The Amboseli Trust for Elephants aims to ensure the long-term conservation and welfare of Africa’s elephants in the context of human needs and pressures through scientific research, training, community outreach, public awareness and advocacy.

An international Animal Conservation Charity in Conjunction with Howletts and Port Lympne Wild Animal Parks.

Mission: to halt extinction of rare and endangered species and return them to the wild where possible.

It's the longest-running and most successful conservation project dedicated to cheetah survival.

Their signature programs, addressing human-wildlife conflict, livelihood development, education and habitat restoration, have stabilized the wild cheetah population of Namibia – the world’s largest — and have helped launch sister programs in several other cheetah range countries. None of this would not be possible without you.

Joel Sartore has traveled the world for more than 25 years, photographing subjects from tiny to terrifying.

These images are not to be missed.

Born from one family’s passion for Kenya and its wilderness, the Trust is today the most successful orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation program in the world and one of the pioneering conservation organizations for wildlife and habitat protection in East Africa.

Explore 15,000 of the world’s endangered species. With over 100,000 photos and videos, discover what these animals, plants and fungi look like, what makes them special and why we should protect them.

The EDGE of Existence program is the only global conservation initiative to focus specifically on threatened species that represent a significant amount of unique evolutionary history.

See article upon article covering threats to the endangered natural world.

Set up to address fish & wildlife, hunting and game mamagement, fisheries, law enforcement, habitat ans species conservation and more.

We're counting on the commitment of our members to help our fight to uphold the Endangered Species Act and defend the wild plants, animals and places we all love.

The Endangered Species Act has an unmatched record of success and has put hundreds of species on the path to recovery, but countless plants and animals are still clinging to existence. Their futures depend on the Center for Biological Diversity and the strength of the Endangered Species Act, and we depend on you.

The (NWPR) is a 22,000 square foot office and warehouse located northeast of Denver, Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. The facility is responsible for receiving wildlife items that have been forfeited or abandoned to the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service.

By law, these items are stored in a secure environment, many of which are donated to educational facilities, nonprofit organizations, and conservation agencies to aid in teaching about endangered species and other wildlife.

Learn about the earth's species and how they are endangered.

Planet Earth teems with life. And now you can meet some of its stars!

Humans are generating climate-altering greenhouse gases at a rate that will forever alter our world’s ecosystem...

There Statement: “It’s very simple: We cannot condone the dilution of the role of science in protecting endangered and threatened wildlife,” said WCS President and CEO Cristián Samper.

Nov. 3, 2019  (ScienceNews)—Jian Zhong Wang’s home in the southern Chinese city of Nanning is an inviting place. Light spills in through large bay windows, which offer a stunning view of the garden of thick-stemmed banana plants and chest-high cacti. The room is packed with intricately carved furniture: a dining table flanked by eight straight-backed chairs, a coffee table and a settee, plus four armchairs, a desk, a divan and a TV stand. Each piece is made of rosewood.

“Rosewood furniture is part of our great national culture with over 5,000 years of history,” says Wang, a 60-year-old retired government official who began collecting rosewood more than two decades ago. He’s not alone.

The furniture is a major status symbol in China, by far the largest importer of rosewood. A canopy bed can fetch as much as $1 million, and an estimated 30,000 companies in China are involved in the rosewood industry, which generated a domestic revenue of over $22 billion in 2014.

Oct. 21, 2019  (TheRevelator)-If a species of bee or butterfly were to vanish from the world, some of us might shed a tear. It’s not an unlikely prospect, as the great insect dying that’s currently underway escalates the chance of losing some of these small but beloved species grows every year.

But what about a flea? Would the loss of one of nature’s most unloved creations give you reason to mourn?

That could happen in our lifetimes. Our new study has just added the Manx shearwater flea (Ceratophyllus fionnus) to the tragic procession of threatened insects marching toward extinction.

Oct. 1, 2019 (National Geographic)- Of all the large African mammals that wildlife veterinarian Pete Morkel has had to capture over his career—lions, forest elephants, white rhinos—giraffes are the most stressful.

