📰 EwA News Digest: Sharks Off California, Missing Arctic Ice, and Lots of Sea Turtles

[mlmcglathery]

Hello all!

Mike here, with another EwA News Digest for you on this balmy November evening. In these digests, you’ll find a selection of the latest news from the worlds of conservation, ecology, and beyond. 

We’ll get the election news out of the way first (don’t worry, this email does not include any electoral maps). Voters in Colorado narrowly passed a measure this week to reintroduce the gray wolf to the Western Slope of the Rockies. This marks the first time a gray wolf reintroduction program will be initiated by voters instead of under the Endangered Species Act, from which the wolves were recently delisted. Read about it from Smithsonian. 

Next, we’ve got a bit of a downer: even after a rainy couple of weeks and an unseasonal snowfall, much of Massachusetts remains in drought. According to the National Integrated Drought Information System, over 90% of the state is still abnormally dry, with over 60% in moderate drought and 16% (the Cape and Islands) remaining under severe drought conditions.

Further north, there’s a worrying lack of a different state of water—sea ice. 2020 has seen dramatically slow growth of Arctic sea ice as winter approaches, with October 2020 representing the largest departure from typical conditions observed in the satellite record. Read about the situation at Earther, or read the more technical and up-to-date debriefing from the National Snow & Ice Data Center.

Across the pond, one of the U.K.’s largest spiders was recently rediscovered after being thought extinct in Britain for over 20 years. Naturalist Mike Waite discovered a great fox spider, not seen in the country since 1999, after two years of nighttime searches for the arachnid. Read about the find at The Guardian.

Image by Mike Waite

The waters off Southern California are seeing an abnormally shark-filled fall. A shark-tagging program from the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach saw greater than triple the number of sharks observed at this time in 2019. Usually sharks migrate to waters off Baja California in Mexico this time of year. Read about it at the LA Times. 

Image by Terry Goss

A little ways east of Baja California, in the state of Sonora, the indigenous Seri community helped to hatch a record number of olive ridley sea turtles in October. The turtles benefitted from less beach traffic due to the pandemic, which resulted to decreased disturbance to their nests. Over 2,259 turtles were released into the Gulf of California, compared to the usual 500. Read more at the BBC.

Image by Steve Jurvetson

That’s it for this week! Catch you next time.

-Mike