Welcome to my blog.
All tagged endangeredspecies
This week the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing four species of giraffes under the Endangered Species Act. Giraffes live in Africa of course, but under the ESA it would be illegal to import any part of a giraffe into the US; the protections would also boost conservation funding for animals in the wild.
The world’s largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, is known as a voracious hunter with razor-sharp teeth. Now we know what makes those choppers so sharp: they’re laced with iron.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration, the Department of the Interior, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service – all because of a lizard barely two inches long.
The Cheshire zoo has announced the birth of an onager, or Asiatic wild ass, the world’s rarest equid. The foal, a male named Jasper, was born to Azita following a year-long pregnancy. Mother and son are healthy and thriving.
A team of scientists led by Mary Hagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute, have proposed an extreme idea to save endangered species: by storing them frozen on the moon. The proposal appears in the journal BioScience.
It may not sound like much to go from “endangered” to “vulnerable,” but for the Iberian lynx, the change augurs very good news for the species. Though still among the rarest cats in the world, the lynx’s rebound from near-extinction just two decades ago is evidence that conservation works, especially when all stakeholders are included in the effort.
Five axolotls were recently seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as they were being smuggled into the United States. Fortunately for the amphibians, they have been taken in by San Francisco Zoo & Gardens.
Hawaii’s birds are seriously imperiled by avian malaria, which spreads, like the more familiar variety of the disease, by mosquitoes. The counterintuitive solution to this dire problem involves releasing millions of mosquitoes into the wild.
Last week scientists in Berlin announced they had successfully transferred a northern white rhinoceros embryo into a surrogate mom, the first successful use of a method that they say could save the nearly extinct rhino subspecies.
What if we could synthesize rhinoceros horn, would that squeeze out the illegal trade of the real thing? Three companies have been working on such a scheme for over ten years, but nothing has come of it; all three are either out of business or about to be.
A zoo in the Czech Republic has announced the birth of an adorable pygmy hippopotamus, a wee male named Mikolas. The baby boy was born in December but unveiled to the public this week at the Dvur Kralove Zoo, about 75 miles east of Prague.
This week the Colorado Parks and Wildlife released five gray wolves in the wild, the first phase in the state’s program to establish a permanent, self-sustaining wolf population. The project was set in motion by a 2020 voter referendum demanding the reintroduction of the wolves, which had been eradicated from the state nearly a century ago.
In September, eight African painted dogs were born in South Bend, Indiana’s Potawatomi Zoo, but the zookeepers saw right away that the mother wasn’t interested in her new brood. Fearing for the survival of the new pups, the zoo brought in a surrogate mom, a heroic golden retriever named Kassy.
If you’ve never witnessed the birth of a rhinoceros, do we have a video for you. This month the Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England announced the birth of the extremely rare Eastern black rhino.
Molecular biologists have discovered that thousands of air-quality monitoring stations around the world have been recording more than just air pollution and dust, they are also collecting biodiversity data. Their findings are published in Current Biology.
Last month a popular stretch of a Waikiki beach was closed to visitors while a newborn monk seal was nursing. The pup has now weaned, so authorities relocated the six-week-old pup and mom to a more secluded spot.
The Oregon Zoo’s condor-breeding program deploys a devious method to monitor conditions in the critically endangered birds’ nests. When an egg is laid, the scientists swap it with a hi-tech fake, a 3D-printed “egg” packed with sensors.
Great apes in Africa are threatened by habitat destruction and poaching for bushmeat. Now there’s a new and growing threat: their babies are kidnapped and trafficked to supply a global for pets and zoos.
Zoe, a new-mom orangutan at the Metro Richmond Zoo in Virginia, didn’t know how to breastfeed her newborn. A lactating human zookeeper showed her how. The zookeepers knew Zoe was not was not up to this basic task in 2021 when her first child was born, a baby boy that Zoe would hold at arm’s length, not close enough to feed or bond with. Because Zoe’s own mother had died unexpectedly when she was just nine months old, she never learned these essential skill sets.
Rice's whale, found only in the Gulf of Mexico and described in 2021, is already critically endangered. Marine biologists are wondering what can be done to save the whales, if anything.
