and animals.
. . The UN's Toepfer called the study an alarm which "underlines again to the world the importance of bringing into force the Kyoto Protocol (news)", the international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions which the United States has refused to adhere to.
. . Kyoto, which would rein in emissions of carbon dioxide, needs countries representing emissions of 55 percent of carbon dioxide to enter into force. It has so far mustered 44% and cannot reach 55 without Russia's 17%, after the United States pulled out its 36% share in 2001, arguing it was too expensive and wrongly excluded poor nations. Moscow says it is undecided.

Jan 7, 04: The second-largest extinction in the Earth's history, the killing of two-thirds of all species, may have been caused by ultraviolet radiation from the sun after gamma rays destroyed the Earth's ozone layer.
. . Astronomers are proposing that a supernova exploded within 10,000 light years of the Earth, destroying the chemistry of the atmosphere and allowing the sun's ultraviolet rays to cook fragile, unprotected life forms.
. . All this happened some 440 million years ago and led to what is known as the Ordovician extinction, the second most severe of the planet's five great periods of extinction.
. . "We think there is very good circumstantial evidence for a gamma ray burst." Fossil records for the Ordovician extinction show an abrupt disappearance of two- thirds of all species on the planet. Those records also show that an ice age that lasted more than a half million years started during the same period.
. . Melott said a gamma ray burst would explain both phenomena. He said a gamma ray beam striking the Earth would break up molecules in the stratosphere, causing the formation of nitrous oxide and other chemicals that would destroy the ozone layer and shroud the planet in a brown smog. "The sky would get brown, but there would be intense ultraviolet radiation from the sun striking the surface." he said. The radiation would be at least 50 times above normal, powerful enough to killed exposed life.
. . In a second effect, the brown smog would cause the Earth to cool, triggering an ice age, Melott said.

The five great extinctions in history:

Ordovician extinction, 440 million years ago.

Devonian, 360 million years ago, killed 60% of all species.

Permian-Triassic, 250 million years ago, killed 90 percent of all life.

Late Triassic, 220 million years ago, killed half of all species.

Cretacious-Tertiary, 65 million years ago, destroyed the dinosaurs and half of all other species.

Nov 17, 03: A cascading decline in seal, sea lion and sea otter populations in the North Pacific may have been triggered by industrial whaling after World War II that forced killer whales to look for new sources of food, a group of scientists suggests.

Nov 16, 03: Disease has wiped out the entire population of rare Sumatran rhinoceroses at a captive breeding program in Malaysia, one of the species' few remaining havens.
. . The Sumatran is the smallest of the world's five types of rhinos and among the rarest of large mammals. Less than 300 are believed to be living in the wild, mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia, and are being threatened by poachers and loss of habitat. A pneumonia-like bacterial infection is suspected.

Nov 13, 03: Climate change, rather than hunting, may have triggered the extinction of Alaska's native horses about 12,500 years ago, researchers said. Some think hunting contributed to their disappearance, but R. Dale Guthrie, of the University of Alaska, said climate change and a shift in vegetation from grasslands to tundra was probably to blame.
. . "Horses underwent a rapid decline in body size before extinction and I propose that the size decline and subsequent regional extinction...are best attributed to a coincident climate/vegetation shift", he said.

Oct 24, 03: A team of biologists are on Maui this week to capture what they believe are the last three po'ouli birds in the world, and hope to breed them in captivity. The po'ouli may be the rarest birds on Earth. The small, stocky brown bird has a partial black face described as a bandit's mask. It was first identified in 1973 in the upper rain forest of East Maui. The population then was estimated at 200.

Oct 23, 03: An unprecedented census of life in the world's oceans is discovering three new fish species a week on average and predicts as many as 5,000 unknown fish species may be lurking undetected, according to the first interim report. By the time they're done in 2010, scientists say they may find more than 2 million different species of marine life.
. . So far, the Census of Marine Life comprised 15,304 species of fish and 194,696 to 214,696 species of [other] animals and plants, estimated to be roughly 10 percent of the world's total. The census is adding about 150 to 200 species of fish and 1,700 species of animals and plants each year.
. . The scientists said they believe the oceans hold about 20,000 species of fish and up to 1.98 million species of [other] animals and plants. Many of those could be basic and small life forms, such as worms and jellyfish. [I know, their terms are confusing, as fish *are animals. So how else do they define "animal"?]

Oct 15, 03: The shrinking natural habitat of Asian elephants in recent decades has forced them into increased and often violent contact with humans, said environmentalists and wildlife experts who met recently in Colombo to find ways to tackle the problem.
. . In India alone, home to more than half the continent's estimated 35,000 pachyderms, about 200 wild elephants die every year in conflict with people (illegal logging & human over-pop) or killed for ivory. In some parts of South India, it is now one adult male to 20 to 100 adult females. Males have been selectively poached for their tusks.
. . India, where the rich have a tradition of keeping elephants, has more than 2,000 beasts in captivity. Sri Lanka has banned their further domestication.

