Wildlife

‘Cooked’ Mussels

Some of Greece’s hottest summer weather in decades decimated parts of the country’s mussel harvest and the baby mussel seeds that would have grown into next year’s mature population.

Fisherman Stefanos Sougioultzis told Reuters that it was “as if they boiled in their own environment.” The high water temperature in the Thermaic Gulf near Thessaloniki in northern Greece not only caused the mussels to suffer heat stress, but it also encouraged a thick white mass, described as a kind of tube worm, to cling to the mussels and gradually kill them.

Many fishermen feel the gulf will become too warm for the mussels in the hotter summers to come.

New Extinctions

The ivory-billed woodpecker, along with 22 other species of birds, fish, mussels and other wildlife, is set to be declared extinct and removed from the endangered species list, US wildlife officials announced Wednesday.

“For the species proposed for delisting today, the protections of the (Endangered Species Act) came too late, with most either extinct, functionally extinct, or in steep decline at the timing of listing,” the US Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Also slated for delisting are the Bachman’s warbler, two species of freshwater fishes, eight species of Southeastern freshwater mussels and 11 species from Hawaii and the Pacific Islands.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/3D3DfCh