1. Seeking Biodiversity

2007

2007 December 18. Zoologist Gives a Voice to Big Cats in the Wilderness. By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, NY Times. Excerpt: Among zoologists, Alan
Rabinowitz is known as the Indiana Jones of wildlife conservation. But he is actually more the Dag Hammarskjold of biology. ...That is because Dr. Rabinowitz, executive director of science and exploration at the Wildlife Conservation Society, is a kind of international diplomat for big cats - jaguars, leopards, pumas.For 20 years, he has traveled the world, imploring the power elite of democracies and dictatorships to dedicate large parcels as reserves for these imperiled felines.In the 1980s, he persuaded the leaders of Belize to establish the world's first jaguar preserve. More recently, this Brooklyn-born biologist prevailed on the junta in Myanmar to transform 8,400 square miles of forest into the Hukawng Valley Tiger Reserve....
Q. With so many of the world's animals in danger, why do you mostly advocate for big cats?
A. Because cats get to the human psyche. People love big cats. If I go to a government and say, "If you don't do something quickly, you're going to lose your tigers," they listen. If I say, "You're about to lose all your wolves," they won't care. But leopards, tigers, jaguars - people have a huge admiration for them. My real goal is to save large sections of pristine wilderness for all types of wildlife. One way to do that is to make sure that the top predators have enough safe territory to thrive in. Because big cats need so much territory, when you save them, you're really saving whole ecosystems and you're saving the other animals down on the food chain. This is what's called the "apex predator strategy" in conservation. The other thing I've seen is that no government, even if they are doing a lot of development, wants to lose their big cats. Even when you're talking to the most authoritarian of dictators, none of them wants to be the guy at the helm when the last of his country's tigers go extinct....
Q. What originally drew you to conservation?
A. As a child, I had this horrific stutter. In school, I was put in what was called the retarded classes. I was very angry that people couldn't see past the stuttering. From the second grade on, I stopped talking, except to the little green turtle and the chameleon I kept at home. Talking to the animals, I realized they had feelings. I didn't know if they understood me. But I saw that they were exactly like me. They weren't broken, but people mistreated them because they can't communicate. I thought if these animals had a voice, people wouldn't be able to crush them and throw them away. When I was a child, I promised the animals that if I ever got my voice back, I'd be their voice....

2007 November 13. Off Endangered List, but What Animal Is It Now? The Great Lakes gray wolf is off the endangered species list, but biologists say it has hybridized with coyotes and wolves from Canada. By MARK DERR. NY Times. Excerpt: Amid much fanfare this year, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service declared the western Great Lakes gray wolf successfully recovered from an encounter with extinction and officially removed it from the endangered species list. Under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, the wolf boomed in population to 4,000 in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin today, up from just several hundred in northern Minnesota in 1974.
But the victory celebration was premature, according to two evolutionary biologists, Jennifer A. Leonard of Uppsala University in Sweden and Robert K. Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles. The historic Great Lakes wolf did not return intact from the edge of oblivion. Instead, the scientists report in the online edition of the journal Biology Letters, it hybridized with gray wolves moving in from Canada, coyotes from the south and west and the hybrids born of that mixing....

2007 November 12. World's Smallest Bear Faces Extinction. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.. Excerpt: GENEVA (AP) -- The world's smallest bear species faces extinction because of deforestation and poaching in its Southeast Asian home, a conservation group said Monday.
The sun bear, whose habitat stretches from India to Indonesia, has been classified as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union.
''We estimate that sun bears have declined by at least 30 percent over the past 30 years and continue to decline at this rate,'' said Rob Steinmetz, a bear expert with the Geneva-based group, known under its acronym IUC
The group estimates there are little more than 10,000 sun bears left, said Dave Garshelis, co-chair of the IUCN bear specialist group.
The bear, which weighs between 90 and 130 pounds, is hunted for its bitter, green bile, which has long been used by Chinese traditional medicine practitioners to treat eye, liver and other ailments. Bear paws are also consumed as a delicacy.
Another threat comes from loggers, who are destroying the sun bear's habitat, Steinmetz said.
Thailand is the only country to have effectively banned logging and enforced laws against poaching, allowing the sun bear population to remain stable there, Garshelis said.
IUCN said six of the eight bear species in the world are now threatened with extinction.
Other vulnerable bear species are the Asiatic black bear, the sloth bear on the Indian subcontinent, the Andean bear in South America and the polar bear. The brown bear and the American black bear are in a lesser category of threat, IUCN said....
On the Net: World Conservation Union: http://www.iucn.org/en/news/archive/2007/11/12--pr--bear.htm