Oct 8, 03: Myanmar's famed teak forests are shrinking due to rampant logging fueled by a cash-strapped military government and timber-hungry neighbors China and Thailand, campaigners said. The military has ruled since 1962. Myanmar is home to 60% of the world's natural reserves of teak and its high quality is prized by furniture makers despite calls for bans and boycotts. Timber exports accounted for 9.3% of foreign exchange earnings last year and pressure to boost earnings has led to over-cutting.

Oct 8, 03: Sonar may cause a type of decompression sickness in whales and dolphins similar to the "bends" in humans, scientists said. They've found bubbles in the tissue of stranded whales and dolphins similar to the effects of decompression sickness. They suspect sonar signals disorient the animals, forcing them to come up to the surface too quickly, which could cause the creation of damaging nitrogen bubbles in their tissue.
. . Both low and mid-frequency sonar have been linked to whale strandings. "It is widely accepted that there is a link between naval sonar use and mass strandings, predominately of big whales; what hasn't been fully understood is what the mechanism would be." The creatures started to appear on the beaches about four hours after the start of the mid-frequency sonar activity.

In Africa, there were about 1.3 million elephants in 1981 —-only about 300,000 remain. Worldwide, there are only about 350,000 elephants left.

A team of 100 African scientists is counting rare mountain gorillas living in the range straddling Congo, Rwanda and Uganda — the first such census in 14 years. There are believed to be about 670 mountain gorillas living in the wild, based on recent partial censuses. "In Congo, people eat gorillas. And there have been wars in Rwanda and Congo. These must have affected the population of these individuals."

Oct 6, 03: About 15 to 20% of animal and plant species in China are in danger of extinction, higher than the world level of 10 to 15%, state media reported. According to statistics from the State Forestry Administration, over 300 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals and some 410 species of wild plants are at risk. By 2010, China will have a total of 3,000 to 4,000 plants on the brink of being wiped out. Because of the structure of the food chain, if one kind of plant disappears, there will be 10 to 30 types of organisms which depend on the plant that could die.

Oct 4, 03: The secret to preventing the spread of sudden oak death in coastal trees may be a gigantic booster shot, expected to cost about $30 per application. It stimulates parts of the tree that produce disease-fighting chemicals. "It's not a cure, not a solution. ... But we have something we can use to defend against the disease."
. . University of California scientists have discovered that trees dosed with a chemical product normally used as a fertilizer can fight and even resist the deadly microbe that has killed more than 100,000 oaks throughout California and Oregon since 1995.

Sept 30, 03: The famed Amur tigers of the Russian Far East, prized by poachers for their hides, could disappear in 20 to 30 years, ecologists warned.
. . The population has stabilized around 400 to 450. But the number of babies among the population has dropped from 28.6% in 1997 to 9.5% in 2003. The number of mother tigers has also decreased, from 14.3% of the total population in 1997, to 4.8% in 2003. The tigers' habitat is also shrinking because of deforestation.
. . The Amur tigers are a favorite poacher target in the Russian Far East, where much of the population is impoverished and a single hide can reportedly fetch up to 20,000 dollars on the black market.

Sept 29, 03: Orangutans could disappear within the next 10 to 20 years if illegal logging that is destroying their habitat is not stopped, according to a new report. Some 2,500 orangutans --about 10% of the world's remaining wild population of the apes-- live in the park.
. . "At the current rate of habitat destruction, orangutans could be extinct in the wild in 10 to 20 years. We must stop this trend -- the alternative is unthinkable."
. . Orangutans, close kin to humans, live only on Borneo and the nearby island of Sumatra. By some estimates, more than 80% of their original habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia has been destroyed, and deforestation has escalated with political and economic turmoil.

Sept 16, 03: Madagascar said it planned to more than triple the size of its nature reserves to help protect some of the planet's weirdest and rarest creatures. Long isolated from the rest of the world, the African island's wildlife has evolved in unique and startling ways, making it an ecological treasure trove.
. .The Indian Ocean island, the world's fourth largest, is home to some 10,000 endemic plant species, 316 endemic reptile species and 109 species of birds found nowhere else in the world. Madagascar's unusual wildlife includes dozens of species of lemurs, ancient primates that are distant relations of humans. Madagascar also has dozens of colorful species of chameleons. Many of Madagascar's lemur species are on the brink of extinction and many reserves are too small to sustain a large variety of animals. Others are poorly protected and suffer from human encroachment.
. . Conservationists estimate the country's forests have shrunk to 9,000,000 acres from 50 million, felled by the timber industry and growing and poor rural communities.

Sept 17, 03: Deep in the lush English countryside south of London a group of scientists is racing against time to save from extinction as many of the world's endangered plants as they can. They've squirreled away some 300 million seeds from nearly 8,000 species of plant and trees from around the world. Dried, sorted and stored at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit they sit in glass jars in vaults, awaiting the day the scientists hope will never come --when the species no longer exists in the wild.
. . The goal of the $127.3 million project is to collect 10% --or 24,000 species-- of the world's seed-bearing plants by 2010.

