A Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) named Asha by conservationists and designated female wolf 2754 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has once again crossed the line. In late October, the endangered wolf ventured north of Interstate 40, west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and into the Jemez Mountains, exiting the northern boundary of the Mexican Wolf Experimental Population Area (MWEPA). Mexican gray wolves found north of the interstate are subject to capture and removal to the New Mexico-Arizona borderlands. Radio-collared Asha was captured last winter near Taos, New Mexico, after trekking over one hundred miles north of I-40. (See "Mexican gray wolf’s trek stokes debate about range" —EcoAméricas, January 2023.) The USFWS tried to have Asha breed with a captive male wolf in New Mexico so the pack could be released...
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Having failed in previous attempts, the Colombian government has launched a new effort to sterilize and relocate environmentally destructive hippopotomuses that escaped captivity and have multiplied in the wild in the country’s mid-Magdalena River Valley region. Hippopotamuses arrived in Colombia as showpieces for a private zoo that then-prominent drug trafficker Pablo Escobar had built at Hacienda Nápoles, a sprawling estate in Antioquia department. After Escobar was gunned down by security forces in 1993, the animals were abandoned and wandered into the mid-Magdalena ecosystem, where they have thrived. A study conducted for the government by Colombia’s National University and a private research agency estimates that 169 hippos are living in the mid-Magdalena. The study, published in April, calculates that the total could reach 1,000 by 2035 if the hippos are not removed or killed. It also confirms that the animals are harming local ecosystems by displacing native...
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Settling a legal dispute of nearly two years, Argentina’s Supreme Court this month cleared the way for an offshore oil and gas exploration project, dismissing objections filed by environmental organizations. The project is led by the state-run energy company Equinor of Norway, with Argentina’s state oil company YPF and the British-Dutch company Shell as minority partners. In 2019, Equinor obtained permits to explore eight offshore areas collectively covering 45,000 square kilometers (17,000 sq. miles), about 300 kilometers (186 miles) off the Argentine coastal city of Mar del Plata. Two years later, the government approved the consortium’s environmental impact statement for the project, which will involve firing air guns on the seafloor to conduct seismic testing. Preliminary exploration data indicates the area contains oil and gas deposits that could generate US$20 billion in annual export earnings, Argentine officials say. In February 2022 a judge in a Mar del...
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Latin American governments have joined with their counterparts from other regions to push for the recovery of river dolphin populations in all 14 of the countries the marine mammal inhabits around the world. They did so by signing the Global Declaration for River Dolphins in Bogotá, Colombia, pledging to reverse an ongoing decline in the world’s river dolphin population, which is estimated to have fallen by 73% since 1980. The declaration states that some river dolphin populations “are under imminent threat of extinction if immediate concrete actions are not taken.” All six globally recognized river cetacean species (five types of dolphin and one variety of porpoise) are categorized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as endangered or critically endangered. Their principal threats are entanglement in fishing nets; river-flow alterations due to hydroelectric dams; mercury pollution from illegal gold mining; and habitat loss, particularly due to...
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