National News

Key Penguins Are Endangered by Warmer Seas. “Their little chicks fast for more than a week while they forage for fish and krill in the waters of the Antarctic polar front, an upwelling where cold, deep seas mix with more temperate seas. And while king penguins, the second largest penguin species, can swim a 400-mile round trip during that time, they are traveling farther and farther from their nests on the islands near Antarctica, endangering their hungry offspring. As with so many other species, warmer temperatures are threatening this population, and a new study published today in Nature Climate Change warns that 70 percent of the 1.6 million estimated breeding pairs of king penguins could be affected in this century. ‘They will need to either move somewhere else or they will just disappear,’ said Emiliano Trucchi, one of the paper’s senior authors. ‘The largest colonies are on islands that will be too far from the source of food,’ predicted Dr. Trucchi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Ferrara in Italy. The research team developed a model to predict which islands would become vulnerable with warming, and which ones might become better habitats. They then validated their model through historical and genetic data, reconstructing king penguin relocations during previous periods of climate change.” [New York Times, 2/26/18 (=)]

Can Mexican Gray Wolves Coexist with People, Cattle? Ranchers, Conservationists Test the Idea. “Cattlemen and wolves have been at odds for decades, almost from the time they began to share the land. Settlers to the West nearly drove Mexican gray wolves extinct in government-sponsored eradication campaigns intended to benefit livestock herds. Even now that the wolves are protected under the Endangered Species Act, the old conflict weighs on their fitful recovery. Authorities may still kill them or remove them from the wild under the law if they prey on livestock because the wolves are deemed a “nonessential experimental population.” Illegal shootings happen every year and those human-caused deaths contribute to wolf advocates’ fear that Mexican gray wolves may never recover.” [Arizona Republic, 2/26/18 (=)]