2. The Trail Back From Near Extinction

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 2

2010 March 5. No Endangered Status for Plains Bird. By John M. Broder, NY Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON — The Interior Department said Friday that the greater sage grouse, a dweller of the high plains of the American West, was facing extinction but would not be designated as an endangered species for now.
Yet the decision in essence reverses a 2004 determination by the Bush administration that the sage grouse did not need protection, a decision that a federal court later ruled was tainted by political tampering with the Interior Department’s scientific conclusions.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a conservative Democrat from a Colorado ranching family, sought to carve a middle course between conservationists who wanted ironclad protections for the ground-hugging bird and industry interests and landowners who sought the ability to locate mines, wells, windmills and power lines in areas where the grouse roam....
As a compromise measure, he said, the bird will be placed on the list of “candidate species” for future inclusion on the list and its status will be reviewed yearly.
The middle-ground decision is typical of Mr. Salazar’s stewardship at the Interior Department, where he has tried to mediate between competing energy and environmental interests. Like many previous decisions, including compromises on oil drilling in Utah and habitat protection for the polar bear in the Arctic, Mr. Salazar’s action left both sides somewhat disgruntled.
Residential building and energy development have shrunk the sage grouse habitat over the past several decades, causing its population in 11 Western states to dwindle from an estimated 16 million 100 years ago to 200,000 to 500,000 today....

2010 February 1. Saving Tiny Toads Without a Home. By Cornelia Dean, NY Times. Excerpt: This is a story about a waterfall, the World Bank and 4,000 homeless toads.
Maybe the story will have a happy ending, and the bright-golden spray toads, each so small it could easily sit on a dime, will return to the African gorge where they once lived, in the spray of a waterfall on the Kihansi River in Tanzania.
The river is dammed now, courtesy of the bank. The waterfall is 10 percent of what it was. And the toads are now extinct in the wild.
But 4,000 of them live in the Bronx and Toledo, Ohio, where scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Toledo Zoo are keeping them alive in hopes, somehow, of returning them to the wild. This month, the Bronx Zoo will formally open a small exhibit displaying the toads in its Reptile House.
Meanwhile, though, the toads embody the larger conflicts between conservation and economic development and the complexity of trying to preserve and restore endangered species to the wild. Their story also raises questions about how much effort should go to save any one species....

2009 August 7. Cradle to grave: Study provides insight into evolution and extinction of vanished elephant seal colony. By Peter Rejcek, Antarctic Sun. Excerpt: An extinct southern elephant seal colony that once existed in huge numbers along sandy and rocky beaches in Antarctica has provided new insight into how quickly a species can respond to the emergence of a new habitat as climate changes — and just as quickly disappear.
That's one of the findings in a paper published in the journal PLoS Genetics in July by scientists who studied DNA sequences from the organic remains of seals found along a nearly 300-kilometer stretch of coastline in Victoria Land, just north of the U.S. Antarctic Program's McMurdo Station.
Mark de Bruyn , lead author of the study and now with Bangor University in the U.K, said the findings showed that a very large, genetically diverse breeding population of southern elephant seals existed in the Ross Sea region around 7,000 to 400 years ago.
...Climate change, the scientists say, allowed the colony to both thrive and later collapse.
It appears the ice sheet along the coast began to recede about 8,000 years ago as the interglacial climate warmed — the time period between ice ages, the most recent being the Holocene. In addition, the sea ice that would have blocked access to the beaches appears to have disappeared or declined enough for long periods of time each year to allow the seals to breed and molt on land, said Brenda Hall , a geologist with the University of Maine and a co-author on the paper.
The colony then began to decline about 1,000 years ago, according to the researchers, indicating yet another change in the climate.
"Our main conclusion is that things have cooled off in that part of the western Ross Sea over the last 500 to 1,000 years and the sea ice has re-expanded," Hall said. "We also see some evidence of glacier re-expansion at that time as well."...

2009 April 27. Eight cases of extreme species rescue. By Catherine Brahic, NewScientist. Excerpt: Swooping down in a last-ditch effort to thwart extinction, conservationists have airlifted 50 mountain chicken frogs from the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
While conservation biologists prefer to help a species survive in its natural environment, extreme cases like that of the mountain chicken (Leptodactylus fallax) call for extreme rescue measures. Here we present eight more novel attempts at species saving....
1. California condor
In 1987, the last remaining 22 California condors were brought into captivity and bred at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo. The scientists removed the first-laid clutches to encourage females to produce more eggs, but this meant that roughly half the young had to be reared by humans. To make them as "wild" as possible, they were fed and reared using condor-shaped hand puppets.
The human effort didn't end there. When young condors released into the wild electrocuted themselves on power lines, the scientists installed mock pylons in their cages, delivering mild electric shocks to any bird that perched on them.
Even still, the released birds did not behave "properly" – they congregated in urbanised zones and played with garbage. One researcher said it was like "putting teenagers together without adult supervision. They were behaving like a bunch of hooligans". The researchers used the remaining captive wild birds to discipline the youngsters.
The scientists' work to help the species paid off, with 322 condors known to be living with 172 in the wild as of April 2009....

