#critical habitat

[rjzimmerman]

U.S.'s plan doubles the acres designated as critical habitat for manatees in Florida. (WLRN South Florida)

This map released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows the proposed critical habitat for manatees in Florida.

Excerpt from this story from WLRN South Florida:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday announced a plan to more than double the critical habitat designated for manatees in Florida to 1.9 million acres.

The proposed revisions also include a new designation of 78,121 acres in Puerto Rico for the Antillean manatee.

In Florida, the lands affected are 34% federal, 57% state, 7% local government and 2% private. Federal permits or funding within the habitat has to be reviewed by the Fish and Wildlife Service to prevent harm to the species.

Nikki Colangelo, a supervisor with the agency in Florida, said the maps benefit from decades of information gathering and data about manatees.

The Florida map adds Silver Springs, Tampa Bay and Withlacoochee Bay. "One of the main features that are essential for Florida manatee," Colangelo said, "are these areas of water that are warmed by natural processes. So, you know, the spring areas and thermal basins are extremely important for the species."

The revised map is nearly 15 years in the making -- since environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, got the wildlife agency to acknowledge it needed to update the one created in 1977.

The revisions come now, only because the environmental groups continued to press for them and, in 2022, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to submit a plan by this month. A comment period is open until Nov. 25.

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Celebrating World Aquatic Animal Day

[fuwaprince]

Um excuse me ma'am may I also be protected by the endangered species act of 1973 👉👈

[borgeslabyrinth]

"Florida is hell on earth" sounds like a you problem

[canisvesperus]

I’m sorry for being chronically offline…

*emerges from the woods to throw you a wip as a treat*

[bereft-of-frogs]

This is the second time I’ve posted this book, which is crazy for a book I wasn’t even really obsessed with (it was a fun read but it was 100% a romance novel, in that it was pretty trope-centered and extremely predictable, I just usually get that through other preferred media, but if you enjoy romance this one did it pretty well! Like if a hallmark movie had some gingersnaps vibes)

but!! Look my cocktail matched kind of! The whiskey sour had this cherry glaze that we agreed kind of looked like werewolf claws 😆

[paintedwarpony]

Ok. Not gonna lie.

This Twitch stream of Matt Mercer moving into his new mini and map office is making me so so happy.

[woomycritiques543]

Say you have no hope for Hazbin but want the leaks to be shut down

I legit never said that I have "no hope for Hazbin". I just said that the video the person made was decent. That's legit just it.

Also- those two opinions can exist in one place.

What are you people even saying anymore? The more I think about how much older the people who write these comments and or asks about or to me are, the worse they get. What the fuck?! LOL!

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from KLAS (Nevada):

A rare toad caught in the middle of a plan to develop geothermal energy in Nevada’s Churchill County could get a protected home from the federal government.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) on Friday published a proposal to set aside 930 acres — about 1.5 square miles — for the endangered Dixie Valley toad.

“We’re pleased that the Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing concrete action to protect the Dixie Valley toad,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“This precious little amphibian is an integral part of a wetland ecosystem that sustains migratory birds, pronghorn and golden eagles. Protecting its habitat safeguards the abundance of life at Dixie Meadows.”

Donnelly’s group has publicized the Dixie Valley toad’s plight, and emergency protection under the Endangered Species Act was established in 2022. Permanent protection came later in the same year.

USFWS identified the geothermal plan as “the primary threat to the Dixie Valley toad” in its proposal to set aside the land.

[milkdongcomics]

World Gorilla Day 2024 世界大猩猩日 HOMELESS GORILLA in "HEY HUMAN, SEE WHAT YOU DO!?" BUY 👈🏻 Instagram 👈🏻 Facebook 👈🏻

[todaysbird]

to clarify to anyone who thinks ive said otherwise - I am critical of how moo deng has been handled and how it appears that her image is being used for cryptocurrency/etc, but I am not overall critical of her zoo. I would say that after looking at the hippo habitat, it looks nice! I'm not sure where the information regarding habitats in the zoo being crowded/dirty is coming from, but (while I'm not local and have not been there!) to me they look only 'dirty' in the sense that, well, wild animals live in there and they don't prefer pristine habitats. you SHOULD be critical of the care of ANY widely meme'd/popular animal because 99% of the time there's something wrong if it's not a domestic pet, but that shouldnt escalate into outright racist statements about everyone at the zoo are animal abusers/the animals being kept in conditions they clearly aren't. keep being critical of 'celebrity' animals, but calling for boycotts of the zoo entirely etc are both an overreaction and ignorant of more severe animal welfare concerns

[reasonsforhope]

"In one of Africa’s last great wildernesses, a remarkable thing has happened—the scimitar-horned oryx, once declared extinct in the wild, is now classified only as endangered.

It’s the first time the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest conservation organization, has ever moved a species on its Red List from ‘Extinct in the Wild’ to ‘Endangered.’

