endangered species

Overfishing made the grey nurse shark endangered, but it's the animal's bizarre, cannibalistic embryos that are making it difficult for the species to rebound. The gestating shark pups need a "time out," says Nick Otway, a fisheries biologist at Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in Australia. As a last-ditch effort to keep the species from eating itself into extinction, he built an artificial uterus, a souped-up fish tank that will give each unborn baby its own womb.

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Hara Woltz's clients don't say much -- mostly just ribbit. A landscape architect and biologist at Columbia University, Woltz has undertaken the daunting task of creating road-crossing tunnels for amphibians and reptiles, based on different animals' preferences for different tunnel attributes. Building herpetological crosswalks might seem absurd, but the stakes are high: nearly one-third of the world's amphibian species and many of its reptiles are spiraling toward extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation from human development.

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An environmental study reports that polarized light from surfaces, such as asphalt and glass buildings, is adversely affecting wildlife behavior.

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Adding insult to injury, many species that are already solidly facing extinction might actually be 100 times more endangered than previously thought, scientists say. A new mathematical model, developed by ecologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, produces extinction risks that are orders of magnitude higher than conservation biologists estimated in compilations like the IUCN red-list.

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It's official: polar bears are in trouble. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne has announced that he is accepting the recommendation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act. That means the bear is just one step from becoming "endangered," a category reserved for species on the brink of extinction.

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Ranchers and conservationists have long been at odds over how to manage the populations of predators at the top of the food chain. Now that wolves have been recently delisted from the Federal Endangered Species Act, state governments in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are wasting no time organizing hunts to reduce the animals' numbers, citing increased attacks on cattle as the reason for the culls. Conservationists are planning to respond with lawsuits against the federal government to attempt to bring the wolves back on the endangered list.

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Researchers use a range of digital technologies in the field to study animal populations. GPS collars and tags track range and migration; motion-sensitive cameras snap candid photos; pre-recorded calls and songs attract individuals so the scientists can get a closer look. Now a new tool has been added to the field arsenal for University of Montana biologists studying wolves in Idaho: the Howlbox.

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