Sept 12, 03: From pole to pole, in virtually every ocean, scientists from two dozen nations are wrapping up preliminary field studies. Together the studies will serve as the foundation for the most extensive project of its kind —-the Census of Marine Life.
. . The census seeks a fundamental understanding of all life that relies on the largely unexplored seas covering most of Earth, increasingly beleaguered by pollution, overfishing and climate change.
. . This unprecedented field guide to millions of species is supposed to be completed in 10 years. It could cost as much as $1 billion, much of it funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and governments.
. . Environmentalists will use it to identify threatened species and locations for marine parks. Fishing and shipping interests believe the observations will make them more efficient — and profitable. And bio-prospectors hope the census will yield a bounty of new materials and compounds, ranging from medicines to industrial adhesives.
. . The census begins in earnest at a time when the ocean's bounty suddenly appears alarmingly skimpy. Large fish have been depleted by 90% since World War II.

Sept 12, 03: A boom in world tourism is posing a huge threat to some of the planet's most sensitive ecosystems. The study, by Conservation International (CI) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), said tourism rose by more than 100% between 1990 and 2000 in the world's "biodiversity hotspots", which include the tropical Andes and the Guinean forests of West Africa.
. . CI has identified 25 such areas, which contain 44 percent of all identified endemic plant species and 35 percent of all known endemic species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. The hotspots cover only 1.4% of the planet's land area and all been significantly altered by human activities.
. . "Prior to its development as a tourist resort in the 1970s, only 12 families lived on the barrier island of Cancun", it said. Now, the resort has 2.6 million visitors per year, the local mangrove and inland forests have been cut down, and in the settlement that has grown nearby, 75% of the sewage of the population is untreated.

Sept 11, 03: Hundreds of species face possible extinction in the next two decades if more land is not set aside to protect them, a new study said. An urgent addition of 2.6 percent of the world's land area to an existing protection system could help stop the imminent extinction of at least two-thirds of unprotected species, it said.
. . Still, many other areas also need protection to safeguard the world's species, the report said. At least 223 bird, 140 mammal and 346 amphibian species are currently completely unprotected.

Sept 8, 03: Africa's multi-million dollar bushmeat industry is threatening species like gorillas and chimpanzees with extinction, conservationists said. "The important thing to remember is that people who are hunting and eating bushmeat generally do not have any other options."
. . Key components of the model would be to help make trade sustainable by encouraging the hunting of smaller, plentiful species such as rodents, cane rats and antelopes which have higher reproductive rates and to help countries enforce laws to control the trade.

Sept 7, 03: Clad in shark suits, a group of Singapore students marched through the city state on Sunday to protest over the mass slaughter of the big fish to make shark fin soup, a delicacy throughout Asia. Around 100 million sharks are caught each year for their fins, and the hunting has depleted some shark populations by as much as 90%.
. . Conservationists say sharks are in danger of extinction due to their late maturity and slow reproductive rates. While killing sharks for their fins is legal in most countries and in international waters, the European Union, Australia and the United States have banned the practice.

Sept 3, 03: Conservationists gather this week to chart a way to save the shark, one of the most feared predators in the oceans itself under threat from over-fishing and demand for dishes such as shark-fin soup.

Aug 16, 03: Burundi hippos are being wiped out by soldiers who earn extra cash by selling the meat to restaurants where middle-class gourmets pay highly to taste its flesh. Experts fear the growing trade in bushmeat, which is fueled by poverty, is devastating much of Africa's wildlife.
. . Of the 300 hippos counted by a 1997 census in the tiny central Africa country, more than 100 have been exterminated, as many as 60 of them this year alone. Environmentalists say Burundi's hippos will be wiped out in one or two years.

Aug 15, 03: As Icelandic whalers ready their explosive harpoons to resume hunting after a 14-year break, the country is grappling with the question of whether whales are worth more to them dead or alive. --meat vs tourism.
. . Iceland ceased whaling in 1989 under international pressure, but said this year it would catch 38 minke whales in August and September for "scientific purposes" as part of a plan to take 100 minke whales, 100 fin whales and 50 sei whales annually.
. . With seven of the 13 great whale species endangered, the International Whaling Commission has outlawed commercial hunting of the world's largest mammal since 1986.
. . Norway defies the ban and Japan uses a loophole for scientific catches. Indigenous people in Greenland, Siberia and the U.S. state of Alaska are allowed to continue traditional "subsistence" whaling.
. . Whale meat is served in restaurants in Rejkjavik, jarring with the success of the whale-watching industry which took out 62,050 tourists last year. Erna Hauksdottir, head of the travel industry lobby, fears a backlash: "History shows us discussion of whaling often lead to protests outside our offices abroad."