“With other animals, you’re trying to give just enough anesthetic to immobilize them, but with a giraffe, we use a total overdose to chemically knock them off their feet,” the sun-leathered 59-year-old tells me as I stalk him stalking a two-year-old female giraffe somewhere in the Nigerien bush, about 60 miles east of Niamey, Niger’s capital.

Sept. 30, 2019 (National Geographic)-Most of the animals shown here are among the more than 28,000 species of animals and plants that the International Union for Conservation of Nature says are threatened with extinction. That number actually understates the risk. Since 1964, when the IUCN established a “red list” of threatened species and began compiling data gathered worldwide, the list has become the preeminent global database of endangered life and an essential tool for conservation policy. Yet the IUCN has been able to assess only about 106,000 species of the more than 1.5 million species of animals and more than 300,000 plants that scientists have described and named—which they estimate is less than a quarter of what’s really out there.

Sept. 21, 2019  (National Geographic)-Two years ago, Joe Braman was living a regular family life with his wife and two daughters on his remote ranch in southern Texas. A part time cop, businessman, and cowboy, he’d never given a thought to the rhino poaching crisis in South Africa. But in May 2018, Braman and his free-running hounds were sprinting across the acacia plains close to Kruger National Park chasing armed rhino poachers.

To date since then, according to authorities, his hounds have helped law enforcement teams in the greater Kruger region catch an unprecedented 145 poachers and confiscate 53 guns, boosting the overall rate of successful arrests and providing a new strategy to fight poaching in Africa.

Sept. 13, 2019  (CNN Politics)- The US Department of Agriculture will resume data collection for its annual Honey Bee Colonies report on October 1 -- the start of a new fiscal year -- after suspending the survey earlier this summer over budget constraints.

While researchers welcome the decision to resume the survey, some caution that it will leave a critical gap in this year's data.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an entomologist who studies bee health at the University of Maryland, explained that missing even one quarter of data can undermine researchers' ability to compare loss rates from year to year, one of the fundamental ways that experts and the honeybee industry can use the survey as they try to better understand honeybee population declines.

Sept. 12, 2019 (National Geographic)- The world's most widely used insecticide has been linked to the dramatic decline in songbirds in North America. A first ever study of birds in the wild found that a migrating songbird that ate the equivalent of one or two seeds treated with a neonicotinoid insecticide suffered immediate weight loss, forcing it to delay its journey.

Although the birds recovered, the delay could severely harm their chances of surviving and reproducing, say the Canadian researchers whose study is published today in Science.

“We show a clear link between neonicotinoid exposure at real-world levels and an impact on birds,” says lead author Margaret Eng, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan Toxicology Center.

Sept. 10, 2019 (Science News) - While scientists have known for decades that certain kinds of birds have struggled as humans (and bird-gobbling cats) encroach on their habitats, a new comprehensive tally shows the staggering extent of the loss. Nearly 1 in 3 birds — or 29 percent — has vanished in the last half century, researchers report September 19 in Science.

“Three billion is a punch in the gut,” says Peter Marra, a conservation biologist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The loss is widespread, he says, affecting rare and common birds alike. “Our study is a wake-up call. We’re experiencing an ecological crisis.”

Sept. 12, 2019 (Center for Biological Diversity) - The Trump administration has authorized a U.S. hunter to import a lion trophy from Tanzania — the first allowed from that country since lions were given protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in January 2016. A Florida man received permission to import the lion’s skin, skull, claws and teeth, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service records belatedly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The decision likely signals that the Fish and Wildlife Service is approving, or will approve, lion and other wildlife trophy imports from Tanzania, despite that nation’s troubling history of mismanaging populations of lions, elephants and other imperiled animals. Many — likely more than two-thirds — of the permit findings would apply to other applications for Tanzanian trophy imports.

Sept. 10, 2019 (Rhinos.org)- The Sumatran rhino is the most endangered of all rhinoceros species due to its rapid rate of decline. Because of poaching, numbers have decreased more than 70% over the last 20 years, with the only viable population now in Indonesia.