2007 June 5. SCIENTIST AT WORK | LINDA J. GORMEZANO A Team of 2, Following the Scent of Polar Bears By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Excerpt: The hunt begins with a loud shout in Spanish by Linda J. Gormezano."¡Búscalo!" Seek. Waiting with ears pricked and tail wagging, Quinoa, her black male Dutch shepherd, leaps to work, straining at the leash, nose down, weaving left and right. ... The quarry sought by Quinoa, named for the Andean grain, is something utterly conventional and doglike: feces, poop or, as field biologists prefer to call it - scat. It comes from polar bears. Although this exercise is taking place in the Mianus River Gorge Preserve, a wooded nook tucked in Bedford, N.Y., 40 miles northeast of Manhattan, the small hidden heaps contain things as foreign to New York as can be - the bones and feathers of snow geese, kelp and lyme grass, a trace of seal. The samples, hidden ahead of time (on Petri dishes), came from the collection Ms. Gormezano has been amassing since 2005 in fieldwork on the grassy coastal plains ringing the western shore of Hudson Bay in central Canada, one of the southernmost bastions of the great ice-roaming predators.
... Ms. Gormezano is using scat to track the wanderings, genetics and condition of the bears, which in that northern region, particularly, have shown signs of stress that could be related to the warming Arctic climate and retreating sea ice. ... Other methods for tracking shifts in populations involve chasing the bears in helicopters, sedating them with darts and tagging or collaring them. But such methods can pose risks or alter the bears' behavior, she said. ... In contrast, bear scat, and also tufts of fur left in dens or sleeping spots, can be collected without affecting the bears. Tests of DNA in the feces can distinguish individual animals. So the dispersion of scat provides a map of a particular bear's wanderings.
"All the issues with global warming are going to affect southernmost populations, especially around southern Hudson Bay and western Hudson Bay, where they're already starting to see changes, reduced reproductive output, thinner subadults," Ms. Gormezano said. "So this is a great opportunity to try out a new method." ...

2007 April 23. Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons. By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO. NY Times. Excerpt: BELTSVILLE, Md. ... The volume of theories to explain the collapse of honeybee populations "is totally mind-boggling," said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Penn State. More than a quarter of the country's 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost - tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives. ... With Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist from the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Cox-Foster is leading a team of researchers who are trying to find answers to explain "colony collapse disorder," the name given for the disappearing bee syndrome. ...the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide...."There are so many of our crops that require pollinators," said Representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat whose district includes that state's central agricultural valley, and who presided last month at a Congressional hearing on the bee issue. "We need an urgent call to arms to try to ascertain what is really going on here with the bees, and bring as much science as we possibly can to bear on the problem." So far, colony collapse disorder has been found in 27 states, ...Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. ... more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work....

2007 February 13. Group: Germany's Amphibians Threatened. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt: BERLIN (AP) -- This year's unusually warm winter could cause large numbers of amphibians to die in Germany, an environmental organization said Tuesday. Unseasonably warm weather and rain over the last few days has already brought amphibians out of hibernation, the German-based Euronatur organization said. ...Newts already have been sighted in pools of water in southern Germany, and the first toads should be seen in the next few days if the weather continues to be warm, Euronatur said. If a cold spell hits now, it could be especially deadly for newts, toads and other amphibians. Eggs could cease developing and adult animals, which are not able to return to hibernation in time, could die. Shorter winters and hotter summers in Germany and other changes attributed to global climate change have depleted native amphibian populations, shortened the lifecycle of already threatened animals, and dried up small water pools that amphibians inhabit during the summer's hotter months.

2007 February 6. For Wolves, a Recovery May Not Be the Blessing It Seems. By JIM ROBBINS. NY Times. Excerpt: HELENA, Mont., Feb. 5 - ...At first glance, it seems like a win for conservation that wolves are now successful enough that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service proposed taking wolves in Idaho and Montana off the endangered species list.... But the price of success may be high. In Idaho, the governor [C. L. Otter] is ready to have hunters reduce the wolf population in the state from 650 to 100, the minimum that will keep the animal off the endangered species list. ...The proposed delisting, as it is called, comes because the population of wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains is surging. ...wolves in [Wyoming] will continue to have federal protections under the Endangered Species Act, federal officials say, because the state's policies are not adequate to keep the wolf from becoming endangered again. ...At the same time, the service announced that the delisting process for wolves in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota was complete. At 4,000 total, the wolf population in those states is considered fully recovered, and the comment period is finished. ....Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group that played a pivotal role in the wolf's return, opposes the delisting. "We don't support the delisting at this time," said Jamie Clark, executive vice president of the group. "Hunting is fine. But you have to be judicious about where you hunt and when you hunt. Wyoming and Idaho say they are going to kill wolves, but there's no mention of population science or monitoring. Its politics, not science." ...On the other hand, some officials say that federal protection has resulted in far too many wolves and that delisting is needed to cull the excess....

