Category — Threatened species

Greenpeace has discovered that an unprecedented amount of the whale meat from the recent hunt has not been used.  Even whaling captain Sigurður Njálsson has said the meat is unfit for domestic consumption.

200 tonnes of the meat is in storage with a further 179 tonnes of entrails buried at a landfill site. But despite demand for whale meat plummeting, Japan and Iceland continue to hunt whales.
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The US has proposed listing polar bears as a threatened species because of declining Arctic ice levels, reports the BBC.

It is the first time the US has made a direct link between global warming and the threat to a species.

President George W Bush has steadfastly refused to back mandatory controls of emissions of carbon dioxide — believed to be the main gas behind global warming.

There are 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears  across the globe, about 4700 of them in the US state of Alaska.

US Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said polar bears were “one of nature’s ultimate survivors”.

But he added: “We are concerned the polar bears’ habitat may literally be melting.”

Being listed as “threatened” is a rung down from being “endangered”.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth.

The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands — in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati — vanished beneath the waves.

The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea.

The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

Hollywood has turned them into the cartoon stars of the film Happy Feet, but the real life story of the rockhopper penguin is not such a happy tale, scientists have discovered.

Millions of the birds are disappearing in a “sinister and astonishing” phenomenon that is baffling biologists.

In just six years their numbers have fallen from 600,000 to 420,000 in the Falkland Islands — one of its few remaining strongholds - according to the latest survey by Falklands Conservation.

The decline equates to a drop of about 30 per cent, although the Falklands population is thought to have dipped by about 85 per cent since 1932, when there were more than 1.5 million birds.

It is thought that global warming may be behind its decline, as warmer seas are less productive and the penguins may not be able to find enough food to eat, but researchers admit they have not yet established the reasons.

EU ministers are meeting to set fishing quotas for 2007 amid renewed calls for a total ban on catching cod.

The European Commission has recommended a 25% cut in cod and North Sea herring catches, lower plaice and sole quotas, and a six-month ban on anchovy fishing.

Scientists warned earlier this year that only a total ban on cod fishing would enable stocks to recover.

Environmentalists have urged ministers to listen to the warnings and “change course” on fisheries policies.

However, European Commission spokeswoman Mireille Thom told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that it was also important to consider the fishing industry.

“Obviously ending fishing … on cod would be most likely to give results, but we don’t live in an ideal world,” she said.

A swath of Amazon rain forest the size of Alabama was placed under government protection yesterday in a region infamous for violent conflicts among loggers, ranchers and environmentalists.

Known as the Guayana Shield, the 57,915-square-mile area contains more than 25 percent of the world’s remaining humid tropical forests and the largest remaining unpolluted fresh water reserves in the American tropics.

The protected areas will link to existing reserves to form a vast preservation corridor eventually stretching into neighboring Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be “global collapse” of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as midcentury, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting.

The scientists, who report their findings today in the journal Science, say it is not too late to turn the situation around. As long as marine ecosystems are still biologically diverse, they can recover quickly once overfishing and other threats are reduced, the researchers say.

But improvements must come quickly, said Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who led the work. Otherwise, he said, “we are seeing the bottom of the barrel.”

“When humans get into trouble they are quick to change their ways,” he continued. “We still have rhinos and tigers and elephants because we saw a clear trend that was going down and we changed it. We have to do the same in the oceans.”

The report is one of many in recent years to identify severe environmental degradation in the world’s oceans and to predict catastrophic loss of fish species. But experts said it was unusual in its vision of widespread fishery collapse so close at hand.

Whale teriyaki? Even the Japanese don’t like it — The Japanese government says whale meat is a traditional part of its food culture.

Japanese journalist Harumi Hayakawa doesn’t agree.

Hear her debunk the dishonesty about Japan’s appetites and ’scientific’ whaling in Perspective, a five-minute thinkpiece on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National network, the home of opinions often contrary to conventional wisdom. Streaming audio, downloadable audio, podcast or RSS.