Aug 14, 03: People and coral do not mix, and never have, scientists said in a report that shows humans started killing off coral reefs thousands of years ago. Several reports in the journal Science suggest the only solution is to create larger, international preserves where no fishing, anchoring or collecting is allowed.
. . Even Australia's Great Barrier Reef, considered the cleanest and best-preserved large reef in the world, actually is not, the dozen-strong team of experts found. "The Great Barrier Reef is already 30% along the way to ecological extinction."
. . "As soon as human exploitation began, whether in the 1600s in Bermuda or tens of thousands of years ago in the Red Sea, the same scenarios were put into play."
. . First, people killed off large predators such as sharks and the biggest fish and turtles, which are easy to catch and slow to reproduce. Then smaller fish go and finally sea grasses and the corals themselves.
. . A search of historical and archaeological records in 14 regions including the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Red Sea, Caribbean and Australia, show the same thing -- these reefs used to be teeming with life... and are not any more.
. . Agriculture alone can cause considerable damage -- without people going near reefs, the analysis found. "Back in the 1600s in Barbados when it was cleared for sugar cane farming, all the land-derived runoff was going into the reef and basically smothering the coral."
. . A second report in Science found that wildfires in Indonesia in 1997 may have indirectly killed an economically important reef when smoke settled onto the water, triggering a red tide --a population explosion of toxic phytoplankton.
. . Much media and scientific attention has been paid to bleached reefs, said Pandolfi, but this damage is only the tip of the iceberg.

Aug 13, 03: The explosion in fish farming in coastal waters around the world is a mounting danger to the environment and to the survival of wild species, the conservation organization WWF-International said.
. . And the Swiss-based body said fish escaping from pens used by the growing number of salmon-breeding businesses on inland rivers could speed the destruction of stocks of wild Atlantic salmon, highly prized for its rich taste.
. . "The spread of the aquaculture (sea farming) industry must be controlled to avoid physical damage to coastal ecosystems and wild species and to lessen negative environmental impacts on coastal communities." Farm-free zones and marine protected areas should be set up around coastlines to protect vulnerable species and the environment in which they lived.

July 24, 03: A genetic study of whales suggests many more have been slaughtered than believed in the whaling frenzy that began in the 18th century, and shows populations have not recovered enough to allow hunting to resume, U.S. researchers said.
. . The International Whaling Commission may be underestimating by tenfold the number of the giant mammals that lived in the seas before whaling began, they said. "The genetics we've done of whales in the North Atlantic says that, before whaling, there were a total of 800,000 to 900,000 humpback, fin and minke whales --far greater numbers than anybody ever thought."
. . The study, published in the journal Science, suggests the worldwide humpback population could have been as high as 1.5 million --more than 10 times the IWC's estimate of 100,000.

July 4, 03: Populations of turtle and dugong, or seacow, are dropping drastically around Australia's Great Barrier Reef because of chemical runoff from farmland and overhunting by Aborigines, officials said.
. . "Dugong populations adjacent to Queensland's urban coasts are estimated to be only three per cent of what they were in the 1960s", Environment Minister Kemp said. Wildlife experts regard Australia as the "dugong capital" of the world.
. . Extensive sugar cane farming, land clearing and urbanization along the Queensland coast is blamed for the rise of runoff into the ocean and riverways, including chemicals and fertilizers.
. . Dugong numbers in Australia are under threat not just from environmental degradation but also from indigenous hunters. It is illegal, however, to sell the meat of dugong and turtle, just as it is unlawful to sell kangaroo or emu flesh. But traditions are breaking down, & a black market in dugong and turtle meat has emerged and modern technology such as motorized boats has made it easier to hunt the vulnerable dugong.
. . "The number of nesting loggerhead turtles has declined between 50 and 80 per cent."
. . Freshwater and saltwater crocodiles --wrongly named since both species are at home in any type water-- have been protected from human predators since the 1960s.

June 31, 03: Britain's insect population seems to be falling and so some 100,000 people will arm themselves with "splatometers" next year to count them. The device is effectively a square of flypaper on a car windshield which traps insects when they crash into the glass. "Many insects are a principal food for many sorts of birds, and having a handle on that figure will be incredibly important."

June 25, 03: Seahorses are their own worst enemy. Fished to the point of extinction for the traditional Chinese medicine market, they mate for life and their unwillingness to seek new partners after being separated has done little to improve their chances of survival. Seahorses are no ordinary sea creatures, notwithstanding their monogamy, which is highly unusual for the animal kingdom. It is the male who receives eggs from his female partner and fertilizes them himself. The male is "pregnant" for about three weeks before giving birth.
. . An estimated 40 million seahorses a year are taken from the wild for traditional Chinese medicine in which they are used as an aphrodisiac as well as a range of ailments including heart disease. Demand has risen in recent years to such an extent that seahorses retail for about $1,900 a kilo in Asia, almost the price of gold. A further one million are fished for the curio trade because seahorses retain their shape and color when dried. The pet trade takes another one million, but very few survive beyond a few months or so without live food.

June 20, 03: The Pacific's last megapode --a bird with large feet that uses hot volcanic ash to incubate its eggs-- has been rescued from the brink of extinction, London based BirdLife International said. Fiji ornithologist Dick Watling found Tonga's Polynesian Megapode or Malau (Megapodius pritchardii) has doubled its population and is now likely to be removed from the "critically endangered" list.
. . Polynesian Megapodes were native to remote Niuafo'ou in Tonga but became critically endangered due to human harvesting of eggs and predation by introduced animals. They were moved to a new two kilometer-wide island, selected because it was uninhabited.