2007 January 23. A Radical Step to Preserve a Species: Assisted Migration. By CARL ZIMMER, NY Times. Excerpt: The Bay checkerspot butterfly's story is all too familiar. It was once a common sight in the San Francisco Bay area, but development and invasive plants have wiped out much of its grassland habitat. Conservationists have tried to save the butterfly by saving the remaining patches where it survives. But thanks to global warming, that may not be good enough. ...Studies on the Bay checkerspot butterfly suggest that this climate change will push the insect to extinction. The plants it depends on for food will shift their growing seasons, so that when the butterfly eggs hatch, the caterpillars have little to eat. Many other species may face a similar threat, and conservation biologists are beginning to confront the question of how to respond. The solution they prefer would be to halt global warming. But they know they may need to prepare for the worst. One of the most radical strategies they are considering is known as assisted migration. Biologists would pick a species up and move it hundreds of miles to a cooler place.... Dr. Jason McLachlan, a Notre Dame biologist, ...and his colleagues argue that assisted migration may indeed turn out to be the only way to save some species. But biologists need to answer many questions before they can do it safely and effectively. The first question would be which species to move. If tens of thousands are facing extinction, it will probably be impossible to save them all. ...The next challenge will be to decide where to take those species. ..."We don't even know where species are now," Dr. McLachlan said. Simply moving a species is no guarantee it will be saved, of course. ...As species shift their ranges, some of them will push into preserves that are refuges for endangered species. "Even if we don't move anything, they're going to be moving," Dr. McLachlan said....

2007 January 2.The Rancher and the Grizzly: A Love Story. By Bruce Barcott Excerpt: People, livestock, and a threatened predator are learning to get along in the new west. As an afternoon rainstorm sweeps down Montana's Madison Valley,…rancher Todd Graham stands inside a dusty barn and asks his neighbors for help….Graham addresses a veritable cross section of the new West: sheep ranchers, cattlemen, conservation biologists, government officials, retirees, and second-home owners. Seated in folding chairs, they've gathered for a Living With Predators workshop jointly organized by the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group (which defends livestock) and Keystone Conservation (which defends animals that want to kill the livestock)…..The Madison Valley today is the crash point of two demographic trends: a hot western housing market and rebounding populations of predators….About 7,000 people live in the valley, and cattle still outnumber them ten to one. But that's changing. Retirees and second-home owners, eager to claim their slice of Montana heaven, are snapping up 20-acre ranchettes carved out of 1,000-acre working ranches…....Humans aren't the only creatures attracted to the valley. Yellowstone's grizzlies, once threatened with extinction, have made a strong recovery....Having reached their population limit within Yellowstone -- these bears need plenty of territory to roam, forage, and mate -- they are fanning out beyond the park's boundaries…..As their numbers grow, Yellowstone grizzlies face a crucial test: Can they survive on land owned by ranchers, farmers, and the new wave of retirees, telecommuters, and vacation-home owners?.....One of the largest relatively intact temperate ecosystems on earth, the Yellowstone region hosts perhaps the greatest concentration of large mammals in the contiguous United States, including the nation's biggest populations of grizzlies outside Alaska. It's a region marked by concentric circles of wildlife protection.…..A final decision is expected from the Fish and Wildlife Service in early 2007. If the Yellowstone grizzly loses its threatened status, protection of the bear will be turned over to state wildlife agencies….

2006

27 December 2006. Agency Proposes to List Polar Bears as Threatened. By FELICITY BARRINGER and ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - The Interior Department proposed Wednesday to designate polar bears as a threatened species, saying that the accelerating loss of the Arctic ice that is the bears' hunting platform has led biologists to believe that bear populations will decline, perhaps sharply, in the coming decades. ... in a conference call with reporters, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said that although his decision to seek protection for polar bears acknowledged the melting of the Arctic ice, his department was not taking a position on why the ice was melting or what to do about it. ...[he said] it was not his department's job to assess causes or prescribe solutions. ...The scientific analysis in the proposal itself, however, did assess the cause of melting ice. ...buildup of heat-trapping gases was probably contributing to the loss of sea ice to date or that the continued buildup of these gases, left unchecked, could create ice-free Arctic summers ...possibly in as little as three decades. The Interior Department ...must also work out a recovery plan to control and reduce harmful impacts to the species, usually by controlling the activities that cause harm. It is unclear whether such a recovery plan could avoid addressing the link between manmade emissions of heat-trapping gases and the increase in Arctic temperatures. Kert Davies, the research director for Greenpeace U.S.A., one of three environmental groups that sued the Interior Department in 2005 to force it to add polar bears to the list of threatened species, said the administration was "clearly scrambling for credibility of any kind in this issue." Kassie Siegel, the lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, ...that took the lead in the lawsuit calling on the department to list the polar bear, added, "I don't see how even this administration can write this proposal without acknowledging that the primary threat to polar bears is global warming and without acknowledging the science of global warming." As a result of the lawsuit, the Interior Department had a court-ordered deadline of Wednesday to make a decision. The worldwide population of polar bears currently stands at 20,000 to 25,000, broken into 19 groups in Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States. ...The most-studied bear population, in the Western Hudson Bay in Canada, has dropped 22 percent, to 935 from 1,194 from 1987 to 2004....

