No. 1308, July 31, 2025

Lawsuit Defends Gulf Species From Drilling

The Center for Biological Diversity just filed a new legal claim in our lawsuit against the Trump administration for failing to take a thorough look at how offshore drilling might threaten endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster was a brutal reminder of how oil spills can devastate wildlife, especially species already struggling against extinction. We’re now fighting two federal assessments that were supposed to analyze how drilling, spills, light pollution, and other factors could harm manatees, sea turtles, cranes, and other birds. The Trump administration’s analyses just don’t cut it.

“Officials need to redo these assessments with a much larger dose of reality and much less deference to oil and gas interests,” said the Center’s Kristen Monsell.

Help our legal work in the Gulf and beyond with a donation to our Future for the Wild Fund.

Petitions Filed for Northeast Fish, Southwest Bird

Last week the Center petitioned NOAA Fisheries to protect one of the North Atlantic Ocean’s most imperiled and overlooked species — cusk fish — under the Endangered Species Act. These long-lived, bottom-dwelling marine fish live off Maine and Massachusetts and into eastern Canadian and Northern European waters. They’re most threatened by habitat loss and bycatch.

And this week, on the opposite corner of the continent, we petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect LeConte’s thrashers. Native to arid desert habitats of the U.S. Southwest and northwestern Mexico, these curve-beaked birds have lost nearly 70% of their U.S. population over the past 50 years, mostly to sprawl and other habitat degradation in Southern California, Nevada, and Arizona.

Join the Call to Ban This Bad Drug

Ractopamine is a dangerous drug used to rapidly grow muscle in cows, pigs, and turkeys raised for meat. It has documented adverse effects on animals treated with it, including tremors, lesions, and broken limbs. It also puts farmworkers at risk and harms the environment by polluting habitat for aquatic species like zebrafish.

Ractopamine is banned or restricted in meat production in at least 160 countries. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved it — at levels above the standards adopted by the United Nations' food-standards body.

Call on the FDA to ban ractopamine in farmed animals now.

Revelator: Pattie Gonia, Nature’s Warrior Queen

“Every time I take action for people and the planet, a little bit of fascism dies a sweet death,” says drag superstar and environmental activist Pattie Gonia.

Don’t miss The Revelator’s exclusive interview to find out how she finds joy in nature, stands up to fascism, and gets creative.

And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to The Revelator’s free weekly e-newsletter for more wildlife and conservation news.

Groups to Feds: Let Taylor the Wolf Wander

Thirty-five conservation groups, including the Center, are urging the Fish and Wildlife Service not to capture a male Mexican gray wolf who’s found a home near Mount Taylor, west of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Mount Taylor is north of Interstate 40, the politically derived boundary meant to limit northward trekking for endangered Southwest wolves. The Service keeps removing wolves from Mount Taylor.

This wolf, now named Taylor, was captured in May and released more than 150 miles south — but he loped back. We think he should be free to roam, for his own sake and so Mexican wolves can gain genes from Colorado’s reintroduced wolves, recreating ancestral connections.

How the USDA Pushes Trump’s Agenda

Ever since President Trump reentered office six months ago, writes Center policy specialist Leah Kelly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has eagerly worked to fulfill his anti-immigrant, anti-diversity, anti-government, and anti-climate change agenda. The USDA has turned its back on the U.S. food system — and the people the agency was created to serve — and become Trump’s enforcement lackey.

Read more in Leah’s latest post on Medium.

Then subscribe to Rooted in Policy, her monthly blog making the connections between policy, agrifood systems, and biodiversity.

That’s Wild: Confirmed — Sloths Do Fart

Some scientists thought sloths didn’t fart, figuring that any gas in the animals’ digestive systems was absorbed in their bloodstream and exited from their mouths.

Apparently that’s wrong — and there’s adorable video proof.

Zoologist Lucy Cook and wildlife veterinarian Andres Saenz Brautfam have released a video on Instagram showing a baby two-toed sloth ripping it up in a bucket of water.

"Yes, sloths do fart. And I may have just witnessed the first documented case," Cooke says. Truth be told, she informs us, sloths are quite gassy.

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Photo credits: Green sea turtle by Jen R./USFWS, manatee by Ryan Hagerty/USFWS; cusk fish courtesy NOAA Ocean Explorer; zebrafish by Lynn Ketchum/Oregon State University; Evan Benally Atwood/Oregon Wild (used with permission); Mexican wolf courtesy of New Mexico Department of Game and Fish; protest by by Mike Goad/Flickr; sloth by Stefan Laube/Wikimedia Commons.

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