June 16, 03: The International Whaling Commission adopted a conservation motion that ecology groups hailed as essential to preserving endangered whales and dolphins, but whalers said the move could wreck the world body.
. . In a sharp shift for the 57-year-old organization, the polarized members voted 25-20 to create a conservation committee that could make recommendations about problems facing marine mammals, or cetaceans.
. . The conservation committee, to start work in 2004, could advise on cetaceans being trapped and drowned in fish nets, toxins in the oceans, climate change, and the use of sonar, which environmentalists say threatens whales with extinction.

June 15, 03: Nearly 1,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises drown every day after becoming tangled in fishing nets and other equipment, scientists say in what appears to be the first global estimate of the problem. Annually, the researchers said 308,000 of the marine mammals die unintentionally in fishermen's hauls. The true numbers may be even higher.
. . There are more than 80 species collectively known as cetaceans, or fishlike sea mammals. They range from porpoises weighing 100 pounds to the blue whale, the world's largest creature at more than 120 tons. Many species are near extinction because of centuries of overhunting.
. . The IWC banned most whaling in the 1980s. Norway ignores the ban, while Japan takes nearly 700 whales a year under a controversial IWC research exemption. Some native cultures are allowed to conduct strictly limited hunts.
. . Last August, spotters identified a 10-year old female ensnared in fishing line off southeastern Canada. The same whale was spotted off Cape Cod in March, still entangled.

June 14, 03: Around 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die each year when they become entangled in nets designed to catch fish, the World Wildlife Fund) said. However, whaling nation Japan threatened to walk out of the IWC meeting if the initiative was backed.

May 24, 03: Even as an endangered species, with protections afforded only a handful of other creatures on Earth, the Florida manatee loses up to 10% of its number every year, many crushed or slashed by boats. Now a move is afoot to "downlist" the manatee from "endangered" to "threatened" in Florida. However, they'd remain on the federal endangered list.
. . To be endangered, a species would have to face the possibility of an 80% decline in population in the next three generations, or 45 years. State scientists have decided the manatee could face a 50% decline in the next 45 years, making them "threatened", not "endangered."
. . Manatee advocates say the state criteria are all wrong for the manatee, a long-living creature that reaches sexual maturity late and reproduces slowly. Mature females generally give birth every 2-5 years and the gestation period is a year.
. . An environmental group said it is rallying allies to join a lawsuit to block the federal government from allowing off-road vehicles in California desert that for three years had been off limits to protect rare plants and animals.

Apr 30, 03: A record number of southern sea otters are washing up sick or dead along California's Central Coast beaches at a rate that could have dire consequences for the threatened species. Experts say they don't know exactly why this is happening but are alarmed that many of the dead mammals this year are of reproductive age that should be healthy.

Apr 17, 03: A toxic "red tide" has killed at least 60 endangered manatees along the southwest Florida coast in the last two months, the second-largest mass death of sea cows blamed on the deadly algae bloom. They represent about 2% of the Florida manatee population. A survey in January indicated there were about 3,000 manatees in Florida.
. . The Florida manatee, a leathery aquatic mammal averaging about 10 feet in length and 1,000 pounds, dates back at least 45 million years. It has hovered on the edge of extinction for years, despite having no natural enemies.
. . The one-celled organism that causes red tide contains a brevetoxin released into the water when the algae dies.

Apr 13, 03: Only about 50,000 Tibetan antelopes known locally as Chiru, survive in the wild. Around 1900, there are thought to have been about a million animals on the Tibetan plateau. With Chinese officials estimating that 20,000 are killed annually, they look likely to vanish within the next two or three years.
. . Their shahtoosh wool is used to make luxury shawls. "If you want the wool, you have to kill them. And they live at about 14,000 feet, which is why they grow this wool --without it, they'd die.
. . Researchers from Kazakhstan, Russia and the UK are also deeply concerned about the future of the Saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica tatarica) after surveys from the air suggested numbers had fallen by 95% since the 1970s. The antelope has now been rushed into the list of critically endangered species. This may be because the depletion of male saiga has altered the behavior of females.
. . Normally, a shortage of males is not necessarily a problem, because one individual can mate with a large number of females. And saiga herds are organized in "harems" which should make this possible. However, now, it appears that dominant female Saiga have started jealously guarding their males, driving away younger females. With only a small number of females being mated, numbers of saiga have plummeted. They're normally extremely fast & young breeders.

Apr 14, 03: Gorilla, chimpanzee and elephant will now be off the menu in Cameroon. Authorities in the central African country announced on Monday that any restaurant caught serving meat from endangered animals could face up to three years in prison and a fine of more than $16,000.

