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In 1973, the American bald eagle population had drastically declined. Populations of American alligators, humpback whales and other landmark species were also diminishing, and America needed to act. In response, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The law was supposed to protect imperiled species on the brink of extinction. However, more than three decades later, the Endangered Species Act has failed to live up to its noble expectations. Today, nearly 1,300 species have been afforded the law's protections, yet, just 10 species have been taken off the list due to recovery. The truth be known, not one single...

VANCOUVER, Wash. — Fish advocates see the plan to demolish Condit Dam on the White Salmon River as good news for salmon everywhere, but the state Ecology Department says the project could hurt fish downstream and might violate the federal Endangered Species Act. Demolition of the 125-foot-high hydroelectric dam, owned by Portland-based PacifiCorp, is proposed for October 2008. The project would open 33 miles of steelhead habitat and 14 miles of salmon habitat in the area of the river blocked by the dam since 1913. The river forms a portion of the boundary between Klickitat and Skamania counties along the...

By Monica Yant Kinney Inquirer Columnist So I'm freezing my tail off on a bridge spanning the Delaware River yesterday, wondering how Petty's Island became the political equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. Strange things happen here, and I'm not just talking about the two bald eagles that flew overhead, as if on cue, while Doug Forrester made yet another pin-striped pitch for the antiestablishment tree-hugger vote. He's a Republican, remember? It's not your fault for forgetting. I, too, have had a hard time distinguishing one self-made multizillionaire candidate from the other. Democrat Jon Corzine is everything you expect in a...

It was a first for veteran anglers at one of the Allegheny River's hottest spots. They were being asked to donate their fish to science. On a recent Saturday, a cadre of fishermen at the Highland Park Dam filled buckets with white bass and channel catfish so that Dan Volz, a public health expert, can tell them someday soon whether what they catch is loaded with heavy metals and estrogen-like compounds, or chemicals that mimic the effect of estrogen, a hormone produced by the body and needed for the development and growth of female sex organs. snip While there are...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed yesterday that it will propose removing threatened-species protection from the marbled murrelet, a small seabird at the center of battles over logging in the Northwest. The proposal, to be formally made by the end of the year, will start a yearlong evaluation of the status of the bird. The marbled murrelet lives its life at sea but uses big old trees near the coast for nesting, laying a single egg in a mossy depression on a large branch. The proposal is based on the idea that the 17,000 to...

Snakes bite back at poison toads Snakes in Australia have evolved to counter the threat of invasive, poisonous cane toads, scientists have found. The toads ( Bufo marinus ) were only introduced in the 1930s but have already overwhelmed the local wildlife in Queensland with their rapid reproduction and toxic flesh, which kills many predators foolish enough to make them a meal. But for two species of snake, at least, natural selection has produced a defence: the snakes have developed relatively smaller heads and longer bodies. In essence, the reduced gape of the animals limits their ability to eat the...

Planting trees can create deserts, lower water tables and drain rivers, rather than filling them, claims a new report supported by the UK government. The findings - which may come as heresy to tree-lovers and most environmentalists - is an emerging new consensus among forest and water professionals. “Common but misguided views about water management,” says the report, are resulting in the waste of tens of millions of pounds every year across the world. Forests planted with the intention of trapping moisture are instead depleting reservoirs and drying out soils. The report summarises studies commissioned over the past four years...

By Carlos AndradeWed Jun 22, 8:48 AM ET Before the arrival of Spanish colonizers some 500 years ago, Indians in what is now Ecuador dipped their arrowheads in venom extracted from the phantasmal poison frog to doom their victims to convulsive death, scientists believe. More recently, epibatidine -- the chemical which paralyzed and killed the Indians' enemies -- has been isolated to produce a pain killer 200 times more powerful than morphine, but without that drug's addictive and toxic side effects. Pharmaceutical companies have not yet brought epibatidine to market but hope to discover other chemicals with powerful properties in...

A tiny parasite, colloquially known as a 'vampire mite,' is devastating honeybees. That worries experts because honeybee-pollinated crops are valued at more than $15 billion a year. By Susan SalisburyPalm Beach Post Staff Writer Monday, March 28, 2005 More than $15 billion in U.S. crops rides each year on the tiny legs of an insect. The honeybee is the major carrier of pollen for seeded fruits and just about anything that grows on a vine. Everything, in other words, from apples to zucchini. Damon Higgins/The PostenlargeMark McCoy walks among the hives with a smoker to keep bees calm, which allows...

A small, fossilized mammal had what appears to be poisonous fangs that allowed it to bite like a snake – the first such find in an extinct mammal, Canadian researchers say. Vertebrate paleontologist Richard Fox of the University of Alberta in Edmonton found the specimen in 1991. Now Fox and his research team say the extinct, mouse-sized creature was built to deliver venom. The fossil specimen, Bisonalveus browni, is shown in this recent handout photo. (CP photo) The world is home to few living mammals with venom delivery systems: the duck-billed platypus, the Caribbean solenodon, and a few rat-like shrews....

