No. 1296, May 8, 2025

Suing to Save Species From Pesticides Put in Water

The Center for Biological Diversity just sued the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency for failing to protect imperiled wildlife from pesticides sprayed directly into water bodies.

The EPA’s permit for applying these pesticides, called the “pesticide general permit,” has such major shortcomings that two federal wildlife agencies said it threatens hundreds of plants and animals listed under the Endangered Species Act — including Pacific salmon, Atlantic sturgeon, northern bog turtles, and whooping cranes. Among many other flaws, it lets about 97% of pesticide applicators avoid even basic safety procedures, like meaningful reporting and monitoring.

“The Trump administration is telling us it wants to make America healthy again by reining in dangerous pesticides, and this is its chance,” said Center attorney Allison LaPlante. “The Trump team should craft a new plan that prevents pesticide users from routinely polluting the waterways people and wildlife depend on.”

Trump Wants to Kill Protections for Marine Mammals

No other federal agency does what the Marine Mammal Commission does. Created in 1972 to oversee federal science and policy on marine mammals, it helps save them from lethal fishing-gear entanglements and offshore energy development.

But President Donald Trump’s new, proposed budget would — among many other harms — cut all the commission’s funding and staff.

“I’m truly shocked to see Trump officials trying to destroy this crucial protection for whales and dolphins that just about every single American adores,” said Miyoko Sakashita, the Center’s oceans director. “This commission costs taxpayers just a penny per person, and most people care about these beautiful creatures.”

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Take Action for Grizzlies, Monarchs

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service extended public-comment periods on protections for grizzly bears and monarch butterflies. So if you haven’t done it already, you have one more chance to speak up in defense of these iconic animals.

Last year, after a decade of work by the Center and allies, the Service finally proposed to protect monarchs under the Endangered Species Act. Finalized protection can’t come soon enough: The western population, which winters on the California coast, has fallen by 95%, and the eastern population — which migrates to Mexico for the winter — is at its second-smallest size ever recorded. Call on the feds to wrap up protection before both these beautiful butterfly migrations disappear.

Meanwhile grizzly bears are back in the crosshairs. The Fish and Wildlife Service recently denied state petitions to strip their federal safeguards, but at the same time it proposed new rules giving state agencies and landowners more leeway to kill them. Tell the Service to keep protections in place in recovery zones and connectivity corridors — and not to pass any grizzly-killing rules.

Defending Coastal Marten Kits From Habitat Havoc

The Center just asked a federal judge to protect coastal martens from thousands of off-road vehicles invading their home in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area this summer — a sensitive time when marten kits still need their mothers. The U.S. Forest Service is poised to approve several loud, damaging off-road vehicle events in marten critical habitat, which was designated last year after a decade of Center work. We’re requesting an injunction to stop the destruction.

Coastal martens are shy, solitary animals related to otters and weasels. Only a few hundred survive.

“Off-road vehicles have a place on the Oregon Dunes, but the Forest Service has to protect martens' key habitat and corridors,” said Center attorney Tala DiBenedetto.

Biodiversity Art Exhibit: ‘I Want You Around’

Austin, Texas-based artist and sometime Center collaborator Juliet Whitsett created a beautiful art installation over the course of April: a series of pieces, placed in a tiny museum one by one every day for a month, highlighting 30 endangered and threatened species that depend on local ecosystems.

The exhibit, inside a white, glass-fronted box on the side of a nature trail, honored “the lives, forms, and distinct palettes of these species,” from Barton Springs salamanders to Texas fatmuckets and bracted twistflowers.

Head to Instagram to watch a video showing the whole thing (and shots of individual pieces on the artist’s account).

Revelator: Beaver Rewilding

In southern Oregon volunteers turned out in force to welcome a family of beavers to degraded mountain meadows. As Juliet Grable reports in The Revelator, both people and beavers are helping restore this remote ecosystem.

If you don’t already, subscribe to The Revelator’s free weekly e-newsletter for more wildlife and conservation news.

That's Wild: The Hannibal Lecter of Larvae

Riddle me this: What kind of animal eats meat (including that of its own species), lurks in spiders’ webs plotting to steal their prey, and covers its body in the dried-out corpses of insects?

The answer is: bone collector caterpillars. But don’t hate them because they’re beautiful. This newly described Hyposmocoma species wears dresses of bug bits to keep itself camouflaged so the spiders whose webs it hunts in don’t notice it — and it’s the length of an average fingernail.

Only .13% of caterpillars in the world are carnivores, so these guys are rare indeed.

Check out our video to see them in action and meet some scientists researching them.

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Photo credits: Whooping crane by Gary Leavens/Wikimedia Commons, Atlantic sturgeon by Ryan Hagerty/USFWS; Havasupai Falls by Taylor McKinnon/Center for Biological Diversity; humpback whale by Charles J. Sharp/Wikimedia Commons; grizzly bear by Terry Tollefsbol/NPS, monarch butterfly courtesy USFWS; coastal marten by Mark Linnell/U.S. Forest Service; biodiversity art exhibit by Juliet Whitsett; beaver rewilding by Juliet Grable; bone collector caterpillar courtesy Rubinoff lab, Entomology section, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience.

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