The species was declared extinct in the wild in Malaysia in 2015. Sumatran rhinos exist only in protected areas where they are physically guarded by Rhino Protection Units. Continued protection, combined with consolidating small, fragmented populations into larger ones, and intensifying captive breeding efforts, are the best hope for the species’ survival.

Sept. 10, 2019 (National Geographic)- In late June our floatplane lifted off from Deadhorse, Alaska, at the top of the state, and arrowed west. As it gained altitude the industrial spraddle of the Prudhoe Bay oil field shrank beneath the plane’s pontoons. Soon there was nothing below but land the color of wet cardboard, an earth still waking from its long winter. About 110 miles to the west, the plane skidded down on a half-frozen lake. We pitched our tents and ringed the camp with an electrified bear fence against curious grizzlies. Then, Martin Robards and Peter Detwiler—a scientist and a senior field technician for the Wildlife Conservation Society, respectively—headed out across the tundra. Robards wore a Remington 870 shotgun slung over his shoulder (bears, again).

Aug. 28, 2019 (National Geographic) FLATEY ISLAND, ICELAND —WHEN the days grew long, seabirds flocked to this hamlet on the edge of the Arctic to rear their chicks under the midnight sun.

"Kria," shrieked the terns, calling summer up from the slumbering ground. Black cliffs were transformed into snowbanks of white kittiwakes. Puffins whirred between land and sea. Murres plied the shoreline; fulmars patrolled the skies. Everywhere sounded their vibrant chorus.

These days, a few stubborn holdovers streak the sky and paddle the bay, but the legions are gone. The chicks have perished, and their bereft parents have returned to the sea.

Aug. 28, 2019 (Center for Biological Diversity)-ANCHORAGE— Conservation groups filed a lawsuit today challenging the Trump administration’s approval of rules allowing Hilcorp Alaska LLC to harm Cook Inlet beluga whales and other marine mammals as it expands its offshore oil and gas operations in Cook Inlet.

Cook Inletkeeper and the Center for Biological Diversity sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in federal district court in Alaska to block the “take authorization” rule it issued in July. The authorization would allow harm to marine mammals from Hilcorp’s seismic blasting, pile driving and other offshore-oil development activities over the next five years.

Aug. 29, 2019 (National Geographic)-The platypus is one of Australia’s most beloved species—and, seemingly, one of its most resilient. Even as many of the continent’s native fauna declined or disappeared throughout the 20th century, the quirky duck-billed mammal with webbed feet was seen regularly enough that there was little urgency to monitor the animal’s populations. That is, until biologists began to realize the freshwater dwellers weren’t ok, and they probably weren’t all along.

“The platypus has declined right in front of our noses,” says Tahneal Hawke, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales and a researcher with the Platypus Conservation Initiative.

Aug. 25, 2019 (National Geographic)-GENEVA - A proposal to strengthen protections for both shortfin and longfin mako sharks, hunted for their meat and fins, was adopted today after a 102-40 secret ballot vote at the global wildlife trade summit. The vote still needs to be finalized at the plenary session at the end, when all appendix change proposals passed in committee are officially adopted.

The proposal, debated at this year’s CITES Conference of the Parties, lists mako sharks under Appendix II, meaning that they can’t be traded unless it can be shown that fishing wouldn’t threaten their chances for survival. Mako sharks were not previously protected under CITES, the treaty that governs the international wildlife trade. Conservationists say this was be the world’s last chance to prevent mako shark populations from collapsing.

Aug. 23, 2018 (inhabitat)-Giraffes are doing a victory dance today after winning international trade protection on Thursday. Delegates at the World Wildlife Conference in Geneva voted to list giraffes on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Countries will now be required to issue non-detriment findings before exporting or importing giraffe parts. This means that in order to get permits, a scientific authority of the state must decree that the trade will not be detrimental to the survival of the species.

Aug. 22, 2018 (National Resources Defense Council(NRDC))-The Florida panther is the only remaining puma population in the eastern United States. It is estimated that fewer than 230 individual panthers remain in a single south Florida population.