Direct Link Discovered Between Agricultural Runoff And Algal Blooms In SeaScientists have found the first direct evidence linking large-scale coastal farming to massive blooms of marine algae that are potentially harmful to ocean life and fisheries. Researchers from Stanford University's School of Earth Sciences made the discovery by analyzing satellite images of Mexico's Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California - a narrow, 700-mile-long stretch of the Pacific Ocean that separates the Mexican mainland from the Baja California Peninsula. Immortalized in the 1941 book Sea of Cortez, by writer John Steinbeck and marine biologist Edward Ricketts, the...

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?2908d135-6ebf-4647-8310-a7c0416ce86a Who Pays for the Delhi Sands Fly? The Endangered Species Act Keeps on Not Saving Endangered Species By Ronald Bailey, 7/27/2005 Environmental activists are howling worse than a heartsick wolf on a moonless winter night over proposed revisions to the Endangered Species Act (ESA). House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) is circulating a draft revision to the ESA that, according to Defenders of Wildlife Executive Vice President Jamie Rappaport Clark, "takes a wrecking ball to the whole Endangered Species Act." But taking into account that its goal is to conserve and recover endangered species, the Act already seems...

Marsupials not colour-blind after all Catriona Purcell ABC Science Online Monday, 28 March 2005 This little creature, called a quokka, is helping to overturn long-standing beliefs about marsupial vision (Image: Catherine Arrese/Nature) Australian marsupials can see in full colour, new research has found, making them the only other mammals apart from primates to do so. A team led by Dr Catherine Arrese from the University of Western Australia in Perth reports its findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a journal of the UK's Royal Society. Most people think marsupials lack colour vision, says Arrese, but her team's...

WILMINGTON, N.C. -- Gill net fishermen in Pamlico Sound could kill up to 100 threatened and endangered sea turtles every year through 2010 under a federal permit sought by the state. The permit also would allow up to 320 additional turtles to be caught and released during each September-to-December flounder fishing season. The proposal has outraged environmentalists and drawn criticism from some federal and state officials. They note that the Army Corps of Engineers isn't allowed to harm a third of that number of turtles for its dredging operations across the whole Southeast. The state Division of Marine Fisheries believes...

USFWS Contacts: Al Pfister(970)243-2778 x 29 or Diane Katzenberger (303)236-4578 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today announced the withdrawal of the Southern Rocky Mountain population of the Boreal Toad (Bufo boreas boreas) from the list of species being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The Service has determined that listing this population of the Boreal Toad at this time is not warranted because it does not constitute a distinct population segment as defined by the ESA. Although no further action will result from this finding, the Service will continue to seek new information on the taxonomy,...

MIAMI (AP) -- The alligator has some foreign competition at the top of the Everglades food chain, and the results of the struggle are horror-movie messy. A 13-foot Burmese python recently burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole, authorities said. The incident has heightened biologists' fears that the nonnative snakes could threaten a host of other animal species in the Everglades. "It means nothing in the Everglades is safe from pythons, a top-down predator,'' said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor. Over the years, many pythons have been abandoned in the Everglades by...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Twenty environmental groups sued the Bush administration over a decision to repeal Clinton-era regulations that blocked road construction, logging and industrial development on more than 90,000 square miles of the nation's last untouched forests. In the lawsuit filed Thursday, the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, Greenpeace and other groups challenged the U.S. Forest Service decision earlier this year to reverse the 2001 "roadless rule" that protected 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest. "These are the last wild areas of North America, and there is overwhelming public support for their protection from development," said Kristen Boyles,...

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a wild and awe-inspiring landscape relentlessly mischaracterized. Here is the October issue of Smithsonian magazine: "Though ANWRs coastal plain boasts a dazzling abundance of wildlife -- the largest concentration of land-denning polar bears in Alaska, enormous flocks of migratory birds, wolves, wolverines, musk oxen, Arctic fox and snowy owls -- the caribou remain the symbol of the fight over the refuge." This theme has become the environmental touchstone for ANWR, and it is a fraud. ANWR is wild and awe-inspiring not for its abundance of wildlife but for the unsettling scarcity of it, for...

A federal court ruling in favor of environmentalists is forcing the Forest Service to suspend more than 1,500 permits for activities ranging from fire prevention to Boy Scout meetings and also is threatening to delay cutting of the Capitol's Christmas tree until after the new year. A Forest Service regulation that allowed projects determined as having minimal environmental impact to be exempt from environmental studies and reviews was challenged by the Earth Island Institute. Judge James K. Singleton of the Eastern District Court of California ruled in July against a project to remove charred and damaged trees, which could kindle...

The Supreme Court, venturing into legal territory that it historically has avoided, said Tuesday it will consider restricting the government's authority to regulate wetlands. Jumping into a subject that is crucial for environmentalists, property owners and developers, the justices will take up claims that federal regulators have gone too far by restricting development of property that is miles away from any river or waterway. The cases give the court an opportunity to put limits on federal government authority, and a key player may be new Chief Justice John Roberts. The appeals were the first the court agreed to hear under...