12 December 2006. All but Ageless, Turtles Face Their Biggest Threat: Humans. By NATALIE ANGIER, NY Times. Excerpt: ...With its miserly metabolism and tranquil temperament, its capacity to forgo food and drink for months at a time, ... the turtle is one of the longest-lived creatures Earth has known. Individual turtles can survive for centuries,.... Last March, a giant tortoise named Adwaita said to be as old as 250 years died in a Calcutta zoo, having been taken to India by British sailors, records suggest, during the reign of King George II. In June, newspapers around the world noted the passing of Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise that died in the Australia Zoo at age 176 - 171 years after Charles Darwin is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have plucked her from her equatorial home. Behind such biblical longevity is the turtle's stubborn refusal to senesce - to grow old. ...Dr. Christopher J. Raxworthy, the associate curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, says the liver, lungs and kidneys of a centenarian turtle are virtually indistinguishable from those of its teenage counterpart .... "Turtles don't really die of old age," Dr. Raxworthy said. In fact, if turtles didn't get eaten, crushed by an automobile or fall prey to a disease, he said, they might just live indefinitely. ...Researchers estimate that at least half of all turtle species are in serious trouble, and that some of them, like the Galapagos tortoise, the North American bog turtle, the Pacific leatherback sea turtle and more than a dozen species in China and Southeast Asia, may effectively go extinct in the next decade if extreme measures are not taken. ...Geneticists have proposed that the turtle shell may have appeared quite suddenly in the distant past, rather than emerging slowly through modest, mincing modifications of pre-existing structures. They suggest that the dramatic innovation could have arisen from just a few key mutations in master genes like the so-called homeobox genes, which help specify an animal's basic body plan....

14 November 2006. Global Warming Increases Species Extinctions Worldwide, University of Texas at Austin Researcher Finds AUSTIN, Texas-Global warming has already caused extinctions in the most sensitive habitats and will continue to cause more species to go extinct over the next 50 to 100 years, confirms the most comprehensive study since 2003 on the effects of climate change on wild species worldwide by a University of Texas at Austin biologist. Dr. Camille Parmesan's synthesis also shows that species are not evolving fast enough to prevent extinction. "This is absolutely the most comprehensive synthesis of the impact of climate change on species to date," said Parmesan, associate professor of integrative biology. "Earlier synthesis were hampered from drawing broad conclusions by the relative lack of studies. Because there are now so many papers on this subject, we can start pulling together some patterns that we weren't able to before." Parmesan reviewed over 800 scientific studies on the effects of human-induced climate change on thousands of species....

September 2006. Dinos of the Sea Scramble to Survive. Terrain Magazine, Ecology Center. by Susan P. Williams Excerpt: All seven species of sea turtles are considered critically endangered by the World Conservation Union, but the precarious plight of the leatherback, the oldest and largest species, has conservationists especially alarmed. Karen Steele of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project says that the population has plummeted by over 95 percent, from 115,000 in 1980 to less than 3,000 nesting females in 2006. Steele worries that the big turtles may be only 5 to 30 years away from extinction.
...Known as "the dinosaurs of the sea," leatherbacks have been around for 100 million years, since before the time of Tyrannosaurus rex and friends. ...Leatherbacks face many threats, but chief among them are humans harvesting the eggs from nesting beaches and drift gillnet and long-line fishing. Drift gillnets, often a million square feet in size, are placed vertically like curtains to drift with the current and ensnare large fish. Long-line fisheries catch fish and sometimes turtles with 60-mile lines of baited hooks. Other hazards are plastic bottles and bags that leatherbacks may confuse with jellyfish, and developments near nesting beaches which, when lit up at night, draw hatchlings away from the water. Development of major nesting beaches around the Pacific has forced the population out to fewer, more far-flung areas...

