Bruce MacFarlane has been studying salmon for 25 years, and he still sounds amazed when he talks about their evolutionary adaptations.

“It’s a brilliant survival strategy,” he says. “They spend most of their lives in the ocean–it’s a nutrient-rich environment. There’s loads of food. But it’s also a predator-rich environment. So where do they go to lay their eggs? To these inland streams, where there aren’t as many predators. But there isn’t as much food, either, so at some point they have to return to the ocean. By the time they hit the ocean in April, May, June, you’ve got a bustling farm out there for them.”

As MacFarlane says this, he’s standing next to a swimming pool-size tank at the NMFS Terrace Point complex where nearly grown coho are flitting among shadows. Some of them will eventually be transported to a hatchery on Big Creek just off Swanton Road where their eggs will be harvested and fertilized.

The Central California coho exist in such low numbers south of San Francisco that without a hatchery program they might not be here at all. Santa Cruz County is at the southernmost end of the coho’s historic range, and populations at the edge of their range are never very stable, says MacFarlane. Add to that the fact that the coho are the hothouse flowers of the salmon world, and it all spells trouble. Coho aren’t able to tolerate fast-moving water. They require deep, shady pools for spawning. Their strict three-year life cycle means they can’t breed with older or younger fish, which makes year lineages vulnerable. Nature did deal them one good card; up to 30 percent of coho migrate to other streams to spawn. Indeed, recently a handful of coho have popped up in Soquel and Aptos creeks–places they’ve never been documented before. It gives the species a little flexibility.

Jonathan Ambrose, a Santa Rosa-based biologist with the NMFS (and the husband of Charlotte Ambrose), says coho have evolved to be able to survive catastrophes like landslides, wildfires and even a spate of poor ocean condition years. But that only works if their habitat is healthy.

“They’re remarkable in the sense that one female can carry 5,000 eggs, and she can re-enter a stream and if the instream conditions are good, she can quickly repopulate it. That’s show these fish have evolved,” he says.”But what we’re realizing is, the instream conditions across the range of the Central California coho are in poor shape. Even if the fish make it back from the ocean, if the instream conditions aren’t there, the fish can’t do what they’ve evolved to do, and that’s quickly recolonize.”

Scientists point to a variety of factors in the destruction of coho habitat. The main one, in Jonathan Ambrose’s view, is urbanization. As an example, he offers up the San Lorenzo River, which had coho until 1982 (and had a few again in 2005).

“The San Lorenzo comes up as probably the watershed in the overall worst condition,” he says. “And why is that? Because you have an incredibly high density of roads. Lots are not properly maintained. Dirt bleeds into the creek. All kinds of people are living on the river because, what a beautiful place.

“But what happens is, this fish needs to have complex instream habitat, and in Santa Cruz County that’s primarily formed by trees falling into the creek, creating deep pools. But in Santa Cruz, the county funds the removal of large woody debris in the stream–and no other county does this–and if you don’t have large woody debris in the water, you won’t have fish.”

Drought and water diversion wreak havoc, too, says MacFarlane, and it could worsen. “If climate change has an adverse impact on the hydrological cycle here, what’s going to happen to the fish?”

via Traci Hukill for Metro Santa Cruz

The new study to assess the world’s mammals shows at least 1,141 of the 5,487 mammals on Earth are known to be threatened with extinction. At least 76 mammals have become extinct since 1500. But the results also show conservation can bring species back from the brink of extinction, with five percent of currently threatened mammals showing signs of recovery in the wild.

China’s Père David’s Deer (Elaphurus davidianus), is listed as Extinct in the Wild. However, the captive and semi-captive populations have increased in recent years and it is possible that truly wild populations could be re-established soon. It may be too late, however, to save the additional 29 species that have been flagged as Critically Endangered Possibly Extinct, including Cuba’s Little Earth Hutia (Mesocapromys sanfelipensis), which has not been seen in nearly 40 years.

Nearly 450 mammals have been listed as Endangered, including the Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii), which moved from Least Concern to Endangered after the global population declined by more than 60 percent in the last 10 years due to a fatal infectious facial cancer.

Habitat loss and degradation affect 40 percent of the world’s mammals. It is most extreme in Central and South America, West, East and Central Africa, Madagascar, and in South and Southeast Asia. Over harvesting is wiping out larger mammals, especially in Southeast Asia, but also in parts of Africa and South America.

full details on Science Daily.

Their findings are presented this month in the international journal Environmental Pollution and are significant because nitrogen from air pollution causes detrimental chemical and biological effects to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Other harmful effects include elevated nitrate concentrations in streams and groundwater, and weakened California forests more susceptible to bark beetle infestations and fires.

[...]

According to the scientists, nitrogen pollution that has virtually eliminated lichen species in the Los Angeles Basin and San Bernardino Mountains is now exceeding critical loads over much of the Western Sierra Nevada as far north as Lake Tahoe. Other areas in corridors of polluted air such as the Central Valley are also exceeding nitrogen critical loads.

more details here.

Giant Humphead Wrasse:  The live fish trade and spear fishing have contributed to the halving of the global population of this beautiful fish loved by divers.

Red Crowned Roof Turtle: (IUCN Red List: Critically Endangered) The illegal wildlife trade in Asia has in part placed at least 40% of all tortoise and freshwater tortoise species at an immediate risk of extinction.

Image sources- Conservation.org

Add your voice by signing the petition to help us stop species extinction. You can also learn how we set our clock.

Tortoises or land turtles are land-dwelling reptiles of the family of Testudinidae, order Testudines. Like their marine cousins, the sea turtles, tortoises are shielded from predators by a shell. The top part of the shell is the carapace, the underside is the plastron, and the two are connected by the bridge. The tortoise has both an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton. Tortoises can vary in size from a few centimetres to two meters. Tortoises tend to be diurnal animals with tendencies to be crepuscular depending on the ambient temperatures. They are generally reclusive and shy.

Beside the common knowledge on tortoise, here’s a few things about the religious symbolism of the tortoise. In Hinduism, Kurma (Sanskrit: कुर्म) was the second avatar of Vishnu. Like the Matsya Avatara also belongs to the Satya yuga. Vishnu took the form of a half-man half-tortoise, the lower half being a tortoise. He is normally shown as having four arms. He sat on the bottom of the ocean after the Great Flood. A mountain was placed on his back by the other gods so that they could churn the sea and find the ancient treasures of the Vedic peoples.

Reference sites:
Turtle Stuff
Reptile’s Web
American Tortoise Rescue