As NRDC previously reported, Florida panthers already experience constant threats to their survival from habitat loss due to oil exploration and development in and near the Everglades’ Big Cypress National Preserve, commercial and residential construction, and vehicular traffic. As of August 2019, 13 panthers have been hit and killed by cars, yet the Florida legislature recently passed a law authorizing the construction of three new toll roads, one of which is in panther habitat.

Aug. 20 2017 (National Geographic)-Many people have never eaten—or even heard of—red abalone, a species of sea snail that lives suctioned onto boulders and feeds on the lush kelp forests of Northern California. Abalone is a much-sought-after delicacy with a sweet, delicate flavor similar to a sea scallop, say those who’ve tried it.

“For people who think they don’t like fish…it’s amazing to see their eyes just sparkle when they take a bite and go ‘this is absolutely incredible,’” says Joe Cresalia, a recreational diver who lives just north of San Francisco. “And you know before they took the bite, they were almost afraid to take a bite.”

But as marine heat waves, ocean acidification, habitat loss, and overfishing shrink the red abalone fishery, the sweet delicacy is at risk of permanently losing its food source: the kelp forests.

Aug. 16, 2018 (The Revelator)-Read the news about these issues:
1.Wildlife Treaty Meeting (Aug. 16)
2.New Zealand’s Extinct Lizard (Aug. 8)
3.India’s Tiger Population (July 30)
4.Endangered Primates (July 23)
5.Who Eats Lemurs - and Why? (July 19)
6.Elephants and Frogs -Who Knew? (June 21)

Aug. 12, 2019 (OutsideOnLine)) -On Monday, the Trump administration announced the opening salvo in its long-feared attack on the Endangered Species Act. The three-pronged assault is designed to weaken protections for threatened and endangered species, while making it harder to add protections for other animals in the future.

“These changes crash a bulldozer through the Endangered Species Act’s lifesaving protections for America’s most vulnerable wildlife,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the wildlife advocacy nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.

Aug. 9, 2019 (Allegheny Front) - The biologically diverse waterways of the Ohio Valley are home to more than 100 species of freshwater mussels. Each can filter five to 10 gallons of water daily. But pollution, land use change, and a changing climate threaten their very existence. They’re among the most endangered animals in the United States.

Janet Clayton, a West Virginia native, began her career researching aquatic invertebrates, but quickly switched gears to studying the state’s mussels and never looked back. She has worked with them for three decades and leads West Virginia’s mussel program, which she helped develop.

July 23, 2020 (The Revelator) -Does a rare monkey still roam what’s left of the forests of Côte d’Ivoire?“

We haven’t given up on it,” says primatologist Russ Mittermeier, referring to the delightfully named Miss Waldron’s red colobus (Piliocolobus waldronae), a species that hasn’t officially been seen in more than four decades due to pressures from hunting and deforestation. “We’re still carrying out surveys in the hopes of finding it. I mean, it’s down to the last individuals if there are any still left, but we’re not ready to declare it extinct yet.”

July 18, 2019 (National Resources Defense Council(NRDC))) -On July 1, the day after Japan officially withdrew from the International Whaling Commission, its fishing fleet slaughtered two minke whales off the island nation’s northern coast. This is the first time Japan has hunted whales commercially since the IWC declared a moratorium on the practice 31 years ago.

The choice was made despite the fact that demand for whale meat in Japan has plummeted. In 1962, the country’s whale meat production peaked at 226,000 tons, but by 2017, that number had dropped to just 3,000 tons, or slightly more than 1% of the industry’s record. Japan also imports whale meat from whaling nations like Iceland and Norway, despite the lack of domestic demand. As of April, 3,500 tons of whale meat were sitting in freezers waiting for someone to buy it.

July 2, 2019 The Revelator -Ten years ago the shaky video of a dehydrated, wildfire-damaged koala captured headlines and the world’s attention.

Crouched next to a charred tree trunk, a volunteer firefighter named David Tree gingerly poured bottled water into the open mouth of the burned koala. A tiny gray paw rested in his own large, calloused hand, allowing the animal to remain upright as she drank.

July 1, 2019 (National Wildlife Federation (NWF)) -State fish and wildlife agencies have identified more than 12,000 species in need of proactive conservation efforts in the United States, including the more than 1,600 U.S. species already listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

The list includes Birds, Fish, Amphibians, Reptiles, Butterflies, Bumblebees, Bats, and Freshwater Mussels.

