WARMING AUTUMNS - FEWER BUTTERFLIES

Science Magazine 

Butterflies such as the great purple hairstreak, Atlides halesus, are in decline in the warming American West according to community surveys.
PHOTO: JEFFREY GLASSBERG/NORTH AMERICAN BUTTERFLY ASSOCIATION

Details here.

Gulf Oil Spill's long-lasting legacy for dolphins

Science News

Bottlenose dolphin. A NOAA photo.

Health impacts from a 2010 spill are found even in dolphins born years later. 

Story here.

WHAT'S IN A PROMISE? The end of gestation crates in Canada was scheduled for 2024. Now, it’s 2029.

Factory Farm Collective   

A sow in a steel crate. If pigs could talk.

In 2014, the National Farm Animal Care Council (NFACC) updated their industry guidelines for pig welfare and recommended that the pork industry end the use of gestation crates (or sow stalls) by 2024. This statement is taken from NFACC’s website under the heading, What The Science Says: Here.

RELATED:

Manitoba hog farmers pledge sow stall phase-out. 

HUMANS HAVE COEXISTED WITH WILDFIRES FOR MILLENNIA, CLIMATE CHANGE AND INDUSTRIAL LOGGING ARE MAKING THINGS WORSE

Sierra Club BC  

Wildfires devastate Fort MacMurray, Alberta, CA. Satellite photo by NASA.

Intact Forests Are Our Biggest Allies Against Worsening Wildfires, But We Are Logging Them To The Brink. Story here.

Nothing quite like blubber: Polar bears have few options as global heating makes seal-hunting more difficult.

Journal of Experimental Biology  

"Polar bear with seal kill, Baffin Island" by vtluvbug79

As Arctic sea ice disappears, polar bears will lose access to their preferred prey – highly caloric seals. The authors say that, on land, a polar bear would need to eat about 1.5 caribou, 37 Arctic char, 74 snow geese, 216 snow goose eggs, or 3 million crowberries to get the digestible energy they now get from the blubber of one adult ringed seal. Read the full study here.

READ another version of this story: Here.

Can polar bears and narwhals cling on as the ice shrinks?

U.N. blueprint on climate emergencies reminds us of man's legacy of deadly pollution and destruction of wildlife.

EcoWatch

Ducks swim through an "algal soup" - a stream in Manitoba Canada probably 

over-fertilized by livestock and human waste. A PinP photo.

The head of the world body sounds the alarm on what he calls humanity's "senseless and suicidal war on nature." Details here.

Release of nutrients from lake-bottom sediments worsens Lake Erie's annual "dead zone"

Science News

"Lake Erie, Canada" by Earth Hour Global

Robotic laboratories on the bottom of Lake Erie have revealed that the muddy sediments there release nearly as much of the nutrient phosphorus into the surrounding waters as enters the lake's central basin each year from rivers and their tributaries. Story here.