Queensland Environment Minister Vicki Darling on Thursday said the Girrigun Aboriginal Corporation, which covers two clan groups in the Townsville region, had agreed to suspend hunting of both species indefinitely.

The clans are entitled to hunt both species under the Native Title Act but agreed to stop after widespread flooding across Queensland last summer damaged sea grass beds - the major food source for both animals - along the coastline.

The agreement comes two weeks after traditional owners' groups from Bundaberg to Gladstone agreed to self-imposed bans on hunting both species

The study's authors estimate that 4,600 sea turtles die each year in U.S. coastal waters.

Before measures to reduce bycatch were put in place, total sea turtle takes surpassed 300,000 annually. Of these, 70,000 turtles were killed.

The study used data collected from 1990 to 2007 by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to determine bycatch rates across more than 20 fisheries operating in Atlantic waters from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, and in the Pacific Ocean, along the West coast and around Hawaii.

It found that overall turtle bycatch rates, including both fatal and nonfatal run-ins, have fallen about 60 percent since 1990.

The 60-million-year-old freshwater relative to modern crocodiles is the first known land animal from the Paleocene New World tropics specialized for eating fish, meaning it competed with Titanoboa for food. But the giant snake could have consumed its competition, too, researchers say.

"The younger individuals were definitely not safe from Titanoboa, but the biggest of these species would have been a bit much for the 42-foot snake to handle," said lead author Alex Hastings, a graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History and UF's department of geological sciences.

The new species is a dyrosaurid, commonly believed to be primarily ocean-dwelling, coastal reptiles. The new adult specimens challenge previous theories the animals only would have entered freshwater environments as babies before returning to sea.

Focusing on the African grey foam nest tree frog (Chiromantis xerampelina), the researchers sought to understand why females behave promiscuously, despite the risk of disease, injury and predation.

"One hypothesis for female promiscuity is that females can increase the genetic diversity of their offspring and, in so doing, increase the chance that at least some offspring survive and reproduce," Dr Byrne said.

Dr Byrne said the argument for mating with multiple partners (polyandry) was that it increased genetic diversity cushions against fluctuating selective forces in challenging environments.
"The frog's offspring are developing in an environment that's highly unpredictable in terms of rainfall, food availability and predation risk," said Dr Byrne.

"If the environment is fluctuating, it is very difficult for females to predict which male partner will provide genes that give her offspring the best chance of performing well in the future".

The last positive sighting of a sand lizard at this site was in the 1960s.

Once commonly found on sand dunes and heathland, the lizards became endangered due to gradual destruction of their habitats.

The captive bred sand lizards, reared at Marwell Zoo, have been released at Hengistbury Head as part of a long-term conservation project to restore the species status.

During the 20th Century a 90% loss of sand lizards was recorded in Dorset.

Under the ESA, an endangered species is any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range. The Ozark hellbender, which grows to lengths up to 2 feet, inhabits the White River system in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. Ozark hellbender populations have declined an estimated 75 percent since the 1980s, with only about 590 individuals remaining in the wild.

It is believed numbers have dropped because of degraded water quality, habitat loss resulting from impoundments, ore and gravel mining, sedimentation , and collection for the pet trade.

Also threatening the Ozark hellbender is a fungal disease, chytridiomycosis (chytrid), and severe physical abnormalities (e.g., lesions, digit and appendage loss, epidermal sloughing) which most Ozark hellbenders exhibit.

In addition, the average age of Ozark hellbender populations is increasing and few young are being found, indicating problems with reproduction or juvenile survival. This, and the multiple threats from disease and habitat degradation, could lead to extinction of the Ozark hellbender within 20 years.

“The Ozark hellbender faces extinction without the protection afforded by the Endangered Species Act,” said Tom Melius, the Service’s Midwest Regional Director. “Listing provides tools and an infrastructure within which partners can pool resources and expertise to help save this species.”

Maternal instinct in the wild has rarely been better captured on camera. As Claudia Marlene, the photographer who took this amazing sequence of photos, says it: "Hero Mom!” Couldn't have put it better.

In a paper appearing in Nature, a consortium of scientists share the information they've gleaned from the first sequencing of a reptile’s genome. They believe that A. carolinensis could be important for understanding the evolution of the amniotic egg, and that its genome could help them discover how it has so easily adapted to a number of various habitats, as well as lead them to the common ancestor that all amniotes (species that reproduce via amniotic eggs) share.

Amniotic eggs are eggs that have a shell and can hold water. They're a big evolutionary deal because they allowed species to be able to reproduce on land. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of mammals and birds who reproduce in this way, but A. carolinensis is the first reptile.

The iconic Nile crocodile actually comprises two different species only distantly related. The large east African Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) is in fact more closely related to four species of Caribbean crocodile than to its small west African neighbour, which has been named Crocodylus suchus.

