Lawsuit Seeks Protection for Horseshoe Crabs

The Center for Biological Diversity just sued the Trump administration’s NOAA Fisheries for refusing to protect American horseshoe crabs under the Endangered Species Act. We (and 25 other organizations) petitioned for their safeguards in 2024.

Horseshoe crabs are ancient, body-armored marine arthropods with 10 eyes and a long, spiked tail. Every spring they crawl ashore to lay their eggs in massive spawning events. In recent decades their population has plummeted by more than 70% because of overharvesting — especially from biomedical companies that drain their blood for drug testing — and habitat loss. As this species has declined, so have animals who eat them and their eggs, like endangered sea turtles and shorebirds called red knots.

“Horseshoe crabs have survived meteor impacts and ice ages, but they’re facing their biggest threat yet: us,” said Center attorney Danny Waltz. “I’m hopeful this lawsuit will force federal officials to save these living fossils from extinction before it’s too late.”

Communities Come Together to Save Big Bend

As we reported in April, the Trump administration wants to cut through Big Bend National Park — one of the most breathtakingly beautiful wild landscapes in the country — with a brutal border wall. In the face of outcry from locals of all political stripes, plus a lawsuit from us, the administration is now claiming it won’t build a physical wall through the most delicate parts of this Rio Grande canyon landscape — but we don’t put much stock in its media statements.

The fact is that it has handed out the largest border-wall contract in U.S. history — $1.7 billion — for the park. Big Bend is home to wildlife like bighorn sheep and black bears and beloved by people, too.

“We’ve had zero transparency with these plans,” the Center’s Laiken Jordahl told National Public Radio listeners on 1A last week. “They haven't held a single public hearing or released a public document that analyzes what they're planning to do. And we’ll continue to fight this project tooth and nail because Big Bend is everything to us, just like it is for so many Texans and so many Americans.”

Help fund our fight against the Big Bend travesty with a gift to the Center’s Future for the Wild Fund. If you donate today, your donation will be doubled.

Suit Launched to Fight Atrazine in Water

The Center and allies just filed a notice of our intent to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to make it set safety limits for atrazine under the Clean Water Act. This cancer-linked pesticide has been found at dangerous levels in thousands of U.S. waterways — including drinking-water supplies — and in 2021 the EPA itself found that it harms more than 1,000 federally protected species, from whooping cranes to Illinois chorus frogs.

“The Trump administration has failed to do anything to adequately protect our families and most endangered wildlife from the dangers of cancer-linked and hormone-disrupting pesticides like atrazine,” said the Center’s Environmental Health Science Director Nathan Donley.

As we prepare our lawsuit, you can help fight pesticides too: Tell the EPA to ban atrazine and other pesticides that other countries already consider too dangerous to use.

Wildlife Crossings in Action

Developments and their roads can be major barriers to all kinds of wildlife. Without proper planning, they can lead to fragmented habitats that constrain wildlife movement, impairing some animals’ ability to find food, shelter, and mates. And of course roads can lead to vehicle-wildlife collisions that kill or injure animals and people.

But there are solutions to improve habitat connectivity — like wildlife crossings.

Head to Facebook or Instagram to watch a video of Florida panthers, alligators, bears, bobcats, deer, and coyotes cruising through wildlife crossings beneath highways as unknowing humans commute above them at 70 miles per hour.

After a Century, Wolves Visit Sequoia National Park

For the first time in more than 100 years, a gray wolf has been confirmed in Sequoia National Park. The three-year-old, black female BEY03F, born in the north of the state, traveled hundreds of miles to get to the park, likely looking for a mate. Beforehand she went all the way south to LA County and then reversed course.

As the Center’s Amaroq Weiss told the Los Angeles Times, “You want them to find a mate and be able to establish a territory, but what you don’t want is for them to end up dead in the process of searching, whether killed by a vehicle or illegally.” In California, vehicle strikes are the number-one cause of wolf deaths.

“If you’re lucky enough to see a wolf in the wild and you have your camera — I guess, your iPhone — with you, take a picture,” added Amaroq. “But the alternative to that is: Don’t take a picture. Just soak in that moment.”

Revelator: Birds in the City

New science reveals that urban areas are surprisingly important for migrating birds. The question of why isn’t quite as settled, but the patterns show that cities can serve as vital stopover sites for migrating species.

Read more in The Revelator.

And if you don't already, subscribe to The Revelator’s free weekly newsletter for more wildlife and conservation news.

That's Wild: Tiny Ants Lick Big Ants

Two decades ago a Smithsonian entomologist named Mark Moffett, working in southern Arizona, captured photos of small cone ants licking clean the bodies of red harvester ants three times their size.

What happened was that the big ants parked themselves near the little ants’ nests, then froze till the little ones had finished grooming their nooks and crannies, including inside their open mandibles — not unlike a drive-through carwash with hand detailing. Sometimes five little ants would work on a big ant at the same time.

Moffet finally published the resulting study in Ecology and Evolution this April.

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Photo credits: Horseshoe crab courtesy NPS; bighorn sheep by Peter Pearsall/USFWS, black bear courtesy NPS; Illinois chorus frog by Jacob Cackowski/USFWS; screenshot of wildlife crossing video courtesy Florida Department of Transportation; gray wolf by Neal Herbert/NPS; urban birds by Hongbin/Unsplash; cone and harvester ants © Mark Moffett/Minden Pictures.

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