Biodiversity

"Restrictions on water pumping that helps supply Southern California, intended to protect California's delta smelt, will be relaxed through June."

Unacceptable death rates of laboratory animals have forced a New Zealand government research agency to end its experimental program on cloning of agricultural animals.

"A federal judge [Wednesday] appeared reluctant to ask the Obama administration to reconsider whether the polar bear should be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act."

"A major new survey of the world's coral reefs finds that they are in trouble. Big trouble"

"The Supreme Court declined [Tuesday] to take up whether federal regulators and courts take account sufficiently of the economic impacts of "critical habitat" designations under the Endangered Species Act."

"Baby dolphins, some barely three feet in length, are washing up along the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines at 10 times the normal rate of stillborn and infant deaths, researchers are finding."

"Over the past 100 years, some two-thirds of the large predator fish in the ocean have been caught and consumed by humans, and in the decades ahead, the rest are likely to perish, too."

"As an algae with a gross nickname invades pristine trout streams across the U.S., Maryland is about to become the first state to enforce a ban on a type of footgear the organism uses to hitchhike from stream to stream: felt-soled fishing boots."

"Bottom-feeding fish in the Hudson River have developed a gene that renders them immune to the toxic effects of PCBs, researchers say."

"Japan abandoned the rest of its whale hunting season in Antarctic waters Friday citing repeated harassment by Sea Shepherd activists, after netting only a fifth of its targeted catch of 850 whales."