The Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, and IUCN today announced they had established the Save Our Species (SOS) initiative with more than $US10 million in financing commitments and called on businesses to help build the biggest global species conservation fund by 2015.
Four years into a wildlife disease epidemic that has already killed more than a million bats in the eastern United States, the federal government today finally released a national response plan for white-nose syndrome. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan is still only in draft form and only provides a conceptual framework for responding to the disease. It lists no specific action items and makes no concrete recommendations for research and management of the fast-spreading malady that has hit [...]
Microbes living at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico may consume far more of the gaseous waste from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill than previously thought, according to research carried out within 100 miles of the spill site.
Dr. Jack Musick, emeritus professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has overseen a global study suggesting that 33 percent of shark, skate, and ray species are threatened with extinction.
Think of it as Habitat for Penguinity. A University of Washington conservation biologist is behind the effort to build nests in the barren rocks of the Galápagos Islands in the hope of increasing the population of an endangered penguin species.
The Table Mountain Ghost Frog, Heleophryne rosei, is listed as ‘Critically Endangered’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This elusive species is restricted to swift-flowing streams on the slopes of Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain.
The most comprehensive assessment of the world’s vertebrates confirms an extinction crisis with one-fifth of species threatened. However, the situation would be worse were it not for current global conservation efforts, according to a study launched at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD, in Nagoya, Japan.
Between 1999 and 2009, more than 1,200 new species of plants and vertebrates were discovered in the Amazon biome – or one new species every 3 days – confirming the Amazon as one of the most diverse places on Earth, says a WWF report.
As Halloween approaches, tales of monsters and creepy crawlies abound. Among the most fearsome is the legendary beast known as the chupacabras.
While many people will be pursuing the latest pop culture icons as Halloween costumes this year, one of the annual icons of Halloween might be viewed as the Rodney Dangerfield of Halloween symbols. The legendary comedian based his career on the line “I get no respect,” which might also apply to the misunderstood flying mammal known as bats. The animals often carry a negative connotation that doesn’t reflect the respective role bats play in biological ecosystems. Dr. Erin Gillam, a [...]
Scientists studying disease and climate change as part of a special multidisciplinary team at Cornell University are heading to the mountains of Puerto Rico – hoping to learn what a struggling frog species can tell us about the danger changing weather patterns present to ecosystems around the globe.
The Usambara Drumming Grasshopper, Ixalidium transiens, has not yet been officially evaluated for inclusion on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, however, it has a provisional assessment of ‘Vulnerable’. It is endemic to the East Usambara Mountains in Tanzania and is a nocturnal species that dwells in the litter layer of evergreen submontane forests. It drums on the substrate with its hind legs to attract females.
Contrary to some previous, highly publicized, reports, ocean acidification is not likely to worsen the hearing of whales and other animals, according to a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientist who studies sound propagation in the ocean.
Rotifers are tiny aquatic creatures with options: They can have sex, or they can simply clone themselves. And this ability to go both ways has made them interesting subjects in the study of the evolution of sex.
Carbon pollution and over-use of Earth’s natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030, the WWF said on Wednesday.
Conservation and citizen groups today filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining for failing to conduct Endangered Species Act consultations prior to authorizing the renewal of an operating permit for the Navajo Coal Mine in northwest New Mexico. The agency was required to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to avoid impacts to threatened and endangered species from the mining of coal at Navajo Mine, its combustion [...]
The Chacoan Peccary, Catagonus wagneri, is listed as ‘Endangered’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The largest peccary species, it is endemic to the dry Chaco of western Paraguay, south-eastern Bolivia and northern Argentina.
Whale feces — should you be forced to consider such matters — probably conjures images of, well, whale-scale hunks of crud, heavy lumps that sink to the bottom. But most whales actually deposit waste that floats at the surface of the ocean, “very liquidy, a flocculent plume,” says University of Vermont whale biologist, Joe Roman.
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