The recovery was down to the conservation work of zoos around the world, but also from game breeders in the Texas hill country, who kept the oryx alive while the governments of Abu Dhabi and Chad worked together on a reintroduction program.

Chad... ranks second-lowest on the UN Development Index. Nevertheless, it is within this North African country that can be found the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, a piece of protected desert and savannah the size of Scotland—around 30,000 square miles, or 10 times the size of Yellowstone.

At a workshop in Chad’s capital of N’Djamena, in 2012, Environment Abu Dhabi, the government of Chad, the Sahara Conservation Fund, and the Zoological Society of London, all secured the support of local landowners and nomadic herders for the reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx to the reserve.

Environment Abu Dhabi started the project, assembling captive animals from zoos and private collections the world over to ensure genetic diversity. In March 2016, the first 21 animals from this “world herd” were released over time into a fenced-off part of the reserve where they could acclimatize. Ranging over 30 miles, one female gave birth—the first oryx born into its once-native habitat in over three decades.

In late January 2017, 14 more animals were flown to the reserve in Chad from Abu Dhabi.

In 2022, the rewilded species was officially assessed by the IUCN’s Red List, and determined them to be just ‘Endangered,’ and not ‘Critically Endangered,’ with a population of between 140 and 160 individuals that was increasing, not decreasing.

It’s a tremendous achievement of international scientific and governmental collaboration and a sign that zoological efforts to breed endangered and even extinct animals in captivity can truly work if suitable habitat remains for them to return to."

-via Good News Network, December 13, 2023

[999-roses]

... the people commenting about environmental destruction are like. Literally chugging terra nullius* 'conservationist' state park propaganda with a Healthy splash of global south-phobia 🙃 hello you privileged fucks living in post-industrialized places. Yap all you want about countries in the midst of industrialization right now, but ignore that your countries went through the same pains of industrialization in the mid-1800s/early 1900s and now you're reaping the benefits of neoliberal policies having exported industrial production (and the pollution that comes with it) in the global south

*(terra nullius means territory or land without a master, eg there were no real people/civilization here before, white people can just claim this land as their rightful colony property. It was popularly employed for indigenous erasure of north america by white settler colonists during westward expansion (monroe doctrine). This notion is still popular in [white] land conservation, in that it assumes that nature/some kind of primitive pastoral should without humans, erasing the mark of millenia of indigenous peoples shaping the land they lived on. this notion that humans/industrialization = pollution = bad for environment is dogmatically also applied to global south countries as well)

even now the carbon footprint of developed nations is still higher than global south. total, and obviously per capita (there are more people living in the global south hello!!!! global south includes china).

china industrialized quickly but is also leading in funding/efforts to convert to renewable energy. china is literally #1 in world producing electricity from renewable sources. while here, we have westerners still criticizing china about smog (which has drastically improved since the 2000s, with more improvement to be made) but their own countries are dragging heels on fossil fuels and allowing big oil to meddle in policies and public access to renewables (eg in usa a lot of solar panels are privatized/individualized to installation on your own house which means inefficient locale/harvesting because a house isn't the best place to install+harvest solar and is not an option for more & more people who aren't owning houses. solar farms scouted out without tree/other house cover are better. there are some solar and wind farms being put up by energy companies but are more expensive than regular fossil fuel-burning sources which undercut price with "free weekends/nights" deals)

also. sitting on an 'environmental' high horse while living in countries that don't actually process their own recycling REALLY FUCKING IRKS ME

Amazed that someone managed to both-sides the very basic and fundamental issue of ‘how would anarchism actually produce the necessities people need to live’, when very evidently, Marxist projects have been able to actually solve the basic issue of production, given the example of a cumulative few centuries of socialist state governance.

Even more amazed that the opinion of people on tumblr towards ‘how would your revolution make sure I get my medicine and don’t just die within a month’ is to say ‘this is unimportant! who cares! whether what we propose would actually work is the least of our worries, what matters is that we just do it anyway!’

[extinctionstories]

On April 19th, 1987, a bird known as Adult Condor 9 was captured in the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, near Bakersfield, California. After decades ravaged by the threats of lead-poisoning and pesticide exposure, and intense debate over the ethics of captivity, it had been determined that captive breeding was the final hope to save a species. As his designation might suggest, AC-9 was the ninth condor to be captured for the new program; he was also the last.

As the biology team transported the seven-year-old male to the safety of the San Diego Wild Animal Park, his species, the California Condor, North America's largest bird, became extinct in its native range. It was Easter Sunday—a fitting day for the start of a resurrection.

At the time of AC-9's capture, the total world population of California condors constituted just twenty-seven birds. The majority of them represented ongoing conservation attempts: immature birds, taken from the wild as nestlings and eggs to be captive-reared in safety, with the intention of re-release into the wild. Now, efforts turned fully towards the hope of captive breeding.