Apr 14, 03: Many species of sharks are threatened —-more than 11,400 are killed every hour every day. "The message we want you to leave with is that of conservation of sharks", said Nancy Hotchkiss, developer for the Shark Quest exhibit.
. . Almost all recorded shark species have declined by half in the past eight to 15 years. Hammerhead shark populations were down 89% in the Atlantic, tiger sharks were reduced by 65%, blue sharks 60%, threshers 80% and great white sharks —-made infamous by the movie "Jaws"-— have declined by 79%.
. . "Some fishing processes are actually strip mining the ocean", said Dave Schofield, the manager of the aquarium's ocean health program. "They throw them away like trash. In reality, 94% of the 400 species of sharks are harmless to humans.

Apr 6, 03: A pair of banteng calves born last week were cloned from an animal that died more than 20 years ago, researchers said --adding they hoped to rescue more endangered animals using cloning. The two bantengs were cloned from the San Diego Zoo's "frozen zoo", a project launched before anyone knew whether cloning would work. Bantengs, found in Asia, are a species of wild cattle.
. . Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technologies said cells frozen from an animal that died in 1980 without leaving any offspring were successfully cloned using cells from cattle, and two of the babies made it to birth last week.
. . One suffered from Large Calf Syndrome & had to be euthanized a few days later.

Apr 6, 03: Western equatorial Africa's wild apes are being killed off by hunting and the Ebola virus and could be pushed to the brink of extinction, scientists said. Gabon and the Republic of Congo are thought to be the home of 80% of the world's gorillas and most of the common chimpanzees, but a survey reveals their numbers dropped by more than half between 1983 and 2000.
. . The animals are currently classified as endangered on the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (IUCN) list of threatened species. Under IUCN criteria, a species should be considered critically endangered if it is expected to suffer a decline of 80% within the next 10 years or three generations. The list includes 11,167 endangered plant and animal species.

Apr 2, 03: French Polynesia's snails, whose range and diversity have played an important part in knowledge of evolution, have been almost wiped out by a catastrophic attempt to control pests. Of the 61 species of Partula snails, 56 have been destroyed in the wild and the fate of the remaining five species "hangs by a thread". They exist in no other part of the world and have lived on an island time capsule. Like the famous Galapagos finches studied by Charles Darwin they can give an insight into evolution.
. . But the Partulas' death knell was sounded in 1974 when a predatory snail called Euglandina rosea was introduced to Tahiti to control an introduced species, the African land snail, that had become a crop pest.

Mar 12, 03: A lack of males is pushing the Saiga antelope in Russia to the brink of extinction, scientists said. A demand for male horns in traditional Chinese medicine has resulted in a shortage of males and although they have harems of 12-30, there are not enough males to mate with all the females.
. . "Our observations indicate that if the percentage of males in the population falls below 1%, reproductive collapse will result." The antelope population is halving each year and could soon be lost. Their numbers have dropped to 50,000 over the past decade --5% of what it was previously.
. . A strict hunting ban saved the saiga antelopes from a similar population crash about a century ago and the scientists suggested similar measures are needed now.
. . The species is difficult to breed because of their nomadic existence --they cannot be penned or even fenced.

Feb 22, 03: Trawling for prawns is hugely wasteful, conservationists say, and threatens other marine creatures with devastation. They say prawn trawlers kill 150,000 marine turtles a year, and also large numbers of seahorses. They want consumers not to buy prawns until supermarkets can prove they have been caught without harming the environment and local communities.
. . The report's main findings include:
trawlers catch up to 20 kilograms of other species for every one kg of prawns they take they are responsible for one-third of the world's discarded catch, although they produce less than 2% of global seafood.
local fish catches can decline sharply in areas where trawlers operate
the trawls cause significant damage to seabed life. The ratio can be 20:1.
. . Most of the bycatch is simply thrown back into the sea dead or dying, it says. It says prawn farming is no substitute, with the farmed fish needing to be fed more than twice their own weight in wild-caught fish before they are big enough to sell. The report says: "Vast areas of mangrove forest have been destroyed to make way for shrimp pond construction, seriously affecting the coastal ecology of many tropical nations."

Feb 22, 03: Leatherback turtles, the largest turtles in the world, will be extinct within a few decades if current fishing practices continue. Scientists say only new international fishing agreements can save the animal.
. . Leatherbacks are spectacular creatures --two to three metres long, covered in a leathery shell, and able to dive almost a kilometre below the ocean's surface in search of food. Poaching of their eggs has driven numbers down but it is the fishing for tuna and swordfish which represent the biggest threat.

Feb 7, 03: The Chinese Tiger is As Good As Extinct. Wildlife reserves are not big enough to support the cat, says a researcher who spent a year on research.

Jan 20, 03: Several shark species have declined steeply in the north-west Atlantic over the last 15 years, scientists say. The populations of some sharks have fallen to less than a quarter of their former size. Some take 15 years or longer to reach sexual maturity, and many have a long gestation period.
. . Hammerheads have declined by 89% in 15 years. The spiny dogfish, one half of a British staple take-away food (fish and chips) under its other names of dogfish or rock salmon, has a 22-month gestation.
. . Many sharks have an annual replacement rate of only 3-4%, too low to make good the losses they are sustaining. "Because of their slow breeding rates, sharks are biologically unable to withstand even a limited amount of exploitation, let alone what they're facing now.

