The Trump administration plans to lay out changes to clean water rules. - via Herp Digest

WASHINGTON- 12/10/18 by Carol Davenport

The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to unveil a plan that would weaken federal clean water rules designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of streams nationwide from pesticide runoff and other pollutants. 

Environmentalists say the proposal represents a historic assault on wetlands regulation at a moment when Mr. Trump has repeatedly voiced a commitment to “crystal-clean water.” The proposed new rule would chip away at safeguards put in place a quarter century ago, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who implemented a policy designed to ensure that no wetlands lost federal protection. 

“They’re definitely rolling things back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era,” said Blan Holman, who works on water regulations with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat. 

President Trump, who made a pledge of weakening a 2015 Obama-era rule one of his central campaign pledges, is expected to tout his plan as ending a federal land grab that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their property as they see fit.

Under the Obama rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and planting certain crops, and would have been required to apply for permits from the Environmental Protection Agency in order to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those water bodies. Under the new Trump plan, which lifts federal protections from many of those streams and wetlands, those requirements will also be lifted. 

A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, John Konkus, declined to comment on the plan. 

The clean water rollback is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to weaken or undo major environmental rules, including proposals to weaken regulations on planet-warming emissions from cars, power plants and oil and gas drilling rigs, a series of moves designed to speed new drilling in the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and efforts to weaken protections under the Endangered Species Act. This week in Katowice, Poland, at an annual United Nations conference on mitigating global warming, Trump administration officials held an event touting the benefits of fossil fuels. 

The proposed water rule, scheduled to be announced Tuesday morning at the Environmental Protection Agency, is designed to replace an Obama-era regulation known as Waters of the United States. Tuesday’s unveiling of the proposal is expected to coincide with its publication in the federal register. After that, the administration will take comment on the plan for 60 days, and it could then revise the plan before finalizing it next year. 

The Obama rule, developed jointly by the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers under the authority of the 1972 Clean Water Act, was designed to limit pollution in about 60 percent of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about a third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams and wetlands. 

But it became a target for rural landowners, an important part of President Trump’s political base, since it could have restricted how much pollution from chemical fertilizers and pesticides could seep into water on their property. 

The new Trump water rule will retain federal protections for those larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them, and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water, according to a detailed eight-page fact sheet prepared by the administration ahead of the unveiling of the rule and reviewed by The New York Times.

The secret contamination of polar bears

Hundreds of unrecognized halogenated contaminants discovered in polar bear serum

Date:  December 3, 2018

Source:  Wiley

Using a new approach to measure chemical contaminants in polar bears, scientists from Canada and the United States found a large variety of new chlorinated and fluorinated substances, including many new polychlorinated biphenyl metabolites. Worryingly, these previously unrecognized contaminants have not declined in the past decades, and many long-chain fluorinated alkyl sulfonic acids have been increasing over time, says the study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Polar bears reside at the top of the Arctic food chain. Whatever pollutants fish and other marine living species take up, they can end up biomagnifying in the polar bears that eat them. Halogenated contaminants were recognized in polar bear serum for the first time in the 1970s, and since then have been monitored frequently, as these human-made substances or their direct metabolites have been linked to disturbances of the immune system or endocrine function. The current study with leading author Jonathan W. Martin from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and now at Stockholm University, Sweden, gives a survey on the different classes of halogenated contaminants now detected in polar bear serum, and also tracks down the trends in contamination during the last two decades.

Continued  

A fresh look at winter footprints: Environmental DNA improves tracking of rare carnivores

Date:  November 27, 2018

Source:  USDA Forest Service - Rocky Mountain Research Station     

An innovative new project has discovered that animal footprints contain enough DNA to allow for species identification. Scientists have traditionally relied on snow-tracks and camera traps to monitor populations of rare carnivores, like Canada lynx, fishers and wolverines. These traditional techniques can tell part of, but not the entire story of an animal population, and are sometimes difficult to validate species identification.

The study, led by the USDA Forest Service, collected snow samples within animal tracks from known locations of collared or photographed animals. DNA was extracted from these samples and analyzed with cutting-edge genomic tools and newly developed molecular genetic assays to identify each species. They found these assays positively detected the DNA of each species in various snow samples and outperformed traditional lab techniques on previously undetectable genetic samples, which suggests that this method could revolutionize winter surveys of rare species by greatly reducing or eliminating misidentifications and missed detections.

"It was the craziest thing, we were talking about how we use environmental DNA to detect aquatic species and thinking, maybe we could do the same in snow, since it is just water after all," said Thomas Franklin, a scientist with the USDA Forest Service National Genomics Center for Wildlife and Fish Conservation, who is lead author on the study. "This study shows that thinking outside the box and collaborating with researchers from other disciplines can pay real dividends in terms innovation and scientific advances."

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Foxes in the city: Citizen science helps researchers to study urban wildlife

Date:  December 14, 2018

Source:  University of Veterinary Medicine -- Vienna

Urban habitats are becoming increasingly more important for several wildlife species. Foxes, for example, have become successful inhabitants of urban areas in recent years. The research team has now conducted an analysis, the first of its kind in the German-speaking countries, of fox sightings in Vienna. Data on fox sightings was available from all times of the year for a period of five years. Encounters with foxes were reported from all city districts and at all times of day.

"Much of our knowledge about the occurrence, distribution and association with land use of these urban foxes is poor, however, partly because many of the favoured urban habitats are on private property and therefore hardly accessible to scientists," explains Theresa Walter from the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at Vetmeduni Vienna. Using a citizen science approach, in which the Viennese public reported fox sightings that were made, for example, in private gardens, it was possible to close this information gap.

Read on  

Extraordinary 'faithful father' revealed by study of smooth guardian frog of Borneo

December 18, 2018 by Brendan M. Lynch, University of Kansas

Stay-at-home dads might find their spirit animal in the smooth guardian frog of Borneo. A new pair of research papers authored by an investigator at the University of Kansas shows the male of the smooth guardian frog species (Limnonectes palavanensis) is a kind of amphibian "Mr. Mom"—an exemplar of male parental care in the animal kingdom.

"Sex-role reversal is basically when a male takes the role that you usually see with females in other species," said Johana Goyes Vallejos, a postdoctoral research associate with the Herpetology Division at KU's Biodiversity Institute, who led both studies. "The male provides care for the offspring. The females do the displaying part—like a peacock that has beautiful feathers—the female has those ornaments or behaviors you usually see with males."

The papers reflect three years' worth of fieldwork in Borneo, a vast island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean split among the nations of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. Goyes Vallejos observed the frogs both in the wild and in outdoor enclosures at a field station.

In one of the papers, published in the Journal of Natural History, Goyes Vallejos offers new details about the prolonged parental duties of the male smooth guardian frog, behavior that had been studied very little until now. "In frogs, male parenting is more common," said Goyes Vallejos. "But in other frog species, males take care of eggs and offspring, but they continue to call to attract other females—they aren't missing opportunities to mate with females just because they have a clutch of eggs. So, sometimes they have two or three clutches of eggs from different females. But in the case of the smooth guardian frog, they only take care of one clutch and they don't call at that time—they aren't interested in attracting other females; they're very faithful fathers. That's unusual. Clearly, other frog species can do it, so why don't they? There's some reversal in the sex roles where the father becomes a very devoted parent while the female can go on to mate multiple times."

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