By Richard Black Mexico’s twin crises – swine flu and the economy – may derail a plan to save the world’s most endangered cetacean. Only about 150 vaquita are left, and about 30 are dying each year through becoming entangled in fishing nets. The government has cut funding aimed at taking fishing boats out of […]
Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer Fluctuating ocean conditions may be depleting the food supply of young sea lions that are turning up skinny and ill on California beaches, mirroring the fate of Brandt’s cormorants earlier this spring. The animal strandings are so numerous that the newly expanded Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito can’t keep up. […]
ANCHORAGE, Alaska— Today, responding to a court-ordered deadline, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released long-overdue reports documenting the status of polar bears and Pacific walrus in Alaska. The reports confirm that polar bears in Alaska are declining and that Pacific walrus are under threat. Both species are imperiled due to the loss of […]
Pollution in the Mekong river has pushed freshwater dolphins in Cambodia and Laos to the brink of extinction, the conservation group WWF has said. Only 64 to 76 Irrawaddy dolphins remain in the Mekong, it says, and calls for a cross-border plan to help the dolphins. Toxic levels of pesticides, mercury and other pollutants have […]
Reindeer and caribou numbers are plummeting around the world. By Matt Walker The first global review of their status has found that reindeer and caribou numbers are plummeting around the world. It is increasingly difficult for the deer to survive in a world warmed by climate change and altered by industrial development, say scientists. The […]
ROCHESTER, New York, June 9, 2009 (ENS) – During pregnancy, exposure to a toxic family of chemicals called dioxins harms the cells in rapidly-changing breast tissue, according to new research from the University of Rochester Medical Center. The researchers believe their findings, although only demonstrated in mice at this point, may explain why some women […]
By Jeremy Hance Watch any nature documentary and it’s sure to include pulse-pounding footage of large herbivores migrating across African plains, Asian steppe, or the Arctic tundra. The images have become iconic: wildebeest forging a crocodile-inhabited river, caribou breaking through snow fields, Saiga running over tall grass. Despite such images of plenty, migrations are […]
By Julio Godoy BERLIN, Apr 3 (Tierramérica) – Ringed seals in the Baltic Sea are finding fewer and fewer ice caves in which to raise their young. Rising global temperatures are the problem, and in turn are depleting the main food source of the giant polar bear, say scientists. … According to the latest report […]
Researchers have marked another decline in northern fur seal pup births in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, where most of the world’s population of northern fur seals gather in the summer to rest and breed. “We started seeing an over-all decline in the abundance of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands around […]
WARMER temperatures and earlier melting of sea ice are causing polar bears to go hungry. The number of undernourished bears has tripled in a 20-year period. Seth Cherry of the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues monitored the health of polar bears in the ice-covered Beaufort Sea region of the Arctic during April and May […]
