#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

[femmefitz]

"ohhhhh the world is ending we'll never recover from this" the other day at work we found rivercane at a site that had been left to degrade for at least two decades. There's still time.

[feralgodmothers]

Ah, Severance. The newest show where, despite the frequency with which it saturates my dash, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the plot. <3

[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 😆

[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.

[synthoria]

December has always been the ultimate vomit marathon. Those flashy, ass-kissing award shows still churn my stomach like nobody’s business. But, hey, God’s got a wicked sense of timing—he makes sure the spectacle lands just right. It’s like a trailer playing out before my eyes, but instead of epic, booming narration paired with sharp, all-caps text and explosive sound effects, I get this awkward shitshow: overly long red error messages in the most basic lowercase font imaginable. A syntax error isn’t supposed to make you laugh, but damn if it doesn’t.

Walking into one of these events is like a sociobiological slap in the face. Still, I giggle to myself as the polished little raisins waltz in with their arm candy—slices straight out of the great braided bread of society. True male-female complementarity at its finest: humanity gleefully screaming down the power-trip rollercoaster to its doom.

At first, I used to feel sorry for these walking props. You look at them, all innocent and awkward, stiff in the dress of their lives—like sheep’s wool stretched over a stool. I mean, it’s gotta suck when everyone knows your Panamanian hubby was sending half-naked selfies from the hotel bathroom to his latest fling just last year. But hey, a kingdom ain’t a kingdom without applause. At least tonight, in the shirt she ironed for him, he’s not wining and dining someone else—though, let’s not get ahead of ourselves; the night’s still young.

In the end, everybody just wants a relationship where they can “be themselves,” and these people, man… they’re fucking nailing it. A spectacular display of charm on the outside, while everything inside rots to hell. But you know what? The narrative is tight—there’s no unexamined self-contradiction in their actions or their stories.

The universe is at least fair enough to corral them all into the same pen, where you can observe them in their natural habitat. At the end of the day, a person’s humanity is defined by whether their heart is in the right place.

Take this past month, for instance. I honestly know people who spent my entire vacation blowing up my phone just to make sure I didn’t dare have a good time without them. But when it comes to offering condolences or stepping up? They’re lying low like rats in the grass.

There are folks I wish I’d met years earlier, and others I wish I’d never crossed paths with. But here’s the thing: nature doesn’t create complicated systems. Hell no. It’s all about simple, elegant structures. I could’ve saved myself this epic round of dragging people, but as I like to say, energy efficiency can skyrocket to quantum levels if you just shut up. Too bad my addiction to observation won’t let me.

[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 2021, scientists in Guelph, Ontario set out to accomplish something that had never been done before: open a lab specifically designed for raising bumble bees in captivity. 

Now, three years later, the scientists at the Bumble Bee Conservation Lab are celebrating a huge milestone. Over the course of 2024, they successfully pulled off what was once deemed impossible and raised a generation of yellow-banded bumble bees. 

The Bumble Bee Conservation Lab, which operates under the nonprofit Wildlife Preservation Canada, is the culmination of a decade-long mission to save the bee species, which is listed as endangered under the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation...

Although the efforts have been in motion for over a decade, the lab itself is a recent development that has rapidly accelerated conservation efforts. 

For bee scientists, the urgency was necessary. 

“We could see the major declines happening rapidly in Canada’s native bumble bees and knew we had to act, not just talk about the problem, but do something practical and immediate,” Woolaver said. 

Yellow-banded bumble bees, which live in southern Canada and across a huge swatch of the United States, were once a common species.

However, like many other bee species, their populations declined sharply in the mid-1990s from a litany of threats, including pathogens, pesticides, and dramatic habitat loss. 

Since the turn of the century, scientists have plunged in to give bees a helping hand. But it was only in the last decade that Woolaver and his team “identified a major gap” in bumble bee conservation and set out to solve it. 

“No one knew how to breed threatened species in captivity,” he explained. “This is critically important if assurance populations are needed to keep a species from going extinct and to assist with future reintroductions.”

To start their experiment, scientists hand-selected wild queen bees throughout Ontario and brought them to the temperature-controlled lab, where they were “treated like queens” and fed tiny balls of nectar and pollen. 

Then, with the help of Ontario’s African Lion Safari theme park, the queens were brought out to small, outdoor enclosures and paired with other bees with the hope that mating would occur. 

For some pairs, they had to play around with different environments to “set the mood,” swapping out spacious flight cages for cozier colony boxes. 

And it worked. 

“The two biggest success stories of 2024 were that we successfully bred our focal species, yellow-banded bumble bees, through their entire lifecycle for the first time,” Woolaver said. 

“[And] the first successful overwintering of yellow-banded bumble bees last winter allowed us to establish our first lab generation, doubling our mating successes and significantly increasing the number of young queens for overwintering to wake early spring and start their own colonies for future generations and future reintroductions.”

Although the first-of-its-kind experiment required careful planning, consideration, resources, and a decade of research, Woolaver hopes that their efforts inspire others to help bees in backyards across North America. 

“Be aware that our native bumble bees really are in serious decline,” Woolaver noted, “so when cottagers see bumble bees pollinating plants in their gardens, they really are seeing something special.”"

-via GoodGoodGood, December 9, 2024

[shithowdy]

there's a post going around asking for your most millennial take and mine is that the livejournal icon ecosystem was essential for a certain type of fan and this loss of critical habitat is why the bios of so many people under 25 are Like That

[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.