Biodiversity

"It's been called a crisis in amphibian biology: more than a third of amphibian species are at risk of extinction. Habitat loss and climate change are both causes, but so is an invasive disease that's been called the smallpox of the amphibian world. Researchers from D.C., Virginia, and Maryland recently traveled to Panama to try to help limit the effects of the disease."

"As long as American Indians have lived in the Pacific Northwest, they have looked to a jawless, eel-like fish for food."

The good news is that the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, expected to be bigger this year because of high runoff and the BP spill, did not set a record for size. The bad news is that oxygen levels in the dead zone that did develop this year are extremely low.

The former Rocky Flats federal nuclear plant was supposedly cleaned up before it was repurposed as a National Wildlife Refuge. But lack of money and invasive plants may keep plutonium worries alive.

"A group of eight senators is asking the FDA to cease consideration of the fish as food, and is threatening to pull funding for the study if the agency does not comply."

"Shrimp boats that fish in the Gulf of Mexico without the required turtle-excluder devices are killing more sea turtles than is allowed under the Endangered Species Act, the advocacy group Oceana said in a report Tuesday."

"Polar bear cubs forced to swim long distances with their mothers as their icy Arctic habitat melts appear to have a higher mortality rate than cubs that didn't have to swim as far, a new study reports."

Weeds in southern Missouri are becoming resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. Some farmers now resort to chemical cocktails -- or even hoes.

"The devastation that bark beetles and fungus have wreaked on hundreds of thousands of acres of whitebark pine trees in the northern Rockies has been tracked and chronicled for 30 years. Now the Fish and Wildlife Service has weighed in with a finding that climate change threatens the long-term survival of the species."