No. 1334, January 29, 2025

Defend Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Named for its “staircase” of stunning rock cliffs, Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is an amazing, 1.87-million-acre wild landscape. It protects world-famous geological formations, rare dinosaur fossils, cultural sites, and staggering biodiversity. It’s habitat for bighorn sheep, mountain lions, bears, more than 200 bird species, and more than 600 bee species.

Now Utah’s members of Congress want to use the Congressional Review Act resolution to wipe out the monument’s protections. It’s part of an ongoing public lands attack, with the goal of letting private industry move in while pushing the public out.

If Congress passes the resolution, it will erase the monument’s management plan — a framework to protect one of the wildest desert landscapes in the West — which took years of hard work, public input, and Tribal consultation.

That would mark the first time the Congressional Review Act is used to reverse a management plan for a national monument — meaning this trick could become a core element in a playbook for going after national monument protections across the United States.

If you live in the United States, tell your members of Congress: Vote “no” on any resolution overturning protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

In Court to Save Gates of the Arctic From Ambler Road

The Center for Biological Diversity and allies just submitted new legal filings challenging the Trump administration’s 2025 decisions to reinstate illegal permits allowing the proposed Ambler Road to carve through Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

We first sued in 2020 over this 200-mile-plus industrial mining road, which would profoundly threaten the people, water, and wildlife of Northwest Alaska — slicing through one of the longest caribou migration paths in the world, crossing nearly 3,000 rivers and streams, damming tundra wetlands, and interrupting traditional Alaska Native ways of life. In 2024 the Bureau of Land Management denied the road’s permits across BLM lands, but last fall the Trump administration reinstated them — hence our new filings.

Help the Center defend the Arctic from this catastrophic road with a gift to our Future for the Wild Fund.

In Memoriam: Taylor the Boundary-Breaking Wolf

The Mexican gray wolf called Taylor, known for repeatedly crossing Interstate 40 northward to return home, tried crossing southward — presumably in search of a mate — and was found dead over the weekend on the freeway near Grants, New Mexico. Taylor had established a home range last year near Mount Taylor, despite a federal rule banning wolves north of I-40, and gone back there twice after being removed.

“This intrepid wolf, whose life was cut short, had such determination and grit,” said the Center’s Michael Robinson. “I can’t help but wonder whether this tragedy could have been avoided if Taylor and potential female mates had been allowed to roam and find each other north of I-40, instead of him crossing south to look for love.”

The Center is working hard, as we have since our founding, to make the world a safer place for wolves like Taylor.

Studfish, Nine Other Species Warrant Protection

After petitions from the Center and allies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that 10 species across the country “warrant” — aka deserve — consideration for Endangered Species Act protection.

They include Olympic marmots and gray cat’s eye plants in Washington; Alvord chub fish, Donner und Blitzen pebblesnails, and wonder caddisflies in Oregon; Mount Pinos sooty grouse and San Joaquin tiger beetles in California; mysterious lantern fireflies in Delaware and Maryland; stippled studfish in Alabama; and Wilson’s phalaropes, migratory birds suffering from the Great Salt Lake’s decline.

“Unfortunately these precious animals and plants are joining a backlog of hundreds of species waiting for help in an administration that didn’t protect a single one last year — the first time that’s happened since 1981,” said Noah Greenwald, our endangered species codirector.

Desert Tortoises Protected From Off-Road Vehicles

Thanks to a 2021 lawsuit by the Center and allies, a federal judge has prohibited off-road vehicle use in critical habitat for desert tortoises in California’s western Mojave Desert. The decision protects more than 2,200 miles of proposed routes across 1 million acres of conservation lands. It follows an earlier ruling that the BLM had unlawfully approved the routes without considering harm to resources or harm to species (and their habitat) protected under the Endangered Species Act.

“I’m grateful the judge recognized the need to take action to stop the steep decline of desert tortoises in the West Mojave,” said Center lawyer Lisa Belenky.

The Revelator: Gator Guardians

Alligators are a well-known conservation success story, but the ways they help people are less understood. A growing field of research shows that these predators are very good at storing carbon, which helps fight climate change.

Read more in The Revelator.

And make sure you’re subscribed to the free Revelator weekly e-newsletter for more wildlife and conservation news.

That’s Wild: The Sleep of the Jellies

Snoozing can be a risky proposition in the natural world: It’s a great time for predators to move in and take a bite. Yet throughout the animal kingdom, critters do it for hours every day.

Recently researchers in Israel have discovered that upside-down jellyfish and starlet sea anemones, both brainless animals who live in shallow waters on the seafloor, spend about a third of their daily cycle asleep and need extra sleep to recover from stress — much as humans need naps. This is particularly intriguing in terms of the light it may shed on the evolutionary history of sleep, since these kinds of ancient animals, called cnidarians, are thought to have been the first to develop neurons.

Watch the researchers’ video of dozing jellies.

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Photo credits: Mountain lion courtesy NPS, bighorn sheep by Nathan Hurner/USFWS; caribou by Lisa Hupp/USFWS; Mexican gray wolf by Aislinn Maestas/USFWS; Olympic marmot by John Gussman, sooty grouse by James Bland; Mojave desert tortoise by Bekee Hotze/USFWS; alligator by Emil Siekkinen; screenshot of an upside-down jellyfish video courtesy Raphael Aguillon et al., Nature Communications 2026 study conducted at Bar-Ilan University (CC BY-NC-ND).

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