How Should Species be Selected for the Endangered Species List?

What do you think should be the primary deciding factor in placing a species on the Endangered Species List? Which other factors should be considered?

Pygmy rabbit, Scientific American

Survival denied: Birds, fish, plant, pygmy rabbits lose out on endangered species protection  By John Platt Oct 7, 2010 09:10 AM 

"A variety of rare and threatened species have been denied protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in recent weeks, including North America's smallest rabbit and a plant that may already be extinct in the wild.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which makes the final determination on which species get protected status, ruled that some of these species deserve protection, although not as much as other, higher priority species."  Read more...

AP Environmental Science Invasive Species Report

actnow.com.au

If you would like to sign up for a specific invasive species for your project before class on Monday, you may sign up in a comment to this post. Remember that each student must report on a different species. Add your first name and last initial  if you comment anonymously so I know which student signed up!

Interesting Careers in Science

Biologists from the Field Museum are studying biodiversity in the Amazon, a tropical jungle. If you were a field biologist, which biome would you study and why?

Photo by Alvaro del Campo

Jaguars are the largest cats in the Americas. A jaguar print at Yagua River measured five inches across.

Big Cats, Tapirs and a Mysterious Bat

By DOUGLAS STOTZ

 

Wednesday, Oct. 27

"Life is tough for tropical mammalogists. They work on a group with a limited number of species, maybe 150 at places like the ones we are in, and most of those species are bats and rats. Other than monkeys, most of the large mammals in the Amazon are rare. To detect them, mammalogists look for signs — scat, tracks, scratch marks, anything to let them know that a species is here. Worse, they have yahoo ornithologists reporting weird bats, and clueless botanists seeing rare deer. But they have to follow up on these reports. They also have to work night and day. Some mammals (monkeys, for example) are out in daylight hours, but for most, nighttime is when they are active."