News at a glance: LGBTQ+ Nobel laureates, a statistics prize, and the return of the snail darter

CONSERVATION Once-controversial fish delisted A small fish famous for drawing the first U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Endangered Species Act was removed last week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from the list of species under threat of extinction. In 1975, the agency declared the snail darter ( Percina tanasi ) endangered, concluding that construction of a dam on the Little Tennessee River would doom the 9-centimeter-long animals. Although the court upheld the listing in 1978, Congress allowed the dam to go ahead. The darter’s outlook improved after some were moved to other streams, more populations were discovered, and stream water became cleaner. Although the snail darter is the fifth fish species to recover and be removed from the list, some 400 other fish species across the United States remain listed as imperiled. The pace of recovery is slow mainly because species are listed only after they have declined to small populations that are difficult to rescue , and because conservation funding is inadequate, researchers report this week in PLOS ONE . Worldwide, populations of freshwater species have declined by 83% on average since 1970, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report , released this week. DIVERSITY In a first, Nobelists are out as LGBTQ+ Last week’s Nobel Prize recipients in the sciences included, for the first time, researchers wh...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news