AP | Greens Worry Geothermal Plant Could Hurt Rare Toad. According to E&E News, “Environmentalists are warning that a planned geothermal energy plant in northern Nevada could threaten the habitat of a rare toad. The future of a big-eyed, freckled creature known as the Dixie Valley toad is at the center of an expected fight as environmentalists seek federal protection for the amphibian, the Las Vegas Sun reports. The toad, whose existence was unknown until a couple of years ago, lives around the thermal springs on the western edge of the Dixie Valley Playa, east of Reno. It’s one of 274 imperiled species — 25 of them in Nevada — at the center of legal action initiated last month under the Endangered Species Act. Ormat Technologies Inc., the company that plans to build the geothermal energy plant, has proposed mitigation strategies to protect the toad’s habitat. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent to sue the Department of the Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to meet a deadline to determine whether species like the Dixie Valley toad should be federally protected (E&E News PM, Nov. 20). The center petitioned to have the toad protected as an endangered species in 2017, after a group of University of Nevada, Reno, biologists determined it was a unique species, said Patrick Donnelly, the Center for Biological Diversity’s state director.” [E&E News, 12/3/19 (=)]

 

AP | Officials Eradicate Plate-Sized Mussels, Avert 'Nightmare'. According to E&E News, “Most Americans know mussels as thumb-sized shellfish that occasionally adorn restaurant dinner plates. But a colony of mussels as big as the dinner plates themselves has recently been wiped out from a New Jersey pond, where they had threatened to spread to the nearby Delaware River and wreak ecological havoc, as they already are doing in other parts of the world. Federal wildlife officials and a New Jersey conservation group say they’re confident they have narrowly avoided a serious environmental problem by eradicating Chinese pond mussels from a former fish farm in Hunterdon County. The mussels, in larvae form, hitched a ride to this country inside the gills of Asian carp that were imported for the Huey Property in Franklin Township, N.J., and quickly began reproducing. Their size and appetite enable them to outcompete native species for food and space. ‘They can become a huge ecological nightmare,’ said Emile DeVito, manager of science for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation. His group bought the land from private owners in 2007 and preserved it as open space. Three years later, the presence of the Chinese mussels was discovered, causing great alarm. The nine deep ponds are at the headwaters of the Wickecheoke Creek, which flows into the Delaware River.” [E&E News, 12/3/19 (=)]

 

 

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