Pulled from Yahoo news and written by Mary Pemberton

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Four years after being placed on the Endangered Species List, the dwindling sea otters of southwest Alaska on Wednesday were given an important recovery tool.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated nearly 5,900 square miles as critical habitat for sea otters in the Aleutian Islands, Bering Sea and Alaska Peninsula. The designated area includes all nearshore waters.

“Critical habitat has a proven record of aiding the recovery of endangered species,” said Rebecca Noblin, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, which filed two lawsuits and engaged in years of litigation to get the animals protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. The otters in southwest Alaska were listed as threatened in 2005.

“This has been a long time coming,” she said.

Critical habitat gives the sea otters — the smallest of marine mammals — a “fighting chance of recovery,” she said.

Nearshore areas were chosen because most of the creatures that sea otters eat — sea urchins, crabs, octopuses and some bottom fish — are found in shallow waters. Areas close to shore also provide the best protection from marine predators, especially killer whales, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Federal law requires that critical habitat be designated at the time of listing. But when that didn’t happen under the Bush administration, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a federal lawsuit in 2006. The following year an agreement was reached that critical habitat would be designated by this October.

Fish and Wildlife said it needed time to conduct an economic impact analysis on what the designation could mean to southwest Alaska. The agency found that designation would not have a large impact and should not result in any commercial fishing closures.

About 90 percent of the world’s sea otters are in Alaska waters. There were more than 100,000 sea otters in southwest Alaska waters in the 1970s but there are fewer than 40,000 now. Some areas have seen numbers plummet 90 percent.

The reason for the decline is not known but one credible theory is that killer whales are preying on more sea otters, perhaps because other larger marine mammals such as sea lions are also in decline.

Noblin said there isn’t much that can be done about killer whales but there are other stressors than can be addressed such as overfishing, the potential for oil development in Bristol Bay and climate change in the Bering Sea.

Critical habitat gives the animals an extra layer of scrutiny when entities are applying for federal permits in the designated area. However, it does not mean that development will stop, Noblin said.

“It just means the developer has to go through an additional process to determine how what they are doing will impact sea otters,” she said.

**pulled from Yahoo news, written by SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN”

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – American wildlife officials and ranchers are raising questions over a plan to release a rare North American gray wolf to its historic range in northern Mexico: Will it stay south of the border and what can be done if it threatens livestock?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said this week it learned of the plan to release captive-bred Mexican gray wolves during a meeting with Mexican officials.

A male, female and two yearlings could be released in Sonora state, bordering Arizona and New Mexico, as early as October. Another release is planned for December and more could happen next year as part of an effort by both countries to return the wolves to the wild.

“I think we kind of assumed it would happen eventually but we didn’t realize it was going to happen this quickly,” said Charna Lefton, regional spokeswoman with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Albuquerque.

The Mexican agency that oversees natural resources and the environment, known as SEMARNAT, did not immediately respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

While wildlife officials and conservationists generally support the move, Lefton says “everyone is asking the same questions.”

What if the wolves cross into the United States? Will they be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act? Or will they have the same “nonessential, experimental” designation as wolves released as part of a reintroduction effort in New Mexico and Arizona?

The Fish and Wildlife Service has posed those questions to the agency’s attorneys and are hoping for answers in coming weeks. The agency also plans another meeting with Mexican officials.

The Mexican wolf, a subspecies of the gray wolf, was exterminated in the wild in the Southwest by the 1930s after a campaign by the federal government to control the predator.

A handful of wolves were captured in Mexico in the late 1970s to save the animal from extinction. In 1998, the U.S. government began reintroducing wolves along the Arizona-New Mexico line in a 4 million-acre territory. Biologists had hoped to have at least 100 wolves by now, but recent surveys show about half that. It’s unclear how many wolves are in Mexico’s Sonora state.

The wolves in Arizona and New Mexico do not have full protection under the Endangered Species Act because they are designated as “experimental,” giving game officials greater flexibility to manage them and even allows permanent removal — by capturing or killing — after three confirmed livestock kills in a year.

Conservationists contend any wolves found outside the reintroduction area in the two states would be protected under the Endangered Species Act unless the Fish and Wildlife seeks a contrary rule.

Wolves returning to the wild in Mexico only complicates a troubled effort in the United States, especially if the animals cross the border, said Caren Cowan, executive director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association.

“You’ve got the potential of wolves coming down on you from the north that have one endangered status, and you’ve got wolves coming from the south that may have a different status,” she said. “How are you supposed to tell the difference?”

Conservationists are encouraged by Mexico’s plans, saying more wolves in the wild will help ensure species survival. If the U.S. and Mexico populations mingle, that would bolster the animal’s limited genetic pool.

Dog Domestication Likely Began in Africa

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News August 3, 2009
Modern humans originated in Africa, and now it looks like man’s best friend first emerged there too.

An extensive genetic study on the ancestry of African village dogs points to a Eurasian — possibly North African — origin for the domestication of dogs.

Prior research concluded that dogs likely originated in East Asia. However, this latest study, the most thorough investigation ever on the ancestry of African village dogs, indicates otherwise.

“Village” dogs are local, semi-feral dogs that cluster around human settlements in much of the world.

“I think our results cast some doubt on the hypothesis of an East Asian origin for dog domestication that was put forward based on previous mitochondrial DNA genetic research,” lead author Adam Boyko told Discovery News.

Boyko, a research associate in the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University, and his colleagues looked at three genetic markers for 318 village dogs from seven regions in Egypt, Uganda and Namibia. The scientists performed the same DNA analysis on a number of putatively African dog breeds, as well as on Puerto Rican street dogs and mixed breed dogs from the United States.

The scientists determined genetic diversity was just as high for the African dogs as it was for the East Asian village dogs that were the focus of the earlier research.

“Species tend to show the highest genetic diversity near their place of origin,” said Boyko. He explained that this is because the species have “been there longer and therefore have had more time to accumulate diversity, and because as a species expands its range by colonizing a new region, it usually does so with a relatively small band of individuals carrying just a subset of the genetic diversity found in the ancestral population.”

Humans might have then first domesticated dogs from wolves in Africa, with Egypt being one possibility, since wolves are native to that region. Many existing wild species of canid, such as the Egyptian jackal, popularly featured in ancient Egyptian art, are now critically endangered.

The new study, published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that some so-called “African” dog breeds are not really native to Africa. These include Pharaoh hounds and Rhodesian ridgebacks, which turned out to not have much indigenous African ancestry.

On the other hand, “Basenjis are clearly an indigenous sub-Saharan breed, and Afghan hounds and Salukis appear to be indigenous to North Africa or the Middle East,” Boyko said.

The pattern seems to be that if a region was colonized or otherwise settled by Europeans, dogs of that area now tend to be less indigenous. Dogs in central Namibia, for example, “looked nearly identical genetically to dogs you would find on the streets of Puerto Rico or in animal shelters in the U.S., a pretty clear indication that these are mixes of various modern breeds.”

Robert Wayne, an expert on wolves and dog domestication and a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, told Discovery News that he supports the new findings.

“It’s clear dogs did not originate in sub-Saharan Africa, since wolves are not native to that area,” asserts Wayne. However, he agrees that Eurasia is the more likely overall place where dogs were first domesticated, with Egypt being a possibility.

Both Wayne and Boyko hope future genetic research on canines will continue to shed light on the origins of indigenous dog populations to better confirm and pinpoint exactly where the domestication of dogs first happened.