endangered species

If Tristan Thorn, hero of Neil Gaiman’s remarkable Stardust, had offered to gallivant off to the Arctic to slaughter a polar bear and bring its head back to President Obama as a birthday gift, Barack would have sternly told him “No-no!”

I jest in fun, because this is such fantastic news. If you’ve seen Earth (or An Inconvenient Truth or Planet Earth or any other climate change documentary made by people other than half-wits—or even one of those “We’re All Connected” posters), you know that polar bears are having a pretty rough go of it these days. Read more

The black-footed Ferret, or Mustela nigripes for you Latinists, is a small carnivorous North American prairie animal that lives in complicated social clusters and burrow complexes. It is the only ferret native to North America. Ferrets are kin to weasels, mink, polecats, martens, and even otters, and badgers. Te Black-footed ferret should not be confused with the domesticated ferret, popular as a pet and not at all in danger—and not native to North America. The black-footed ferret is native, and is the rarest mammal in North America. Mustela nigripes was declared extinct in Canada in 1934, and endangered in the U. S. in 1967. Read more

Recently the Journal of Mammalogy featured a new study on a rather unusual little mammal called the long-beaked echidna. This study, which was primarily the work of Muse Opiang who was a research intern at the Wildlife Conservation Society during the study, provided much needed information about this rare little animal and the current status of the long-beaked echidna's populations.

The long beaked echidna, also known by its common name the spiny anteater, has a spiked like armored shell and long snout. But it is not just the appearance that makes this animal so unusual. The long-beaked echidna is a mammal; however, instead of having offspring by live birth as most known mammals do, the long-beaked echidna actually lays eggs the way we often see various types of reptiles doing. Read more

Shark FinningIf humans were sharks, I wonder which part of us would be sliced off and used for soup-our ears, or an arm, maybe? It doesn't really matter; after it would be chopped off our skin, we'd just be thrown back into the water to survive without it.

That's exactly what fisherman do to sharks in the process of "finning." Finning involves slicing off a shark's fin--to use in a soup, of all things, because we all know that soup is important enough to condone amputating living creatures and using their appendages a nice, hot meal alongside a grilled cheese--and then tossing the finless shark back into the sea.

These fins are then used as an Asian delicacy, "shark fin soup," which sounds about as appetizing as monkey butt on a stick. The fin doesn't even have flavor on its own-it actually floats along in a bowl of chicken broth to make the soup look fancy. Chicken and shark-sounds like a Colonel Sanders special from hell. Read more