Species

Federal officials announced today that they are removing the brown pelican from the endangered species list, capping a century-long recovery that started under President Theodore Roosevelt. The brown pelican is an avian fixture in Southern California and along the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Florida, where Roosevelt established the first national wildlife refuge on Pelican Island to protect the bird from human slaughter. It is an icon in Louisiana, where it is the state bird and where Interior Department officials assembled today at the Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge near New Orleans to proclaim the brown pelican "fully recovered" and no longer in need of federal protection.

Top 10 lists are standard fodder for media: the 10 best dressed, the 10 best-looking, the 10 most wanted, etc. But the International Institute for Species Exploration, headquartered at Arizona State University, has a new take on such lists. For the last five years, the institute has been issuing a top 10 list of the quirkiest, most bizarre and just plain interesting new species discovered the previous year.

Hit the snooze on that ecological doomsday clock for a minute: The world's species may not be going extinct quite as fast as we thought they were. Scientists may be overestimating the crisis by as much as 160%, according to a recent study. The research was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. While stressing that the global extinction crisis is still indeed a crisis, the study's two authors called for a better mathematical model to predict how fast the world's diversity is disappearing.

NEW YORK - Leah Tyrrell wants to make something clear: She does not wear ladybug sweatshirts. She does not carry her belongings in ladybug bags, shelter from the rain beneath a ladybug-shaped umbrella, or take notes with pens decorated with little ladybugs. True, someone did give her earrings in the shape of ladybugs, and another admirer gave her a rock painted like a ladybug. A woman once saw her in the supermarket and said loudly, "Oh! The ladybug lady!" For the most part, though, the Buffalo-based student and mother of two says she is no different from thousands of other people across North America and Mexico who have become absorbed in an effort called the Lost Ladybug Project, which Cornell University entomologist John Losey started 12 years ago to document the insects and determine why some species are declining.

About to have unprotected sex to ring in the new year? Think about the critically endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtle! Or the Florida panther, or the Lange's metalmark butterfly, or any of hundreds of other endangered species. And then call the Hump Smarter Hotline. The hotline, part of the Center for Biological Diversity 's 7 Billion and Counting Project, aims to persuade randy revelers to practice safe sex and avoid unwanted pregnancies. Aw, you know you want to call it now, even if just out of curiosity.

At this time of year, do you ever find yourself wondering if turkey the bird has anything to do with Turkey the country? Is it really a coincidence that the main course of our national meal shares its name with a large Muslim country that stretches from Europe to the Caucasus? After all, besides being the star attraction at Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey is a bird so American that Benjamin Franklin wanted it as our national symbol. (He considered the bald eagle to be "of low moral character.

The news was mixed this week as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would move forward on a review of 29 plant and animal species and assess their inclusion on the federal endangered species list. The fact that the agency is considering listing any species represents a change from the last eight years. But the service also rejected petitions for nine species, including the ashy storm-petrel, a California seabird. For those who submitted petitions that were denied, the situation appeared dire.

It is fashionable among environmentalists today to paint a gloomy portrait of our future. Although there are many environmental issues yet to be solved, too many species endangered, more pollution than most of us would like and far too many people still going hungry each day, let's not forget how far we've come, starting 10,000 years ago. Before that time, all people lived as hunter-gatherers in relative poverty compared with today. How poor were they? If you walk into a Yanomamö village in Brazil today — a good analogue for how our ancestors lived — and count up the stone tools, baskets, arrow points, arrow shafts, bows, hammocks, clay pots, assorted other tools, various medicinal remedies, pets, food products, articles of clothing and the like, you would end up with a figure of about 300. Before 10,000 years ago, this was the approximate material wealth of each village on the planet.

Rare plants are increasingly finding their way outside their normal habitats because of commercial sellers and citizen conservationists, two ecologists warn. Unless the movement of such plants is better regulated, it could spell trouble for endangered species as well as the environments to which they are moved. The caution, written by Patrick Shirey and Gary Lamberti at the University of Notre Dame and published in the journal Nature, warned that rare plants grown outside their native territories can disrupt their new environment, hybridize with related plants and blur their genetic individuality, or carry pathogens them that devastate other plants.