11 July 2006. Racing to Know the Rarest of Rhinos, Before It's Too Late. By MARK DERR, NY Times. Excerpt: A two-ton rhinoceros measuring 5 feet tall and 10 feet long, with a fondness for browsing on low-lying shrubbery, hardly seems like a difficult animal to find. Unless there are fewer than 60 left on the planet. That is the case with the Javan rhinoceros, often called the rarest large mammal on earth and perhaps the most endangered. ...Because they lead solitary, secretive lives in remote forests in Indonesia and Vietnam, these rhinos are very hard to study: images of them come from "camera traps" activated by movement in the forest, and biologists get DNA samples from dung or from the horns and hides of dead animals. "It is totally amazing how little we know about these animals, their mating habits and social behavior," said Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando, director of the Center for Conservation and Research in Rajagiriya, Sri Lanka. "Till a decade ago people were debating whether the females have horns." (They do.) ...The plight of the Javan rhino is a direct result of human actions, especially habitat destruction and hunting, Dr. Fernando said. For millions of years, the animal flourished in lowland forests from eastern India and Bangladesh all the way to the islands of Java and Sumatra, now part of Indonesia. During periods of glacial advance and low sea levels, those islands formed a land mass, Sundaland, that was connected to the mainland. Unfortunately for the rhino, humans favored the same habitat and had little use for a large herbivore that raided their crops. Farmers regarded rhinos as agricultural pests and often killed them on sight. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the advent of colonialism and firearms drew hunters who slaughtered thousands. By 1934, the species was all but extinct on the Asian mainland. Devastated by the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the Ujung Kulon peninsula was later recolonized by rhinos and other animals but not by humans. It has since become a national park, and strong anti-poaching measures are in place. But perversely, the rhinos' numbers have barely budged since 1980; the lack of human disturbance means that mature forests and exotic plants are replacing the shrubby lowland vegetation the animal prefers. A further problem, the scientists say, is that the remaining rhino populations lack the genetic variation they need to combat disease, adapt to changing conditions and avoid the health and fertility problems that arise from inbreeding. ...The Indonesian forestry department has decided to improve rhino habitat in Ujung Kulon by keeping out or removing competitor species, like the banteng, a wild cow, and invasive, exotic plants that crowd out the rhino's preferred food, Adhi Rachmat Hariyadi, site manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature's Ujung Kulon National Park project, wrote in an e-mail message. ...
"Allowing a species such as a rhinoceros to go extinct in the 21st century," he writes, "would be tragic and unpardonable."

28 May 2006. Alligators Abound During Annual Fla. Count. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. ON LAKE OKEECHOBEE, Fla. (AP) Excerpt: ... officials estimate there are more than one million alligators in Florida -- a miraculous comeback for a species that was approaching extinction 40 years ago. State officials and environmentalists attribute the population growth to strict federal regulations on sales of alligator products like skin and meat, along with tight limits on hunting and trapping. ...Each year, scientists set out into some 50 locations statewide for the monthlong population assessment, recording alligator size and estimating age.
If they can't get close enough before a gator sinks beneath the surface, the biologists use estimates, sometimes using the distance between its eyes to determine size or noting the pace with which it fled. ...Though its brain is only the size of a man's thumb, the American alligator has proven highly adaptable since it emerged about 4 million years ago from a line of reptiles that have survived on Earth for 200 million years. ...the species can grow to 14 feet long and weigh up to 1,000 pounds during a life span of more than 30 years. ... In 1967, after years of overhunting and habitat loss, the American alligator was listed as an endangered species, but conservation efforts and hunting regulations led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to pronounce it fully recovered 20 years later. ...State alligator management: http://myfwc.com/gators

27 May 2006. Bear Hunting Caught in Global Warming Debate. By CLIFFORD KRAUSS. NY Times. Excerpt: RESOLUTE, Nunavut ...Polar bear hunting has gotten caught up in the larger debate over global warming. Scientists and environmentalists are pushing for measures to protect the animal, whose most immediate threat, they say, is not hunters, but loss of habitat. As its icy environs shrink, the polar bear has, improbably perhaps, become the new poster face of Arctic vulnerability. ..."People care about polar bears - they're iconic," noted Kassie Siegel, a lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity. ...Her group, along with Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council, filed a petition with the United States government to list the polar bear as threatened as a way to push the American authorities to control greenhouse gas emissions, like carbon dioxide from cars. The message has alarmed American polar bear hunters.... It has also run up against unbending opposition from local communities of Inuit, also known as Eskimos, and the Nunavut territorial government, which has expanded sport hunting in recent years. ... a list of stresses on the polar bear: Global warming is melting the bear's icy migration routes, critical for breeding and catching seals for food, around Hudson Bay and Alaska. ... there are more than 20,000 polar bears roaming the Arctic, compared to as few as 5,000 40 years ago, before Canada, Denmark, Norway, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to strong restrictions on trophy hunting in the 1970's. ...In Resolute, a snow-swept hamlet of shacks hugging a salty ice-packed Arctic channel, Inuit villagers hold an annual lottery to see who will get the permits to kill the local quota of 35 bears a year. Fifteen of those bears will be consumed locally, as food and to make rugs, mattresses, wind pants and mittens. The 20 other permits are sold to American hunters. With each permit, or tag, worth nearly $2,500, that means a fast infusion of nearly $50,000 a year into the community, on Cornwallis Island some 500 miles above the Arctic Circle. On top of that, the guides earn almost $8,000, and their assistants another $4,500, per hunt. ...

1 May 2006. 16,000 Species Said to Face Extinction. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. GENEVA (AP) -- Excerpt: Polar bears and hippos are among more than 16,000 species of animals and plants threatened with global extinction, the World Conservation Union said Tuesday. According to the Swiss-based conservation group, known by its acronym IUCN [http://www.iucnredlist.org], the number of species classified as being in serious danger of extinction rose from about 15,500 in its previous ''Red List'' report, published in 2004. The list includes one in three amphibians, a quarter of the world's mammals and coniferous trees, and one in eight birds, according to a preview of the 2006 Red List. ...The Red List classifies about 40,000 species according to their risk of extinction and provides a searchable online database of the results. The total number of species on the planet is unknown, with 15 million being the most widely accepted estimate. Up to 1.8 million are known today. People are the main reason for most species' decline, mainly through habitat destruction, according to IUCN. ...Freshwater fish have suffered some of the most dramatic population declines because of human activities that damage their habitat, like forest clearance, pollution and water extraction. In the Mediterranean, more than half of the 252 endemic species are threatened with extinction.