Captive breeding is never a sure-fire bet, especially for sensitive, slow-reproducing species like the condor. Animals can and do go extinct even when all individuals are successfully shielded from peril and provided with ideal breeding conditions. Persistence in captivity is not the solution to habitat destruction and extirpation—but it can buy valuable time for a species that needs it.

Thankfully, for the California condor, it paid off.

The birds defied expectations, with an egg successfully hatched at the San Diego Zoo the very next year. Unlike many other birds of prey, which may produce clutches of up to 5 hatchlings, the California condor raises a single chick per breeding season, providing care for the first full year of its life, and, as a consequence, often not nesting at all in the year following the birth of a chick. This, combined with the bird's slow maturation (taking six to eight years to start breeding), presented a significant challenge. However, biologists were able to exploit another quirk of the bird's breeding cycle: its ability to double-clutch.

Raising a single offspring per year is a massive risk in a world full of threats, and the California condor's biology has provided it with a back-up plan: in years when a chick or egg has been lost, condors will often re-nest with a second egg. To take advantage of this tendency, eggs were selectively removed from birds in the captive breeding program, which would then lay a replacement, greatly increasing their reproduction rate.

And what of the eggs that were taken? The tendency of hatchlings to imprint is well-known, and the intention from the very beginning was for the birds to one day return to the wild—an impossibility for animals acclimated to humans. And so, puppets were made in the realistic likeness of adult condors, and used by members of the conservation team to feed and nurture the young birds, mitigating the risk of imprintation on the wrong species.

By 1992, the captive population had more than doubled, to 64 birds. That year, after an absence of five years, the first two captive-bred condors were released into their ancestral home. Many other releases followed, including the return of AC-9 himself in 2002. Thanks to the efforts of zoos and conservationists, as of 2024 there are 561 living California condors, over half of which fly free in the wilds of the American West.

The fight to save the California condor is far from over. The species is still listed as critically endangered. Lead poisoning (from ingesting shot/bullets from abandoned carcasses) remains the primary source of mortality for the species, with tagged birds tested and treated whenever possible. Baby condors are fed bone chips by their parents, likely as a calcium supplement—but, to a condor, bits of bone and bits of plastic can be indistinguishable, and dead nestlings have been found with stomachs full of trash.

There's hope, though. There are things we can change, things we can counteract and stop from happening in the future. It was a human hand that created this problem, and it will take a human hand to fix it. Hope is only gone when the last animal breathes its last breath—and the California condor is still here.

-

This painting is titled Puppet Rearing (California Condor), and is part of my series Conservation Pieces, which focuses on the efforts and techniques used to save critically endangered birds from extinction. It is traditional gouache, on 22x30" paper.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Okay, I know people as a general rule tend to not care about invertebrates as much as cute, fuzzy mammals, but this is a must-read if you care about animal welfare. The short version is that horseshoe crab blood has been used for decades in medicine as a way to test whether something is truly sterile; the blood clots in the presence of bacteria. Since then millions of horseshoe crabs have been captured and drained of blood, even though a synthetic alternative was developed a few years ago.

They go through a pretty brutal experience in the process. They're caught by fishermen who often throw them by their tails into a pile in the open air, and they're then trucked to a bleeding facility where they're strapped down and their blood is removed with needles jabbed directly into their hearts. Over half their blood may be taken, after which they're supposed to be returned to the ocean. However, it's likely many of them never make it back, instead turned into fish bait and sold by the same fishermen who caught them in the first place.

Apart from the fact that this is a horrific thing to put any animal through, the attrition due to fatalities has put a serious dent in horseshoe crab numbers. This is compounded by massive habitat loss, pollution, and the capture of horseshoe crabs as food, particularly as the females of one species are considered a delicacy. And other animals that rely on horseshoe crabs are suffering, too. The American rufa subspecies of the red knot, a medium-sized shorebird, is critically endangered as the horseshoe crab eggs it must have in order to successfully complete migration have become increasingly scarce, and it is likely the bird will become extinct if trends continue.

While there are guidelines for medical horseshoe crab harvest, they're considered optional. The few laws that exist are poorly enforced. Short of a complete ban on horseshoe crab blood in favor of the synthetic alternative, these animals are in very real danger of going extinct after a history spanning over 400 million years on this planet.

Thankfully, this article is not the first to bring forth the issues surrounding horseshoe crab harvest. Here are a few resources for further information and action (US based, though horseshoe crabs are threatened throughout their entire range):

Horseshoe Crab Conservation Network - https://horseshoecrab.org/conservation/

Wetlands Institute - https://wetlandsinstitute.org/conservation/horseshoe-crab-conservation/

Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition - https://hscrabrecovery.org/

[herpsandbirds]

Dahl’s Toad-Headed Turtles (Mesoclemmys dahli), family Chelidae, endemic to northern Colombia

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.

Endangered due to habitat degradation and fragmentation.

photographs: Yeiner Vega (juveniles) and Luis Rojas