Biodiversity

"A campaign to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2022 was on the agenda today at the highest level political meeting to ever discuss a single species."

"For most of three decades, the U.S. has financed massive aerial spraying of pesticides over a large part of Guatemala in an attempt to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly, but common precautions to limit exposure to the toxic chemicals are not being followed."

A new method of manipulating the genetic code of agricultural plants, known as targeted mutation, uses only genes that already exist in the plant. It may upend the debate over "genetic engineering."

"Here in the vast wilderness surrounding Peru's Alto Purús National Park, the locations of [mahogany] trees, worth tens of thousands of dollars in the United States, have become closely guarded secrets among members of indigenous tribes."

Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association's issues director, has called for all grizzlies to be shot on sight. He justifies the position by quoting Exodus.

"Up to 1.1 million acres of prairie in the Flint Hills of Kansas could be protected under the first National Wildlife Refuge unit designated by the Obama administration. To create the new protected area, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will establish a voluntary conservation easement program in eastern Kansas."

In a new book, a Dutch researcher says a new class of insecticides, the neonicotinoids, may be causing as much damage to bird populations as the DDT Rachel Carson wrote about in Silent Spring. Some bird populations in Europe are crashing dramatically.

"Scientists have observed the highest rate of beak abnormalities ever recorded in wild bird populations in Alaska and the Northwest, a study by two federal scientists said." The cause is undetermined, but an environmental cause is suspected.

"A small environmental miracle has occurred in Beatty, Nev., a former mining town that sits on the eastern edge of Death Valley between Jackass Flats and Sober Up Gulch. The people of Beatty have helped revive the Amargosa toad, a warty, speckled, palm-sized creature that's unique to the area and, just a few years ago, seemed headed for extinction."