Unless our nation invests in proactive, on-the-ground, collaborative conservation, we risk losing thousands of species and our wildlife heritage to preventable challenges.

June 26, 2019   Investor Ideas - Texas leads the nation in wind energy generation with thousands of wind turbines throughout the state. This is a boon for clean energy generation but not for the state's large population of bats, which are often drawn to the spinning turbines.

To help discourage them from approaching, Duke Energy Renewables is working with NRG Systems, Inc. to install an innovative bat deterrent system. The technology uses ultrasound to block the sonar that bats use to navigate in the dark, causing them to avoid areas around the wind turbines.

Duke Energy Renewables will install NRG Systems' Bat Deterrent System over a five-year period at 255 wind turbines at its Los Vientos III, IV and V wind sites beginning in July 2019. This will mark the first commercial deployment of the Bat Deterrent System in the continental U.S.

June 10, 2019  (Defenders of Wildlife)—The red wolf is a smaller, thinner cousin of the gray wolf.

It has a distinctive reddish cast for which it is named. The red wolf is the world's most endangered canid, and the Southeast’s native wolf. Uniquely "All-American," the red wolf's entire historical range is confined within what is now the United States.

Once roaming as far west as Texas, down into Florida, and up into the Midwest, the red wolf now persists in only a fraction of its range. It has lost more of its historical territory—99.7 percent—than any other large carnivore, including lions, tigers and snow leopards. The red wolf has faced an embattled road to recovery since its listing in the first class of the Endangered Species Act.

The Revelator, June 6, 2019  - How can we better protect sharks and rays from overfishing?

These related species — which, along with chimaeras, are known collectively as chondrichthyans — include some of the most threatened marine fishes in the world. Sharks and rays face a variety of threats depending on where they live and swim, but the biggest risk comes from overfishing, which takes a noticeable toll on these slow-growing, slow-to-reproduce animals. As a result, nearly 1 in 4 species of chondricthyan fishes is estimated to be, or assessed as, threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.

The Allegheny Front, May 31, 2019  - More than 70% of land in Pennsylvania is privately owned. Each year, with help from state and federal agency biologists, about 400 landowners manage their land in ways that help threatened and endangered species.

Tom Belinda is one of them. To find Belinda’s house in Williamsburg, PA, near Altoona, you wind through a small community of homes and fields along the river valley. After a nearly 2-mile long trek down a gravel driveway, the woods break open to a clearing. There sits Belinda’s mountain lodge made of logs.

Center For Biological Diversity, May 22, 2019  - WASHINGTON— As scientists warn of a global extinction crisis, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) introduced legislation today that would provide funding for some of the most critically imperiled species in the United States — butterflies, Hawaiian plants, eastern freshwater mussels and southwest desert fish.

The legislation comes during a congressional hearing on a landmark scientific report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which warned that one million species are being pushed to extinction by human activities.

National Wildlife Federation (NWF), May 7, 2019  - The U.N. just released a frightening new report about rapidly declining wildlife and plant populations around the world, and everyone is talking about it. Here’s how the New York Times just described it:

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction.“

The Allegheny Front, Apr 25, 2019  - Amphibians around the world are dying, and a particularly nasty fungus is playing a major role.

A recent study published in Science confirms that the chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) is causing catastrophic loss to biodiversity through declines in species populations and in some cases, extinction. Some are calling it an amphibian apocalypse.

ScienceNews, Apr. 24, 2019  - Beleaguered populations of green sea turtles living in and around Hawaii and American Pacific island territories are increasing in number.

From 2002 to 2015, scuba diving researchers circumnavigated 53 islands, atolls and coral reefs throughout the U.S. Pacific, conducting the first comprehensive survey in that region of the turtles’ ocean habitats. Over the 13 years, the divers counted more than 3,400 sea turtles. The vast majority — 90.1 percent — were green sea turtles; only 8.3 percent were hawksbills and 1.6 percent were unidentified.

