JULES STRUCK

25 years after ‘disaster’ declaration, major U.S. fishery makes a comeback
MONGABAY

Aaron Longton reached down into the rinsing sink in his garage-turned-fish-processing facility on the Oregon coast and hoisted a redbanded rockfish by its fat bottom lip. The homely fish was next in line for the dressing table, where Brian Morrissey, Longton’s “cutter-in-chief,” would deftly slice it into neat fillets, setting aside its guts and bones for crabbing chum.

Morrisey had about 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of the rockfish (Sebastes babcocki) to get through that day, and 90 kg (200 lbs) of lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus), he said, his knife unzipping yet another fish. An unthinkable abundance only 20 years ago.

“These fish were really severely limited to us,” said Longton, founder of Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, a company that sells fish via a subscription program. “Now, we have huge quotas.”

Our car tires are poisoning salmon—and maybe us, too
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

On the banks of an unassuming creek south of Seattle, biologist Nathan Ivy packed a pair of dripping waders and a cooler full of petri dishes into the back of his pickup truck, and peeled away towards the highway.

As he merged south on Interstate-5, he was uniquely aware that from this river of cars, including his own, issued an imperceptible and deadly chemical—the same chemical, he knew, disfiguring the vermillion salmon eggs in the petri dishes packed away beside him.

For decades, researchers suspected that a strange chemical in Washington’s streams was causing unnatural numbers of adult coho salmon to wash up dead after heavy rains, their bellies full of unlaid eggs. In 2020, after years of Curie-like obsession, a team of scientists finally identified the deadly chemical in roadway stormwater runoff as 6PPD-quinone. Its parent chemical, they confirmed, is in virtually every tire in the world.

Wild pigs are turning electric blue in California. Here’s why.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Dan Burton heard of pigs with electric blue meat in California years ago from an old-timer he used to hunt with, but he’d brushed it off as urban legend.

So when he cut open a dead wild pig in Monterey County, California, this past February,he was surprised to see blue fat—vivid, “7/11 slushie” blue—beneath the skin.

The color came from the blue dye of rodent poison, he correctly suspected, specifically from anticoagulant rodenticide bait containing the chemical diphacinone. He tipped off the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which confirmed the presence of diphacinone and sounded the alarm to local hunters.

It wasn’t the first time.

What a chicken-size bird can tell us about a shrinking prairie
THE WASHINGTON POST

There’s a stretch of Kim Shade’s ranch in the North Dakota Badlands where he used to look for a peculiar long-billed bird from the seat of his saddle. Now, all he sees there is a road leading to an oil rig.

“I used to see quite a few of them,” the cowboy said, of the speckled, chicken-size bird called a long-billed curlew. The curlew’s absence is unsettling, he said.

“Our birds on the prairie are the same thing as a canary in a coal mine,” Shade said. “If we lose them, something’s wrong.”

Curlew territory has been slowly shunted westward in North Dakota following the retreat of the state’s dwindling grasslands. That’s bad news for conservationists, who are trying to salvage one of the country’s most threatened habitats, which has been hit hard by industry and traditional crop development. It’s also a problem for ranchers, whose cattle rely on the health and sprawl of prairie as much as the curlews.