Federal scientists are on the lookout for the Eskimo curlew, as they work to determine if the elusive shorebird last seen two decades ago still exists.
Tiny algae and a whale native to the Pacific have crossed a thawing Arctic Ocean in what may portend a marine invasion threatening Atlantic fish stocks, scientists said on Sunday.
The Pacific algae, absent from the North Atlantic for 800,000 years according to fossil records, apparently returned after climate change thawed sea ice and currents carried the microscopic plants across the Arctic Oc
New Study Says Claims Overstated By 160%
New Delhi: After climate gate, the green brigade might be looking at another scandalous exaggeration laid bare
Europe's fisheries chief called on Wednesday for close monitoring of the trade in bluefin tuna caught in Libyan waters, fearing illegal catches could push the endangered fish closer to extinction amid the chaos of war.
Atlantic bluefin fetch more than $100,000 each in markets such as Japan, but stocks have plunged by more than 80 percent since the 1970s due to overfishing, many scientists say.
A projected spate of extinctions of animals and plants this century may be less drastic than feared because the most widely used scientific method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent, a study said on Wednesday.
"Extinctions caused by habitat loss require greater loss of habitat than previously thought," two experts, based in China and the United States, wrote in the journal Nature.
Extinction from habitat loss is the signature conservation problem of the twenty-first century. Despite its importance, estimating extinction rates is still highly uncertain because no proven direct methods or reliable data exist for verifying extinctions. The most widely used indirect method is to estimate extinction rates by reversing the species–area accumulation curve, extrapolating backwards to smaller areas to calculate expected species loss. Estimates of extinction rates based on this method are almost always much higher than those actually observed.
Conservationists predict massive extinctions as a result of habitat loss. Habitat loss undoubtedly does drive extinctions, but dealing with an unmet assumption that underlies these predictions yields much lower estimates.
Federal protections for some 1,200 gray wolves in Montana and Idaho end on Thursday under unprecedented legislation passed by the U.S. Congress last month removing them from the endangered species list.
The effective date of the de-listing, which places the wolves under state wildlife control and opens them to licensed hunting, was announced on Wednesday by U.S.