14 March 2006. A Rare Predator Bounces Back (Now Get It Out of Here). By ABBY GOODNOUGH. NY Times. Excerpt: OCHOPEE, Fla. - In the weeks before Valentine's Day, a healthy Florida panther kept emerging from the dense, sloshy wilderness around Big Cypress National Preserve to kill things he shouldn't: chickens, ducks, a turkey, a pig and a house cat, all on residential property that his stealthy species normally shuns. The hungry panther - nicknamed Don Juan by scientists who had radio-collared him years earlier and knew he had fathered some 30 kittens - kept coming back for more, despite efforts to deter him. So on Feb. 16, wildlife officials had dogs chase Don Juan up a tree, shot him with a tranquilizer gun and removed him from the wild. It was no light decision, as the number of Florida panthers, the only subspecies of puma east of the Mississippi, is estimated at fewer than 100. Cars have already hit and killed five other panthers in 2006, including one pregnant with four kittens and another that was crossing a road just north of the Florida Keys, far from typical panther habitat. A sixth was apparently killed by another panther, an increasingly common fate as the territorial cat loses habitat to subdivisions, golf courses and the like. A new federal report in January announced the obvious: that the Florida panther population must grow to survive - ideally, to three separate populations of at least 240 each - but that it is ever more desperate for space. The report, by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, rehashed the thorny old idea of moving some of the cats to Central Florida and eventually to other states where they once roamed, like Georgia and Arkansas....Darrell Land, the panther team leader for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, ... and other government officials said they hoped the new federal plan for dealing with "panther-human interactions" and educating the public would avert conflicts ...A panther that stalked or showed other aggressive behavior toward people would immediately be removed from the wild. But with one that killed pets or livestock, or did not retreat when a human tried to scare it away, wildlife officials would first try "aversive conditioning": chasing it with dogs, hitting it with a slingshot or otherwise trying to deter it from returning to the area. ...The new federal report - the latest draft of a panther recovery plan last updated in 1995 - suggests keeping panthers far from urban areas by moving some of them into rural Central Florida. But many scientists, including Mr. Land, are skeptical. They say that Central Florida does not have enough contiguous panther habitat, that the cats would have to cross more highways, and that much agricultural land would have to be turned into the dense forests that panthers prefer. A better alternative, many scientists agree, is moving some Florida panthers to remote areas of Georgia, Arkansas or other states where they used to roam and where choice panther habitat still exists. But as history and the recent tensions here suggest, getting the public to embrace what the report calls "large carnivore reintroduction" will not be easy. When Texas pumas were released in North Florida in 1988 and 1993, to gauge whether a permanent population of Florida panthers could be established there, local opposition was fierce and hunters shot some of the cats. ..."The cat was listed as endangered in 1967 and we're still waiting, 39 years later." In Arkansas, home to four of the nine recommended relocation sites, David Goad, deputy director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said panthers were unlikely to be welcome there. "Before you can move a large predator into an area you've got to have a lot of support from the public," Mr. Goad said....

2005

15 December 2005. Parrots of the Caribbean. By Alan Mowbray, Forest Magazine, Winter 2006. Excerpt: The Puerto Rican parrot was one of the first species to be listed under the Endangered Species Act more than thirty years ago. It remains one of the most critically endangered members of the list today; fewer than forty individuals remain in the wild. Five hundred and twelve years ago, on his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus dropped anchor off the Caribbean island that he named San Juan de Bautista. He and his crew of Spanish explorers saw white-sand beaches bordered by lushly forested mountains. They were greeted by the native Taino people, who gave them gifts of gold nuggets plucked from the island's rivers. Hundreds of noisy, bright-green parrots with beautiful white-ringed eyes swooped overhead. The Taino called these birds "Higuaca." At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonists estimated that there were nearly a million of these beautiful birds living in the island's forests. Today there are fewer than forty Amazona vittata-the Puerto Rican parrot-living in the wild on the island we know as Puerto Rico. ...Their demise is directly related to the rise of human population on the island: As colonists cut down forests and converted land for agriculture, the habitat on which the species depended started to disappear. The remaining parrot population, which had retreated to the Luquillo Mountains, was further reduced when the forests there were cut for charcoal production in the 1900s. ...By 1989, the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Plan had been in operation for almost two decades and the parrot population in the wild had increased to forty-seven birds. Then disaster struck. On September 18th, 1989, Hurricane Hugo roared across the Luquillo Mountains, destroying more than half of the parrots in the wild. By year's end, only twenty-two birds remained. By early 1994, the wild population had risen to thirty-nine birds and six breeding pairs. Today's parrot population continues to hover at that level....

