In 2003, Pixar presented the American imagination with a tour of the world’s sealife led by America’s favorite fish, Nemo. But according to a new study, many of the species who swam on screen are close to no longer existing in real life. The International Union for Conservation of Nature found that 16 percent of the species found in “Finding Nemo” actually “face the threat of extinction“:

Sixteen percent of the species associated with characters in “Finding Nemo” that have been evaluated face the threat of extinction, according to the study, which was conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Canada’s Simon Fraser University. The analysis of 1,568 species is not just a whimsical look at American popular culture and its cartoon characters. It reveals how humans treat some of the ocean’s most charismatic inhabitants.[...]

The Oscar-winning 2003 Disney/Pixar movie, which details how the clownfish Marlin defies all odds to save his son from the aquarium trade, has a conservation message. But the film actually inspired a booming aquarium trade in the bright orange fish with white stripes, significantly reducing native clownfish populations on coral reefs in Australia and elsewhere.

While the IUCN classifies clownfish as a “species of least concern,” meaning it does not face an imminent extinction risk, 18 percent of the evaluated species that are related to Nemo — those of the scientific family Pomacentridae — are at risk of extinction. There have been few formal scientific assessments of coral reef fish populations that are sought by the aquarium trade, McClenachan said, so “it’s very hard to know the true extent of the aquarium, live reef and curio trade.”

Many of these species are endangered because of human activity. Sea turtles are vulnerable after years of getting caught in commercial fishing gear and getting their nesting area trampled or obstructed by development. More than half of hammer head sharks face extinction due to over-fishing and demand for shark fins. Indeed, “direct exploitation is the key driver of many of the species’ decline.” What’s more, they “are more threatened than the most threatened vertebrates on land.”

But not many of the species that are endangered and face extinction are listed as such. In fact, 40 percent of the birds, 50 percent of the mammals, and 80 to 95 percent of the other species like amphibians and insects that the IUCN recognize as endangered are not even listed on the official U.S. list of endangered species. This amounts to about 531 species that have not made the official protection list.

Researchers hope that the more people recognize the animals they see in movies like Finding Nemo, the more likely they are to care about human impact on them. These animals “got life histories that cause them to interact with people wherever they go,” said one researcher. “These are species that should be doing better because they are ones we care about.” Unless humans take notice, Nemo will be increasingly hard to find.

Florida Tea Party members believe that federal efforts to protect manatees from extinction are part of a United Nations conspiracy to place manatee over man. Freshman Rep. Rich Nugent (R-FL) is now standing up for the Tea Partiers against the feared manatee overlords, offering an amendment to the FY 2012 Interior and Environment appropriations bill (HR 2584) that would block the creation of a manatee refuge in Citrus County:

U.S. Rep. Rich Nugent is asking Congress to withhold funding for a proposed manatee-protection rule involving Crystal River and King’s Bay, effectively stopping the rule before it starts.

The planned refuge would place speed limits on motor boats, to protect the nearly extinct species of herbivorous, aquatic mammals from maiming, disfigurement, and death.

Other crazed amendments offered to the FY 2012 Interior and Environment appropriations bill:

Scott (R-GA): None of the funds for climate change research.

Fahrenthold (R-TX): None of the funds to interfere with States’ efforts to regulate hydraulic fracturing.

Blackburn (R-TN): Prohibits the appropriated agencies from buying compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Blackburn (R-TN): Bar funding for the SunWise Program, an EPA program to teach parents, teachers, and children about what they should do to protect kids from overexposure to the sun.

Fleming (R-LA): Eliminate funding for the Energy Star program.

Flores (R-TX): None of the funds to enforce section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 to prohibit federal purchases of high-carbon fuels.

Lankford (R-OK): None of the funds for the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

King (R-IA): None of the funds to enforce the Oil Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure Program.

Stivers (R-OH): None of the funds to regulate stationary source greenhouse gases for two years.

The government is too strapped for cash to prevent the “imminent” extinction of a critical member of the Rocky Mountain forests, the Obama administration has determined. On Monday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that global warming pollution is causing the spread of the pine bark beetle and white pine blister rust into the the once-cold Rockies, killing off the whitebark pine in staggering numbers. However, because of budgetary limits, the service said it would defer instituting any attempt to save the trees:

The Fish and Wildlife Service determined Monday that whitebark pine, a tree found atop mountains across the American West, faces an “imminent” risk of extinction because of factors including climate change. The decision is significant because it marks the first time the federal government has identified climate change as one of the driving factors for why a broad-ranging tree species could disappear. The Canadian government has already declared whitebark pine to be endangered throughout its entire range; a recent study found that 80 percent of whitebark pine forests in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem are dead or dying. The Natural Resources Defense Council asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to place the tree on the endangered species list. In its determination, the agency said that it found a listing was “warranted but precluded,” meaning the pine deserved federal protection but the government could not afford it.

There are now 265 candidate species waiting for protection — or until their extinction eliminates the urgency.

The whitebark pine has been in decline for decades. Protection requested over 10 years ago, in February 1991, was rejected in 1994. Since then, the collapse of the species, which sustains the entire ecosystem from nutcrackers to grizzlies, has been “dramatic and catastrophic.”

Our ability to be responsible stewards of the planet is likely to get even worse, thanks to the Tea Party. “This month, the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee voted to eliminate any funds for listing species under the Endangered Species Act as part of the 2012 budget,” the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin notes.

The polar bear, elkhorn coral, and staghorn coral are all species listed as threatened because of global warming, but with the caveat that no action be taken to fight greenhouse pollution.

In 2008, the U.S. government placed the polar bear on the threatened species list because of the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice, becoming “the first to be designated as threatened because of global warming.”