Evon Hekkala of Fordham University in New York and her colleagues revealed evidence for the existence of the second species by sequencing the genes of 123 living Nile crocodiles and 57 museum specimens, including several 2,000-year-old crocodile mummies.

For years, people have been looking at what they considered to be the Nile crocodile and they didn’t really have much material to compare across Africa. In the 1970s, the industry that was involved in tanning crocodile hides was looking for ones with fewer bony scutes. A man called Fuchs did an analysis of the scutes to identify stocks that have fewer of them. He proposed some of these subspecies but the crocodile researchers threw out his work and said this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

That’s the earliest sign of a morphological difference. People had been looking and looking and they just couldn’t see these differences. There had been all this evidence throughout the years about some extreme differences but most of the anecdotes were about their behaviour. Crocodiles are generally very hard to tell apart from their exterior features.

We can now revisit the morphological data to see what springs out. There’s an unpublished preliminary analysis of skulls by Chris Brochu that does pull apart the two species based on just skull morphology. We’re working together to write a description of the new species to pull together the behavioural, genetic and morphological data.

Last month, the Raleigh eighth-grader addressed the Wake County Board of Commissioners to share her vast knowledge about frogs and to put in a good word for proclaiming the last Saturday in April as Save the Frogs Day.

Impressed, the commissioners said they would take the issue to the governor, and the paperwork that would make Rachel's dream a reality is now making its way through the political pipeline.

Meanwhile, the frogs could use some help.

One-third of the world's amphibian species, including frogs, are threatened, Rachel said, and at least 200 species have already met with extinction since 1979.

"Frogs will not survive the 21st century if they continue declining at their current rate," she said.

If you happen to shrug, Rachel is quick to set you straight. She admits she fell in love with frogs initially because "they're just really, really cute - I love their little eyes" and "they have a lot of personality," but the more she learned, the more she came to love.

Now naturalists fear that up to 1,500 dugongs – a species of sea cows – and 6,000 turtles along the Reef are likely to die in the coming months because their main food source, sea grass, which grows on the ocean floor, was largely wiped out by the floods and cyclone.

In some places the plants were ripped from the seabed by currents created by the storms and in others they were inundated under silt and soil washed out from the land by the torrential rains.

Beachgoers have reported stumbling across groups of turtles in shallow waters near Townsville – only to discover they were dead or dying.

"This is a long-term environmental disaster," said Dr Ellen Ariel, a turtle expert at James Cook University.

"It is not like an oil spill where you can clean the water and move on. It is such a large stretch of coastline... We have had mass strandings of turtles. The turtles are sick and starving and can't go on any longer. They don't have anywhere to go."

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority says it expects more dugongs to die than in any previous event.

One-third of the sea turtle nests buried in the beaches of the Outer Banks were destroyed by Hurricane Irene, and the number could rise if remaining nests fail to hatch, but that's just nature taking its course, biologists said this week.

Loggerhead and green sea turtles laid 147 nests on National Park Service beaches from Ocracoke north, the second highest number on record. Seventy-eight of those hatched before the storm.

Of the 69 remaining when the hurricane hit, 45 were lost, said Britta Muiznieks, wildlife biologist for Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

Beginning on the Sunday after the storm, the remaining nests were checked, and it appears that 20 still have live eggs, she said. However, saltwater inundation and extra layers of sand may have harmed them.

A woman who lives off of Beach Drive in Destin discovered two eastern box turtles with their shells painted — one had the No. 3 on it, while the other paint job couldn’t be identified.

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“One might think this is cute and harmless, however, it can adversely affect the health of these animals. And, since we don't know exactly the purpose of these numbers, we are concerned about what other harassment the turtles may be exposed to,” the refuge’s Facebook page stated. “This entire shell structure is absorbent and if the outer keratin is breached by infection or injury, the turtle can lose its protection and infection can proceed into the bony layer and the body cavity, threatening the turtle's life"

Volunteers with Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch on Monday released about 100 baby green sea turtles to the Gulf of Mexico.

The hatchlings had been born the night before, and volunteers were able to rescue them before they became disoriented by nearby lights.

The nest was the first in at least 11 years to be laid by a green turtle. All but one of the more than 140 nests recorded on Anna Maria Island this year were laid by loggerhead turtles.

"This is decades of work to produce the animals that we've been producing," Brown says. "This is a huge loss for our business.

Pro Exotics has been in business for 20 years.

"These are very special animals," Brown says. "There's a number of unique animals that were the only ones of their type on the planet."

"With the heat inside I can't imagine those animals surviving," he says. "They're very tough animals but to survive that type of heat is very unlikely."

"I could see the flames inside the facility, and certainly the smoke was really heavy" says Brown's partner, Robyn Markland.

"This is going to be our life-changing moment, we'll figure things out and we'll move forward," he say