Spawning endangered coho salmon have yet to appear in Redwood Creek, raising fears that Cosco Busan oil spill may have driven the fish away.
“No coho have come up Redwood Creek so far this year,” said Steve Hampton, of the state Department of Fish and Game, at a meeting Tuesday night in Mill Valley to discuss the effects of the spill on Marin.
Letter submitted to NOAA and CA DFG. The Redwood Creek coho salmon run comes in from the Pacific Ocean at Muir Beach in Marin County and is closely monitored each year by biologists from the National Park Service. Redwood Creek coho congregate off Muir Beach at the start of the rainy season waiting for seasonal rains to break the berm at Muir Beach so they can begin their upstream migration. On the date of the oil spill, November 7th, 2007, that berm had not yet broken. Thus the fish were likely directly offshore — and may have been in the path of the oil that affected coastal Marin and particularly Muir Beach.
Fish biologists in West Marin are expressing concern over what is shaping up to be one of the worst coho salmon spawning years on record. Numbers of new nests are…
SAN FRANCISCO- The U.S. government announced today that it is considering listing loggerhead sea turtles found off the U.S. West Coast as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. The action comes in response to a formal petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Turtle Island Restoration Network in July 2007 that aimed to increase protections for loggerhead sea turtles. The petition sought to have North Pacific loggerhead sea turtles listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act and to have areas along the California coast and off Hawaii designated as critical habitat for the species.
Yesterday, Costa Rica’s Federal Register (el Diario Oficial La Gaceta, #194) published a decree (nacion91007>32) signed by President Oscar Arias which authorizes the Environmental Ministry (MINAE) to begin the administrative proceedings to expropriate the properties within Las Baulas National Marine Park in Guanacaste.
Terre Verde speaks with watershed biologists from the Salmon Protection And Watershed Network and the Natural Heritage Institute about salmon runs in Marin County and the East Bay. Topics include…
HONOLULU, Hawaii- Today the federal government announced the initiation of a formal review to determine if the black-footed albatross should receive the protections of the Endangered Species Act. The announcement, published in the Federal Register, comes in response to a petition filed in 2004 by the environmental law firm Earthjustice on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity and Turtle Island Restoration Network.
SAN FRANCISCO- Two conservation organizations, the Center for Biological Diversity and Turtle Island Restoration Network, filed a lawsuit today against Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne for failing to take into account the latest information on global warming in management decisions affecting polar bears, walrus, sea otters, and manatees. The suit, brought under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, seeks to force the federal government to issue updated stock assessment reports for protected marine mammals ranging from Florida to Alaska. Stock assessments are population estimates that include information on the range of the species and threats to its survival.
SAN FRANCISCO Today, a coalition of environmental organizations formally petitioned the federal government to designate critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act for the Pacific leatherback sea turtle, a species whose frequent and deadly encounters with longline and gillnet fishing gear meant to catch swordfish have put it on a steep slide towards extinction.
Hundreds of Scientists and Thousands of Residents Call on Supervisors to Enact Stronger Creek Protections. San Rafael–Marin County Supervisors are being told by California’s leading scientists with affiliations from almost every leading university in the State and the California Academy of Sciences, that current and proposed policies regarding Marin’s coho salmon do not adequately protect this critically endangered species and are likely to lead to their extirpation.