6 December 2005. In Mongolia, an 'Extinction Crisis' Looms. By JOHN Noble Wilford, NY Times. Excerpt: ULAN BATOR, Mongolia - On a highway west of this capital, roadside signs advertise marmot, fox and other wildlife, and stacks of skins stand on display. In open markets, traders conduct a gritty commerce in furs and hides, much of it illegal. Similar markets flourish elsewhere in Mongolia, especially along the border with China....If the good news in Mongolia is the gradual comeback of the Przewalski wild horses, the disturbing news is the diminishing numbers of other wildlife, under relentless siege by overhunting and excessive trade in skins and other animal products. ... the populations of endangered species - marmots, argali sheep, antelope, red deer, bears, Asiatic wild asses - have plummeted by 50 to 90 percent. The only other possible exception to the woeful trend, conservation experts say, is the apparent increase in wolves. ...A draft report of the study, "The Silent Steppe: The Illegal Wildlife Trade Crisis in Mongolia," was circulated recently. ... Hunting for subsistence and income increased. Illegal trade in meat and other animal products proliferated. "Neighboring countries, especially China, have been the happy recipients of this new stream of wildlife product, consuming millions of animals every year and generating uncounted profits," ... more than 250,000 Mongolians, out of a population of 2.6 million, are active hunters. ...In the last five years, the saiga antelope has declined from more than 5,000 to fewer than 800; the saiga horn is prized in China as a traditional remedy. The red deer population has fallen 92 percent in 18 years, and the argali, the wild mountain sheep with handsome spiraling horns, are down 75 percent in 16 years. One of the rarest animals in the Mongolian mountains is the snow leopard, and its survival is endangered. ...The Gobi bear, a small animal related to the brown bear and known to exist only in a corner of the desert here, may be beyond saving. Dr. Zahler, of the conservation society, said that as few as 25 were left. "The bears appear to face numerous potential threats, ranging from lack of food and water to inbreeding and fragmentation of the few remaining breeding adults," Dr. Zahler wrote in an earlier research report.

26 September 2005. As Population of Yellowstone Grizzlies Grows, Further Protection Is Up for Debate. By JIM ROBBINS. After dwindling to 200 or so by the 1970's, the number of the big bears in the mountains and grassy meadows around Yellowstone National Park has grown to more than 600, thanks to the federal protections given to the species in 1975. "It's the biggest success story under the Endangered Species Act because grizzly bears are one of the toughest species to manage," said Chris Servheen, who has been working on efforts to protect and to re-establish grizzlies in Yellowstone and elsewhere for 25 years and is coordinator for grizzly bear recovery for the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Mont. While there is widespread agreement that the story is a good one, however, there is disagreement on the next chapter. The Fish and Wildlife Service, saying that the mission to bring the bear back has been accomplished, will propose removing the bear from the list of threatened species this fall and, after a comment period, make a final decision in 2006. Delisting has happened for only about 15 species out of the 1,830 on the imperiled list. But opponents of delisting say the bear is still endangered, primarily because of threats to critical food sources. Both sides say the science is on their side. ...Whether to recognize the Yellowstone bears as a recovered population is not just an abstract scientific debate. Grizzlies, which occasionally prey on people, are moving out of the park's mountain wilderness and federal forest refuges and into areas with growing human populations. Removing protections would allow the bears to be hunted. Since the late 1960's, there have been 17 fatalities involving bears and many more attacks in Yellowstone and Glacier National Park, home to the only other large population of the bears in the lower 48 states. ...A critical element in the Yellowstone grizzlies' future is that they are an island population, a remnant of a much larger one that once extended from the Pacific Ocean to the Midwest. While bears in Glacier are connected to much larger Canadian populations, bears in the Yellowstone area are, in terms of numbers and genetics, on their own. A disease could decimate the population.

Fall 2005. Seeking a Missing Species. By Richard S. Nauman. Forest Magazine. Excerpt: ...in the spring of 1996, when U.S. Forest Service biologists Dave Clayton and Sam Cuenca flipped over a rock and found something unexpected underneath, the esoteric study of genes, principally the realm of university researchers, became part of their daily work. Under the rock was a small woodland salamander. ... Clayton and Cuenca noticed that this salamander was different. It shared the general form and color of neighboring populations, but it appeared a little more full-bodied, with a wider head, shorter body and longer legs than other salamanders. Though they didnœt realize it at the time, the pair had discovered a species new to science, a salamander that may have been living for millions of years along the dry hillsides above the Klamath River in the rain shadow of the Marble Mountains. ... even as the new species was being established, changes in land management laws were affecting it. In 2004, the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, the two land management agencies governed by the Northwest Forest Plan, eliminated the survey-and-manage provision of the plan altogether. The original version had required salamander surveys prior to timber harvest, road building and other land management projects for the Siskiyou Mountains salamander and protection of all known sites. ...While federal agencies move cautiously with the management of the salamanders, the California Department of Fish and Game has submitted a petition to the State Fish and Game Commission recommending elimination of the state protections that protect both species on private lands, and states in its petition that "The Department further believes that no special management provisions or protections under the California Environmental Quality Act or Forest Practice Rules are necessary to conserve this species."