Re "Study Says Frog Habitat Won't Hamper Builders," Dec. 22: My biologist colleagues and I sincerely wish that both the Building Industry Assn. and the Center for Biological Diversity would stop the hype and deception about [the] "critical habitat" [designation] for endangered species. The Endangered Species Act clearly states that critical habitat only applies to federal lands; it offers absolutely no additional protection for species on private or state-owned lands. Without critical habitat, it remains illegal under the ESA to harm listed species, and the ESA requires both private and federal landowners to minimize and mitigate such harm, whether or not the project lies within a critical habitat zone.

If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child's brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. That provided a distinct competitive advantage for early humans when limited resources and a small population made it difficult for them to thrive. "Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened," said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden.

The first documented outbreak of canine distemper in desert kit foxes has spread beyond its origins at a construction site west of Blythe and could take a heavy toll on the species, state wildlife biologists said Tuesday. Biologists have nearly given up hope of containing the deadly virus. It was first diagnosed in October during construction at the $1-billion Genesis Solar Energy Project site, about 25 miles west of Blythe. Eight of the cat-sized foxes died there. Since then, distemper has been detected in living kit foxes and two dead ones up to 11 miles south of Genesis, said Deana Clifford, wildlife veterinarian for the California Department of Fish and Game.

Tests on seafood sold at Los Angeles sushi bars, other restaurants, and grocery stores have revealed that more than half is not labeled correctly, a nonprofit organization is reporting. Red snapper, Dover sole, white tuna and other fish were often different species, the group Oceana found in DNA tests of seafood from 74 retail outlets in Los Angeles. In all, 55% of 119 fish samples from across L.A. were misidentified, Oceana said. Oceana focused on the frequency of mislabeling rather than its origins.

Hunters in Texas will no longer be able to shoot down three endangered species of antelopes without a federal permit, a judge ruled Tuesday. A special federal exemption had previously allowed breeders of the scimitar-homed oryx and two other endangered African antelopes to sell and allow their animals to be hunted - at $5,500 a head. As a result, herds grew exponentially on exotic hunting ranches nationwide, especially in Texas. However this exemption of the Endangered Species Act disappeared Tuesday after a federal judge rejected a last-minute appeal by ranchers for an injunction.

Federal biologists have concluded that another native fish of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is headed toward extinction, underscoring the region's severe environmental problems. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday that it has determined that longfin smelt in the delta deserve Endangered Species Act protections. But the finding won't expand restrictions on the delta's water operations because the agency is simply designating the fish a candidate for listing.

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly discovered fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have unearthed a rare, 3.4-million-year-old partial foot that resembles those belonging to Ardipithecus ramidus , a species thought to have roamed East Africa a million years before Lucy and other members of her species, Australopithecus afarensis . The findings, published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, provide the first good evidence that another bipedal human relative was still climbing trees at the same time that Lucy and her kind had their feet planted on the ground.

A U.S. District Court judge Tuesday ordered three federal agencies to "take all necessary measures" to better protect 40 endangered species in four national forests in Southern California. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's action followed a 2009 federal court decision that management plans for the Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres and San Bernardino national forests failed to ensure that human activities not jeopardize already-imperiled plants and animals. Photos: Threatened with extinction Patel gave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Forest Service six months to develop and implement long-term safeguards for the 40 species, which include the California condor and California gnatcatcher.

Even in territory as well-traversed as California, biologists can discover new creatures. The latest? A species of scorpion in Death Valley National Park. Wernerius inyoensis is tiny — just over half an inch long — and may live underground. Matthew Graham, a doctoral student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, discovered it during a nighttime search of the park, using a special ultraviolet light that made the animal glow in the dark. Scorpions have chemicals in their exoskeletons that fluoresce under UV light.

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Congress acted legally when it eliminated Endangered Species Act protections for the Northern Rocky Mountain population of gray wolves and opened the door to wolf hunts. The opinion, by a Democrat-appointed panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, found that when Congress last year ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove protection for that distinct wolf population, lawmakers were amending the law and not violating the separation of powers doctrine.