Background Articles

Somebody is poisoning the moose of Anchorage. It's probably you. And many of your relatives, friends, and neighbors. Because the entire city is a garden laced with poisonous plants.

There's somewhat of a slow motion invasion of a fresh water crustacean happening in Buskin River and Buskin Lake. It has a hard shell, two claws and tastes great in pies.

The lobster population has crashed to the lowest levels on record in southern New England while climbing to heights never before seen in the cold waters off Maine and other northern reaches — a geographic shift that scientists attribute in large part to the warming of the ocean.

A recent study shows that polar bears' mercury levels are declining as melting ice drives them onshore. But is it all good news? Read on.

If you're wondering why British Columbia experienced such a mild winter and early spring, you could maybe blame it on a mysterious "blob" of warm water in the Pacific Ocean.

Human encounters with cougars are on the rise in Alberta, according to wildlife conservation group WildSmart.

The majestic birds of the far north are traveling as far south as Bermuda.

Kays, along with fellow curator Robert Feranec, developed a new kind of carbon isotope test on hair and bone that proved the Sacandaga Lake wolf lived on a diet in the wild, and had never been a pet or zoo specimen fed by humans. Seeing the animal was not a coyote, the hunter gave the wolf carcass to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which called in federal wildlife officials, who confiscated it. The DEC issued a statement saying the study shows federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials need to reverse efforts to remove endangered species protections for wolves in the Northeast. Said Christopher Amato, assistant commissioner for natural resources, "We continue to believe that natural recovery of wolves in the Northeast is possible and urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider its recent proposals and to update its wolf recovery plan to reflect this new scientific information and support the natural recolonization by wolves." In July 2004, federal officials proposed removing the wolf from the endangered species in the east, due to growing wolf populations from recovery efforts in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

A parasitic isopod that scientists identified five years ago has all but decimated mud shrimp populations in coastal estuaries ranging from British Columbia to northern California - with the exception of a handful of locations in Oregon from Waldport to Tillamook.

July 23, 2007 – Over the last five years, large, predatory Humboldt squid have moved north from equatorial waters and invaded the sea off Central California, where they may be decimating populations of Pacific hake, an important commercial fish.

"We never know for sure how they died, but it does seem like a lot of the evidence points to killer whale predation," Steve Ferguson, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, said Thursday.

Efforts to encourage Icelandic fisheries to make use of Atlantic bluefin tuna catch quotas allotted to Iceland have yet to prove fruitful. While tuna goes for high prices, specialised ships are necessary to make tuna fishing profitable. Chartering foreign boats to develop tuna fishing experience within the Icelandic fishing industry would require authorisation from the […]

Coyotes’ recent occupation of one of the most densely human-populated cities in America may have started around 2003. That’s when a team led by Benjamin Sacks of the University of California, Davis extracted DNA from the blood of a male coyote captured in the Presidio and later returned there.

North Pacific right whales, once numbering in the tens of thousands, swam throughout the Bering Sea until they were nearly wiped out by commercial hunters. Now the Eastern North Pacific right whale population is estimated to total about 30 individuals, and its habitat is believed to be concentrated in the southeastern corner of the Bering Sea.

Landmark report says invasive species are major threat to biodiversity and dealing with them requires global cooperation

Scientists looking at salmon found in Arctic waters are still asking northern harvesters and fishers to submit any unusual catches in exchange for compensation. It's part of the Arctic Salmon Project, which is a collaborative effort involving Fisheries and Oceans Canada, scientists from the South and local hunters and trappers organizations.

Researchers from the University of Oklahoma are using Unangax knowledge and oral traditions to solve the mystery of ancient bear bones found on Unalaska and Amaknak Islands in Alaska, with the possibility that the bones were transported by sea from a neighboring island.

Once believed extinct, Alaska’s wood bison have survived their first winter, and new calves represent a huge milestone for the state’s experimental project.

Biologists were able to collect valuable data on these rare animals during a special whale survey in August.