The Revelator, Apr. 24, 2019  - If you were to somehow snorkel up the Sixaola River from the Caribbean Sea to its source in Costa Rica’s Talamanca Mountains — charging up rapids, scaling waterfalls, and gaining more than 10,000 feet of elevation in the process—you would notice an apparent paradox: The further from the ocean you ventured, the more marine fish you would encounter.

Costa Rica’s streams are dominated by amphidromous fish and shrimp, creatures that split their curious lives between fresh water and salt. Species like river gobies (Awaous banana), mountain mullet (Agonostomus monticola) and banded shrimp (Macrobrachium heterochirus) lay their eggs in downstream reaches; once hatched, their larvae wash to the ocean, where they develop until they are large enough to reenter their natal rivers and ascend to the headwaters, maturing as they travel.

Apr.22, 2019 ,National Geographic -

Coral reefs, sprawling forests, and abundant wildlife enrich our Earth, but the number of species that inhabit this planet is declining. Climate change is making it too hot for many reefs to survive, once lush regions are being deforested, and wildlife is finding it increasingly difficult to coexist with people. To highlight these issues, the theme of 2019's Earth Day is “Protect Our Species.”

Earth Day's organizers aim to highlight how many species are facing extinction and what can be done to save them. By creating nature sanctuaries, both on land and below the sea, environmental activists are trying to create safe spaces in which wildlife can thrive.

Apr.22, 2019  National Geographic -

IF ALL GOES well, an extremely rare species of warty pig with rockstar hair will be running wild once more.

Only about 300 Visayan warty pigs (Sus cebifrons)—known for the males’ distinctive mohawks—exist in captivity; their wild population is unknown. Previously found throughout the lush rainforests of the Philippines’ six West Visayas islands, the critically endangered swine now roams small pockets of only two: Panay and Negros.

Bloomberg News, Apr. 17, 2019  -The Trump administration has failed to tackle a backlog of hundreds of requests to add species to the federal endangered or threatened list, approving the fewest since Ronald Reagan was president, an environmental conservation group alleged in a lawsuit.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have added 16 plants and animals to the list under the landmark Endangered Species Act - the lowest figure since 1982, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Washington by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Apr.16, 2019  National Wildlife Federation -At 4:15 AM, we stumbled out of our Rock Springs, Wyoming motel rooms to begin our search for sage grouse. We were greeted with several pots of strong coffee in the parking lot by a grinning Aaron Kindle, the senior manager of western sporting campaigns for the National Wildlife Federation.

Kindle and David Willms, director of Western Wildlife for NWF, had planned this trip for seven other members of the National Wildlife Federation’s public lands team. The mission was to learn first-hand about the habitat and habits of the Greater Sage-Grouse. Some on the public lands team have been fighting for many years to protect this western bird. Others, just a few months. But only Kindle and Willms had ever actually seen the bird and its elaborate mating ritual up close. This was a chance for the rest to see what all the fuss is about.

Apr.19, 2019 National Wildlife Federation -Zombie deer. Miracle cures. The headlines have been flying around chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, elk and moose lately, but the sensational isn’t always accurate. Deer do not turn into zombies, nor will they turn humans in to zombies.

And the miracle cure suggested at a February news conference in Pennsylvania turns out to be little but old and unverified research that rejects the scientific consensus. Proposed federal legislation, though, could help with what is really needed to combat CWD: research and funding.

National Geographic, Apr. 12, 2019  -CAMPECHE, MEXICO“How did it start?” asks Everardo Chablé. He’s propped on a stool in his living room as the daylight fades outside. The only noise in this tiny Mexican town in the Yucatán Peninsula—where there’s no cell signal and little electricity—comes from the music his father is blasting in the yard.

He speaks up. “For thousands of years the Maya people had bee culture. Then the Mennonites came with large machines and started to deforest large parts of land where the bees feed. We had virgin forest with very delicate ecosystems—deer, toucans—but most importantly bees that keep up life. When deforestation started they destroyed everything from millennia back.”

BBC News, Mar. 28, 2019  -Scientists are calling for a widespread cull of feral cats and dogs, pigs, goats, and rats and mice to save the endangered species they prey upon.

