Category: Animals_Extinction_CN CONSEQUENCES_WATER_OCEANS NEWS_ARCHIVE ocean ocean conservation oceans Uncategorized

Warming waters are cooking creatures in their own habitats. Many species are slowly suffocating as oxygen leaches out of the seas. Even populations that have managed to withstand the ravages of overfishing, pollution and habitat loss are struggling to survive amid accelerating climate change.

The world’s biodiversity is constantly being threatened by warming temperatures and extreme changes in climate and weather patterns.
And while that “doom and gloom” is the typical discourse surrounding how climate change is affecting biodiversity, another interesting aspect of the warming temperatures is how different species have been adapting over the decades, as the warming progresses, experts say.

Thousands of birds die each spring and fall when they collide with Chicago’s skyscrapers, which lie on a major migration path between Canada and Latin America.
But the birds don’t die in vain. Since the 1970s, many of them have been collected from the street and cataloged by the city’s Field Museum. This unique and detailed set of data has been a scientific windfall, revealing that North American migratory birds appear to be shrinking in response to climate change.

A record manatee die-off in Florida this year has become so dire that federal officials are taking a once unthinkable step — feeding the wild marine mammals to help them survive the winter…

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen wrote in the opening lines of “Pride and Prejudice,” “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Social mores may have shifted since the early 19th century, but the maxim seems still to hold true for albatrosses, very large seabirds that live mostly in the Southern Hemisphere and are known as some of the world’s most reliably monogamous creatures.

As the East End mopes its way through a third-straight disastrous bay scallop season — desperate scallop lovers are forking over upwards of $45 per pound for cousins of the Peconic Bay scallop, imported from Martha’s Vineyard — scientists are working on ways that humans might help steel the local population against the conditions that have led to the massive die-offs of the iconic shellfish just as they had seemed on the verge of a historic rebound.

The “Lord God Bird” is dead. The ivory-billed woodpecker, a ghostly bird whose long-rumored survival in the bottomland swamps of the South has haunted seekers for generations, will be officially declared extinct by U.S. officials after years of futile efforts to save it.

For centuries, spring-run Chinook salmon, among California’s most iconic fish, would rest for weeks in these historically cold waters after their brutal upstream journey. Then they would lay eggs and, finally, perish to complete one of nature’s most improbable life cycles…

It was just before sunrise in July when the botanists Naomi Fraga and Maria Jesus threw on backpacks and crunched their way across a brittle alkaline flat in the hottest corner of the Mojave Desert. Their mission: to rescue a tiny plant teetering on the brink of extinction.