But in 2008, media mega-star Sarah Palin was still the governor of Alaska. Fearing that protecting the polar bear would “cripple oil and gas development” off Alaska’s coasts, Palin — a well-worn climate science denier — sued the government to remove the species from the list. Palin pointed to the high population of polar bears in 2008 and dismissed climate models that predict continued loss of sea ice as “unreliable,” “uncertain,” and “unproven.”

But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan backed the government scientists’ finding this week “that global warming is threatening the survival of the polar bear.” In a 116-page opinion, Sullivan dismissed Palin and hunting groups’ arguments as “nothing more than competing views about policy and science” and ruled on the side of science:

Notwithstanding a handful of references to uncertainty that appear in record documents, Joint Plaintiffs have failed to persuade this Court that FWS [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] implemented the ESA [Endangered Species Act] “haphazardly.” Accordingly, the Court concludes that FWS did not act arbitrarily in relying on and drawing reasonable conclusions from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports and climate models in making its listing determination for the polar bear.

Under the judge’s ruling, the polar bear is still listed as “threatened,” not “endangered,” on the endangered species list. The U.S. Justice Department stated yesterday that “it was pleased that the court agreed with its argument that the decision was based on the science available at the time.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, however, noted after the decision that “even if polar bears could be considered only threatened in 2008, they are clearly endangered today.” While the estimated population of Arctic polar bears in 2008 stood at 20,000 to 25,000, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that “two thirds of the world’s polar bears will disappear in the next 50 years because of a decline in Arctic sea ice.” Indeed, “climate change has turned some polar bears into cannibals as global warming melts their Arctic ice hunting grounds.”

Regardless of the facts, Palin said in a 2009 op-ed that she “took a stand against politicized science” in this case and “stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of ‘climate change impacts’ was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act.”

A federal judge today upheld the George W. Bush administration’s decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The ruling is a blow to environmental groups that wanted the bear listed as endangered, thereby giving it more protections, and industry groups and others that don’t want it listed at all.

The original Bush decision meant listing the polar bear as “threatened” because of its melting polar sea ice habitat, but then doing nothing to actually protect that polar habitat from its primary threat, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

As I wrote at the time, the Department of Interior suffers from a rare form of bipolar disorder called bye-polar disorder.  On the one hand, then DOI Secretary Kempthorne explicitly wanted “to allow continuation of vital energy production in Alaska,” while on the other hand the DOI noted:

• The polar bears need sea ice for feeding.
• The sea ice is being destroyed by human-caused emissions, faster than the models had predicted.
• Thus, the polar bear is endangered.

Bye-polar disorder is apparently hard to diagnose.  You can read the 116-page ruling of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia here, but he is no diagnostician:  Sullivan said the plaintiffs challenging the listing “have failed to demonstrate that the agency’s listing determination rises to the level of irrationality.”  Oh, it wasn’t irrational for the pro-oil Bushies, but for bears, it was just nuts.

Let’s be clear here:  “The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover,” concludes the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States.

The climate models have left people with the impression that summer Arctic sea ice will survive past 2050, but reality is already worse than the IPCC’s worst-case scenario.  As I discussed in my post last month, “Arctic sea ice volume: The death spiral continues,” it is extremely likely the Arctic will be virtually ice free in the summer within about two decades, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it happened within one.

Read more

Our guest blogger is Michael Conathan, Center for American Progress Director of Oceans Policy.

After Sarah Palin left the governorship of Alaska in July 2009, more than a year before her term was to expire, her first move was to go fishing. Palin and her daughter Bristol — named after the fertile fishing ground of Bristol Bay — bonded on her reality show with even more fishing.

When Palin’s One Nation bus tour pulled into New Hampshire yesterday, it came as no surprise that one of her first stops was the Yankee Fishermen’s Cooperative in Seabrook. New England is home to America’s oldest fishing industry. Many of the region’s fisheries were overfished for decades until recent reductions in catch limits began rebuilding depleted fish populations. While these regulations will allow the fisheries to reverse decades of decline, the short-term economic sacrifices have hit some fishermen hard.

In New Hampshire, which has just 18 miles of coastline, fishermen have felt the pinch, while some of their counterparts in the larger Massachusetts fishing ports of Gloucester and New Bedford or Portland, Maine have thrived. As such, Palin found fertile ground for her anti-government pandering. Palin greeted fishermen by exclaiming “I love your industry!” She tied her visit to one of her major themes, excess government regulation:

“Politics cannot play a part in the fisheries industry,” said Palin, rapping “overly cautious environmental concerns” for strangling the enterprise.

The “overly cautious” regulations Palin attacked are rebuilding fish populations and ensuring that the fisheries reverse decades of decline to once again become growth industries, sustainable for future generations.

Palin has a long track record of politicizing fisheries issues in her Alaskan homeland, to the detriment of both the wildlife and Alaska fishermen:

– Palin consistently opposed allowing native Alaskans to maintain their subsistence fishing rights, choosing instead to back commercial and sportfishing interests.

– Testing the limits of campaign laws, Palin joined mining interests to actively oppose a state ballot measure that would have protected Bristol Bay’s abundant salmon populations from polluted runoff and habitat destruction that would come as a result of opening the Pebble Mine site, thought to contain up to half a trillion dollars of gold, silver, and copper ores.

– Palin attempted to block the endangerment listing of Cook Inlet beluga whales for economic reasons, despite the fact that the Endangered Species Act explicitly excludes consideration of economic factors from decisions about endangerment listings.

For Palin, it seems the only good fish is a dead fish. Honest politics and sound science can give us good fisheries policy. Let’s keep Palin’s political rapping out of the equation.