The United States Department of Agriculture is preparing to barrage northeastern Mexico with sterile flies in an effort to stop the advance of a flesh-eating parasite that preys on cattle and wildlife. Nearly a dozen cases of infection by the northward-moving New World screwworm fly (Cochliomyia hominivorax) have been detected in Mexican states that border the United States in recent months, according to U.S. officials. The orange-eyed flies, about twice the size of a house fly, lay eggs in the wounds of warm-blooded animals. Its larvae feed on live flesh and can severely harm or kill their host. The parasites have moved steadily closer to U.S. states including Texas, home to a US$1.8-billion cattle industry, and if unchecked could further drive up already-elevated U.S. beef prices. In response, the USDA in November opened a sterile-fly dispersal facility in Tampico, in the northeastern...
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A leading world conservation network has called on the Argentine government to suspend its US$2.5 billion project to build an oil pipeline linking Patagonian shale-oil and gas fields with export facilities bordering South Atlantic waters extraordinarily rich in marine life. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which engages government officials, advocates, scientists, and business executives around the world in environmental protection efforts, addressed the subject at its most recent quadrennial congress. At issue is Argentina’s plan to build a 600-kilometer (370-mile) Patagonian oil pipeline and a related oil-export facility on Río Negro province’s Gulf of San Matías, which is bordered on the south by the Valdés Peninsula in neighboring Chubut Province. The peninsula’s coastal waters are an important breeding ground for the southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) and have been recognized as a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1975. The planned pipeline would...
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Conservationists monitoring the vaquita (Phocoena sinus) this summer in the Upper Gulf of California detected at least two vaquita calves and estimated that the population of the critically endangered porpoises remains stable, though tiny. The calves were among seven to 10 porpoises spotted during a summer survey led by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a Woodbridge, VA-based nonprofit dedicated to marine conservation. Sea Shepherd patrols the vaquita’s habitat and monitors the porpoise as part of a campaign to save the diminutive mammal, which lives in shallow waters of the Gulf of California near the Colorado River Delta. The vaquita population has declined almost 99% over the past 10 years due in part to illegal gillnet fishing of totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), an endangered finfish whose swim-bladder is deemed a delicacy in China and can sell there for tens of thousands of dollars per pound. Julián Escutia, executive director of...
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