Jan 20, 03: Edible bananas may disappear within a decade if urgent action is not taken to develop new varieties resistant to blight. A Belgian scientist leading research into the fruit loved by millions, and a staple for much of the world's poor, has warned that diseases and pests are steadily encroaching upon crops.
. . The problem is that the banana we eat is a seedless, sterile article which could slip the way of its predecessor, which was wiped out by blight half a century ago. The Cavendish banana now being eaten across the globe lacks genetic diversity, he argues in New Scientist magazine, and its survival is threatened by:
1: Panama disease, caused by a soil fungus, wiped out the Gros Michel variety in the 1950s.
2: Black sigatoka, another fungal disease, has reached global epidemic proportions.
3: Pests invading plantations and farms in central America, Africa and Asia alike.
. . New Scientist compared the current threat to bananas to the potato blight which caused the devastating Irish famine of the 1840s.

Jan 17, 03: The seal population off Canada's Atlantic Coast is suffering because Ottawa continues to allow hunters to kill hundreds of thousands of the animals each year despite clear evidence the ice cover is rapidly thinning, activists said.
. . Dr. David Lavigne, the IFAW's senior science advisor, said this was hurting harp and hooded seals, which give birth on the ice in late February and March and nurse their young for around 12 days. "There have been reports of reduced survivorship of pups.
. . The annual hunt has become a public relations nightmare for Ottawa, which last year allowed hunters to cull 307,000 harp and hooded seals. In addition, Lavigne said, around 250,000 harp seals were also being killed a year off Greenland.
. . "Even if you use the Canadian government's own model, the total allowable (Canadian) catch is set higher than the replacement yield, which seems to be a conscious decision to deplete the population", said Lavigne, saying the annual hunt should be cut to 50,000 seals.

Jan 15, 03: Scientists in the United States have questioned the accuracy of the "Red List" of endangered species because it does not take account of the threat that humans pose to animals. They say the list should be amended to include local human population density. "Although a large number of people nearby may not be in itself a threat, they argue that hunting, pollution and habitat destruction, for example, are all likely to increase as people encroach on wildlife", New Scientist magazine said.
. . But how the list is compiled is unlikely to be altered because the IUCN already has a separate system incorporating human threats that runs in parallel with the Red List. "We've been asked by everyone, please don't change the system again", Craig Hilton-Taylor, the Red List program officer, told the magazine.

Human activities threaten to wipe out as many as one-half of the Earth's plant species, a new study suggests. Earlier studies had estimated that only about 13% of all plant species are in danger of extinction. But those estimates did not take into account the plants at risk from environmental change in the tropics where most of the world's plant species grow. Extrapolating this data to the entire world suggests that from 22% to 47% of all of the Earth's plant species are in danger of becoming extinct.
. . As to how many plant species there are: estimates range from 310,000 to 422,000. "The more fragmented the vegetation becomes, the more difficult it is for the natural environment to respond {to global warming]. Plants that need to move around to find a cooler place to grow can't move ... because there are farmers in the way."

Nov 25, 02: The last three po`ouli birds known to exist will be taken into captivity in a last-ditch effort to save the species from extinction. The po`ouli, or Hawaiian Honeycreeper, may be the rarest bird on Earth. The last known breeding occurred about five years ago. It was first identified in 1973 by students on a University of Hawaii expedition. Its population then was estimated at 200. The last three birds live within 2.7 KM of each other in the dense rainforest of Maui, and scientists believe they have never met.

Nov 13, 02: The tiny sea horse briefly stole the spotlight at a U.N. meeting in Chile when delegates agreed to protect all 32 species of the sea creature from a lucrative global trade that threatens to drive them to extinction.

Oct 28, 02: China's bear bile farms are threatening the survival of the animal worldwide, a leading charity said. The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) is calling for protests to the sponsors of the 2008 summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
. . Illegal trading in bear bile is worth millions of dollars annually said the charity, launching a report on the alleged maltreatment of bears in Chinese farms. Bear bile is viewed as a panacea in traditional Chinese medicine. Bear shampoos, tonics and wine have been found on sale the world over, particularly in Asian communities. The trade is legal within China but the export trade is not.
. . Two hundred farms in China tap 7,000 live, caged bears for their bile in an excruciating process, said the report. Chinese farms slice into the bears to milk bile from the gall bladder with a tube. Many bears do not survive the initial operation and few live longer than 10 years, less than half the average life expectancy.

Oct 22, 02: Urban expansion and loss of open space have put some 25% of North America's bird species in trouble or decline, more than double the number of species at risk five years ago, a National Audubon Society study said. The wildlife conservation organization released, for the first time in five years, its watch list of birds that are declining in population or are endangered or threatened. About 201 birds are on the watch list and 21 of them are in the endangered category.