7 July 2005. Did humans cause ecosystem collapse in ancient Australia? Dr. Marilyn Fogel, Carnegie Institution. Washington, D.C. Massive extinctions of animals and the arrival of the first humans in ancient Australia may be linked, according to scientists at the Carnegie Institution, University of Colorado, Australian National University, and Bates College. The extinctions occurred 45,000 to 55,000 years ago. The researchers traced evidence of diet and the environment contained in ancient eggshells and wombat teeth over the last 140,000 years to reconstruct what happened. The remains showed evidence of a rapid change of diet at the time of the extinctions. The researchers believe that massive fires set by the first humans may have altered the ecosystem of shrubs, trees, and grasses to the fire-adapted desert-scrub of today.

6 June 2005. Prehistoric Decline of Freshwater Mussels Tied to Rise in Maize Cultivation. USDA Forest Service (FS) research suggests that a decline in the abundance of freshwater mussels about 1000 years ago may have been caused by the large-scale cultivation of maize by Native Americans. In the April 2005 issue of Conservation Biology, Wendell Haag and Mel Warren, researchers with the FS Southern Research Station (SRS) unit in Oxford , MS, report results from a study of archaeological data from 27 prehistoric sites in the southeastern United States. Worldwide, freshwater mussels have proven to be highly susceptible to human-caused disturbance, and represent the most endangered group of organisms in North America. Of 297 species found in the United States, 269 freshwater mussel species are found in the Southeast. "We can tie declines of specific mussel populations to the construction of dams, stream channelization, or pollution from a specific source," says Haag, "but the worldwide patterns of decline in these animals implies that larger-scale disturbances such as sedimentation and nonpoint-source pollution may have an equal impact." ..."Human population in the Southeast began to increase steadily about 5000 years ago," says Warren. "With increasing population came land disturbance from agriculture. This intensified about 1000 years ago, with the beginning of large-scale maize cultivation.... "As far as we can tell, Native Americans harvested mussels without preference for species," says Haag. "Shell middens provide us with a way to establish the range of freshwater mussel species before human impacts, and to chart changes in relative abundance as impacts increased." The researchers found that the relative abundance of riffleshell mussels in the rivers they studied declined gradually during the period between 5000 and 1000 years ago; however, the decline accelerated markedly during the period between 1000 and 500 years ago, when thousands of acres of land were cleared for farming.
Full text version of the article: http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/9281
For more information:
Wendell Haag at (662-234-2744 x245) or whaag@fs.fed.us
Mel Warren at (662-234-2744 x34) or mwarren01@fs.fed.us

2004

5 October 2004. NEW TOOLS FOR CONSERVATION (from NASA Earth Observatory website).
Scientists are studying animal and plant species with satellites. With remote sensing data, researchers are able to accurately map species' habitats and plan conservation programs.

6 January 2004. Multiplication Problem Threatens Stock of Sturgeon, By CHRISTOPHER PALA. TYRAU, Kazakhstan - Beluga caviar, pearly black and $1,500 a pound, goes well with Champagne. But next year, connoisseurs may have to do with farmed American caviar or lesser Caspian species if the United States Fish and Wildlife Service decides to ban imports. At issue is the number of beluga sturgeon in the Caspian Sea. Some researchers say the sturgeon, a 200-million-year-old species, is in serious trouble. [photo caption] A beluga was dragged to a barge on the Ural River near Atyrau, Kazakhstan. The river is the last spawning ground for the endangered sturgeon. Overfishing has wiped out much of the adult population.

2003

18 December 2003. NASA HELPS FORCAST REPTILE DISTRIBUTIONS IN MADAGASCAR -- NASA-supported biologists developed a modeling approach that uses satellite data and specimen locality data from museum collections to predict successfully the geographic distribution of 11 known chameleon species in Madagascar.

2001

5 March 2001. Where Frogs Live by Michon Scott. In the 1970s, Cynthia Carey was studying a population of boreal toads in the Colorado Rocky Mountains for her Ph.D. thesis when the unthinkable happened: all the toads in her study mysteriously died. Carey suspected a pathogen, perhaps bacterial, but had no way to verify her hypothesis. In the late 1980s, amphibian population declines gained widespread attention as a growing number of researchers observed similar problems. When they returned to once-thriving frog habitats, the familiar amphibians were gone. Concern deepened in 1995 when Minnesota schoolchildren visited a local frog pond to discover alarming deformities in leopard frogs.

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