2009 March 16. The Fall and Rise of the Right Whale. By Cornelia Dean, The NY Times. Excerpt: ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — The biologists had been in the plane for hours, flying back and forth over the calm ocean....
...And there, below, were a right whale mother and her new calf, barely breaking the surface, lolling in the swells.
The researchers, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Georgia Wildlife Trust, are part of an intense effort to monitor North Atlantic right whales, one of the most endangered, and closely watched, species on earth. As a database check eventually disclosed, the whale was Diablo, who was born in these waters eight years ago. Her calf — at a guess 2 weeks old and a bouncing 12 feet and 2 tons — was the 38th born this year, a record that would be surpassed just weeks later, with a report from NOAA on the birth of a 39th calf. The previous record was 31, set in 2001.
...Actually, it’s one of so many good signs that researchers are beginning to hope that for the first time in centuries things are looking up for the right whale. They say the species offers proof that simple conservation steps can have a big impact, even for species driven to the edge of oblivion.
North Atlantic right whales, which can grow up to 55 feet long and weigh up to 70 tons, were the “right” whales for 18th- and 19th-century whalers because they are rich in oil and baleen, move slowly, keep close to shore and float when they die.
They were long ago hunted to extinction in European waters, and by 1900 perhaps only 100 or so remained in their North American range...
Since then, the species’ numbers have crept up, but very slowly. NOAA estimates that there are about 325, though scientists in and out of the agency suspect there may be more, perhaps as many as 400....
But “over the last four or five months there’s been a tremendous amount of good news,” said Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, a center of right whale research....

2008 Nov 3. Asking 'Why Do Species Go Extinct?' By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The NY Times--A CONVERSATION WITH STUART L. PIMM. Excerpt: 'I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?' - Stuart L. Pimm
For a man whose scholarly specialty is one of the grimmest topics on earth - extinction - Stuart L. Pimm is remarkably chipper. On a recent morning, while visiting New York City, Dr. Pimm, a 59-year-old zoologist, was full of warm stories about the many places he travels: South Africa, Madagascar and even South Florida, which he visits as part of an effort to save the endangered Florida panther. Fewer than 100 survive in the wild. In 2006, Dr. Pimm, who holds the Doris Duke professorship of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, won the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, the Nobel of the ecology world.
Q. HOW DOES A PERSON MAKE EXTINCTION THE CENTERPIECE OF A PROFESSIONAL LIFE?
A. In 1978, I went to Hawaii, supposedly a tropical paradise. I am an enthusiastic birder, and I looked forward to getting into the lush forest to view the abundant flora and fauna the islands were famous for. Here you had this rich island chain, out in the midst of the Pacific, full of wondrous birds and plants - a place supposedly richer in natural diversity than even the Galápagos....

2008 Mar 23. Anger Over Culling of Yellowstone's Bison By JIM ROBBINS, NY Times. Excerpt: GARDINER, Mont. - This was not the Yellowstone National Park that tourists see. ...more than 60 of the park's wild bison were being loaded on a semi-trailer to be shipped to a slaughterhouse. With heavy snow still covering the park's vast grasslands, hundreds of bison have been leaving Yellowstone in search of food at lower elevations. A record number of the migrating animals - 1,195, or about a quarter of the park's population - have been killed by hunters or rounded up and sent to slaughterhouses by park employees. The bison are being killed because they have ventured outside the park into Montana and some might carry a disease called brucellosis, which can be passed along to cattle.
The large-scale culling, which is expected to continue through April, has outraged groups working to preserve the park's bison herds.... ...The standoff has been made all the worse by the detection last year of brucellosis in several cattle elsewhere in Montana. Though experts believe the disease was transmitted by elk, not bison, the case has stirred passions among ranchers. Brucellosis ...when detected, requires that the cattle be destroyed. If another incidence of brucellosis appears in Montana, the state would lose its brucellosis-free status, ....
"Our interest is having a brucellosis-free United States," said Mr. Knight, the agriculture official. "The sole remaining reservoir is in the Greater Yellowstone. ...the best solution would be a vaccine for bison, .... Park officials, however, say it is not known when a vaccine, which they are researching, will be available.... In the last few years biologists have discovered that Yellowstone's bison are one of only two genetically pure herds owned by the federal government.
James Derr, a professor of genetics at Texas A&M who is studying the Yellowstone bison, said he feared that some behaviors or traits, including the propensity to migrate, could be lost with the killed bison. "The great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and daughter often travel together," he said. Killing them "is like going to a family reunion and killing off all of the Smiths. You are affecting the genetic architecture of the herd."...

13 February 2007. Sharing of Bison Range Management Breaks Down. By JIM ROBBINS, New York Times. Excerpt: MOIESE, Mont. - An effort to have two Indian tribes assist government officials in operating a federal wildlife refuge that is surrounded by their reservation has collapsed amid accusations of racism, harassment, intimidation and poor performance. But top federal officials say they are determined to resurrect it. ...The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 allows tribal involvement in the management of federal lands, and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, which have strong cultural links to bison, wanted the authority to manage the refuge. The Fish and Wildlife Service opposed ceding control over the bison range, and the Interior Department and tribal officials decided to split the mission. ..

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 2

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