Sept 8, 02: The nomadic Saiga antelope could soon be taking its last leap, the wild Bactrian camel its last drink and the Ethiopian water mouse its last dip. All are on the brink of extinction, conservationists said. The freshwater gastropod mollusk has already made its salty tearful goodbyes in the last two years.There are 11,167 other plants and animals threatened with extinction, according to the World Conservation Union's 2002 Red List of Threatened Species, an increase of 121 since 2000.

Aug 13, 02: An expedition headed to Angola today to search for the giant sable, a majestic antelope that scientists hope has survived the southwest African nation's decades- long civil war. "There is a lot of speculation that these animals have gone extinct." There have been unconfirmed sightings in recent years but no confirmed sightings for 20 years. The animal's only known range is Angola and there are none to be found in zoos anywhere.
. . Male giant sables have elegant horns which curve backwards and can grow to an astonishing five feet or more.

July 23, 02: "The Siberian tiger and Amur leopard, two of the most endangered cat species in the world, are now threatened with extinction because of the rampant illegal logging that fragments their Russian habitat", the WWF said. Widespread illegal logging and wasteful forestry management were laying waste to hard-timber forests in Russia's Far East and south Siberia, the Worldwide Fund for Nature said in a report on the $700 million annual Russian-Japanese timber trade.
. . "It's no secret that the catastrophic floods in Yakutia (in 2001) and this year in the North Caucasus and the Far East were due mostly to logging in the upland regions." Forestry workers who earn as little as $16 to $32 a month have little incentive for heroics when crime gangs in China -- the main market for timber from Russia's Far East -- pay $80 to $200 per cubic meter of wood, say ecologists.

A SIXTH EXTINCTION? Many species could follow the dinosaurs down the road to extinction because of human activities such as logging, farming and building dams. Many credible scientists fear that the sixth mass extinction in the planet's long history is unfolding --a doomsday scenario dismissed as alarmist by some.
. . A recent U.N. report, prepared ahead of a summit next month in Johannesburg on the environment and poverty, warned that 12%, or 1,183 bird species, and 1,130, or nearly a quarter of all mammal species, are regarded as globally threatened. According to one book on the subject, "The Sixth Extinction", by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, the grim reaper first visited Earth on this vast scale 450 million years ago.
. . Mass extinctions have occurred five times in the four billion year history of life. The second mass extinction took place 100 million years later, giving rise to coal forests. In the Triassic period 250 and 200 million years ago, two mass extinctions snuffed out countless species. Then, 65 million years ago, scientists believe the dinosaurs were killed off when a giant meteorite collided with Earth. Scientists say the sixth extinction will have been brought about entirely by people. Leakey and Lewin estimate that perhaps 50% of all species will become extinct in the next 100 years. Others take a more measured view but agree that a crisis is looming.

March 1, 02: Scientists at Oxford University said they had extracted DNA from a Dodo, the famous flightless bird hunted to extinction on its native Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in the 17th century. "The DNA survives", Dr. Alan Cooper of the university's Department of Zoology told BBC news. "It's very damaged and broken down into tiny pieces, but little fragments remain." It's not enough to bring the bird back to life --or pave the way for a Jurassic Park- type reincarnation. "But... you can never say never."

June 7, 01: The arrival of human hunters triggered a mass extinction of large animals in North America, dooming such Ice Age behemoths as the woolly mammoth and mastodon, as well as one in Australia tens of thousands of years earlier, scientists said. Two studies appearing in the journal Science discount climate change as the cause of the calamities on the two continents, instead pinning the blame squarely on prehistoric people who were fanning out around the globe.
. . Regardless of how he adjusted the variables, Alroy found that human hunting inevitably caused mass extinctions -- particularly devastating the populations of the largest animals such as mammoths and mastodons, whose slow growth rates and long gestation periods made it hard for them to rebound.
. . The first large populations of people arrived in North America about 13,400 years ago. Alroy said the extinction appeared to unfold within about 1,200 years after that. University of Melbourne geo-chronologist Richard Roberts used advanced techniques to determine when scores of marsupials and huge flightless birds disappeared in Australia. A continent-wide mass extinction took place around 46,400 years ago --shortly after the ancestors of today's abborigines first landed on the shores of Australia, Roberts said.
. . In a blow to the climate-change theory, the new research demonstrated that in different parts of the world and at times separated by tens of thousands of years, the lone common thread in the extinctions was the arrival of humans on the scene.
. . Among the casualties were: two kinds of mammoths and the mastodon, relatives of the modern elephant; woolly bison; enormous ground sloths; tapirs; half a dozen species of horses; a camel; llamas; giant antelopes; oxen; the giant armadillo; and glyptodonts, an enormous mammals with tank-like armor.
. . Alroy said these losses also spelled the end for key predators such as the saber-toothed cats and the Dire Wolf. But MacPhee faulted Alroy for failing to examine whether diseases that may have accompanied humans' arrival played a role.

If you got here from the HOME PAGE, click on
"minimize" or "eXit". (upper right browser buttons)
If you didn't: the site.)