Their eradication on more than 100 islands could save some of the rarest animals on Earth, says an international team.

Islands have seen 75% of known bird, mammal, amphibian and reptile extinctions over the past 500 years.

San Francisco Chronicle Mar. 26, 2019 - California crab fisheries will close for the season in April when whales are feeding off the state's coast as part of an effort to keep Dungeness crab fishery gear from killing protected whales, officials announced Tuesday.

The April 15 closure, three months before the crab fishing season normally ends, is part of a settlement reached by the Center for Biological Diversity and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Earther Gizmodo, Mar. 18 2019 -In a tiny 15-by-7.5-mile section of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, poachers come out in the night and drop their illegal gill nets. They’re fishing for the critically endangered totoaba, a large fish whose bladder is used in Chinese traditional medicine. However, these gillnets don’t only catch this endangered fish; they catch the vaquita, the most endangered marine mammal in the world.

In fact, those fishnets have decimated the remaining population, which stands at no more than 22 individuals and probably closer to 10 as of the summer of 2018, according to a report released on March 14 by CIRVA, an international committee seeking to save the species.

Center for Biological Diversity, Mar. 14 2019 - The Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice today of its intent to sue the National Marine Fisheries Service to compel the designation of critical habitat in Alaska for two ice seal species. Both bearded and ringed seals are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because their Arctic sea-ice habitat is melting.

“As these ice seals’ homes melt away, the Trump administration has to give these animals the protection the Endangered Species Act requires,” said Emily Jeffers, a staff attorney with the Center. “With the Arctic warming at twice the global warming rate, ringed and bearded seals urgently need our help.”

Feb. 21, 2019  National Resources Defense Council(NRDC) - NRDC and Healthy Gulf are suing the Trump administration to protect this imperiled species.

The Gulf of Mexico whale, one of the most endangered species on the planet, is facing extinction if it doesn’t gain the protections of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). But—not surprisingly — the Trump administration has been dragging its feet on listing this imperiled species.

National Geographic, Feb.21, 2019 - The world’s largest bee may also be the planet’s most elusive. First discovered in 1859 by the prominent scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, nobody could locate it again, and it was presumed extinct.

But Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) was not gone. In 1981, an entomologist named Adam Messer searched and found it on three islands in Indonesia, on an archipelago called the North Moluccas. He collected a specimen and wrote about his discovery in 1984.

Feb. 21, 2019 Science News - Everything about Wallace’s giant bee is goliath: It reaches an average body length of around 4 centimeters — about the size of a walnut — and has a wingspan of over 7.5 centimeters. Yet despite its eye-popping size, it’s been nearly 40 years since the world’s largest bee (Megachile pluto) was officially sighted in the wild.

So when Eli Wyman, an entomologist at Princeton University, had an opportunity to hunt for the elusive bee, he jumped at the chance. He and two other scientists, along with photographer Clay Bolt, set off in January for a two-week expedition to forests on two of only three Indonesian islands where the bee has ever been found.

Feb. 14, 2019 National Geographic - Eleven killer whales (also known as orcas) and 87 belugas languish in several rectangular sea pens in Srednyaya Bay in Russia’s Far East. Four Russian firms that supply marine animals to aquariums caught them over the course of several months in the summer of 2018. Their plight made headlines in November, when a drone captured aerial video footage of the facility, leading the media to label it the “whale jail.”

Read all about it, and/or view a slow-loading video.

Feb. 10, 2019 The Guardian -The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

Feb. 8, 2019 Express News -The golden-cheeked warbler, a songbird that has lost much of its nesting area to suburban sprawl near San Antonio, Austin and across Central Texas, will remain protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, a judge in Austin has ruled.

The decision came in a lawsuit filed 18 months ago by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation on behalf of the Texas General Land Office.

Feb. 6, 2019 My News LA -The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wednesday announced a recovery plan for the endangered Southern California population of mountain yellow-legged frogs.

The finalized plan, developed in response to legal action by the Center for Biological Diversity, calls for a wide array of recovery actions and research efforts to deal with the multitude of threats to the survival of the amphibian.