Threatened/Endangered

[mariness]

Manatee, bald eagle removed from Florida "endangered" status and moved to "threatened" status; Panama City crayfish and gopher tortoise moved to "endangered" status.Oddly, of all of these, I know the least about the Panama City crayfish -- this oddly because I tend to focus more on invertebrates than vertebrates. But onwards

Comments

[loucheroo]

The fact that the gopher tortoise is now very, very, very, very, very endangered as in only a couple left makes me angry. EXTRAORDINARILY angry. The habitats of the gopher tortoises are being rapidly churned up to make lovely housing developments for people. Um, hello? People from out of state? Hurricanes are horrible. You don't want to live here. If you stop moving here, perhaps we won't keep killing off our varied animal species just to build you your dumb houses.

Believe it or not, what is called to mind is the movie Over the Hedge, where an entire wooded area is turned into a lovely housing development with a tiny triangle of land left for the woodland creatures (no, this isn't a spoiler in any way shape or form). That horrified me too -- and reminded me of Florida. :P

[mariness]

Overpopulation.

It's not just a Florida problem; it's a world problem, and as long as our world population keeps rising, we're going to continue to encounter problems like this.

[loucheroo]

Agreed... to an extent. Florida's population just seems to be exploding at an alarming rate... even moreso than many other places.

[lordsnotrag]

Here's an idea: let's use the word "endangered" for all critters on the list and just gauge levels of endangered-ness by the number of times we put the word "really" in front of it.

Or just have one status: endangered. Because, no matter what you call the levels, once a critter is moved up the chain publicly, people will think all is well regardless of the name. Keep the "levels" as internal tools for scientist types to determine just how endangered they are.

Just a thought.

[mariness]

The one problem with just having one category is that each category defines specific legal boundaries when dealing with that species. For example, you can offer habitat mitigation or destroy the habitat of "threatened" species (U.S. definition) but not "endangered" species.

We scientist types often don't use these definitions much -- except for marine mammal researchers who do use CITES definitions all the time, but that's because dolphins aren't big on following international maps and boundaries, and they're extremely difficult to count.

[cardinalximinez]

"I'm not dead yet!"

[mariness]

"I'm getting better!"

[cardinalximinez]

"You'll be stone dead in a moment."

[mariness]

I'll just lie here, then and dream of living in an autonomous collective.

[anonymous]

I agree with you on your classification, but I still say it is good news for the species involved. I have noticed that the bald eagle seems to be coming back in alot of areas. For example, we have a nesting pair here in The Woodlands and the kids and I even saw one of them one day. It is also good news that the manatee at least has a chance to survive!

[mariness]

And so, the bald eagle attacks the suburbs!

Manatees would actually probably be just fine is they weren't such slow, stupid animals incapable of getting away from boats. Poor things. And if they weren't so difficult to see in the water. I wouldn't, myself, say that manatees are out of danger of extinction, but at least their numbers seem to be stabilizing, and that's a very good thing.

And now that you've finally found my blog you should go check out the funny stuff! The more amusing posts are listed under my user info.