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This Article discusses the  recent announcement that Bumble Bees are officially an endangered species, and The Endangered Species Act will begin to help preserve them. The article states that the Bumble Bee species has decreased 87% since the end of the 90's. This decrease is a result of climate change, pesticides, disease, and habitat loss. A decrease in Bumble Bees will lead to problems because, as pollinators, they help to strengthen the  environments and maintain the plentiful amount of species that live within the different ecosystems. An attorney from the Natural Resources Defense Council also stated that, "a decline of bees could lead to a reduction in the amount of food humans are able to produce" (Riley).

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For the first time in the history of the continental United States, a species of bumble bee that was once a common sight across much of the nation has been declared an endangered species.

The rusty patched bumble bee was abundant across 28 states from Connecticut to South Dakota and up into Canada just 20 years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said, but is now "balancing precariously on the brink of extinction."

The bee's population has "plummeted by 87 percent" after a dramatic decline starting in the late 1990s, the FWS said in a statement announcing that the bee would now be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The rusty patched bumble bee has recently only been spotted in small, scattered populations in 13 states, according to the FWS.

The agency declared the bumble bee species endangered on Tuesday, following a petition and lawsuit from advocacy groups.

"Bees are dying and we need to do something to save them," Rebecca Riley, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council told NBC News Thursday. The NRDC partnered with wildlife protection non-profit the Xerces Society to petition the FWS to declare the species endangered.

The rusty patched bumble bee is the first of its kind to be declared endangered in the continental United States, Riley said, noting the development was "incredibly significant."
Related: U.S. Adds Bees to Endangered Species List for First Time
"This bumble bee is just one of many bees that are in trouble and listing the rusty patched bumble bee is a really good first step toward taking action to save bees - and it's going to take an all hands on deck approach," Riley said.

The bees population has drastically diminished over the decades due to habitat loss, use of pesticides, disease and climate change, according to the FWS.

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Bumble bee species declared endangered in the U.S. for first time

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For the first time in the history of the continental United States, a species of bumble bee that was once a common sight across much of the nation has been declared an endangered species. The rusty patched bumble bee was abundant across 28 states from Connecticut to South Dakota and up into Canada just 20 years ago, the U.S.

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This article discusses the recent upsetting news that 82 dolphins were found dead washed up along the coasts of Florida’s Everglades National Park. These dolphins are more commonly referred to as False Killer Whales and can be 16 to 20 feet long. This species tend to spend most of there time in tropical areas but have been seen in parts of Alaska and Canada as well. As of now the cause of these deaths is uncertain but research is being done. It has been said that The IUCN Red List will not make any statements on whether or not these dolphins are endangered, yet because they do not have enough information. In addition to this, the dolphins do not have any safeguarding in the Florida waters because they have not been "declared endangered".

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Dozens of false killer whales have died under mysterious circumstances after stranding themselves on a remote shoreline in Florida's Everglades National Park.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Service reports that 95 false killer whales stranded themselves at Hog Key, on Florida's southwestern coast. Since the U.S. Coast Guard spotted the animals on Saturday, 82 of the animals have died. The Miami Herald reports that the stranding was the largest for false killer whales ever recorded in the state.

False killer whales are the fourth-largest members of Delphinidae -the family of aquatic mammals comprising dolphins-and can grow between 16 to 20 feet long. They look similar to killer whales but lack orcas' distinctive white spots. While false killer whales have been spotted as far north as Alaska and western Canada, they are primarily found in the tropics. They are highly social, typically found in groups of 10 to 20 that comprise schools numbering in the hundreds.

The IUCN Red List-a globally recognized register that evaluates species' risk of extinction- reports that data is too scant to assess the false killer whale's conservation status. While populations in the waters around the main Hawaiian Islands have been declared endangered, the species does not have federal protections in Florida's waters. Florida's false killer whale population remains unknown, though as of 2004, researchers estimated that some 780 false killer whales lived in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

In an interview with the Miami Herald, Blair Mase, the coordinator of NOAA's mammal stranding network, described the stranding as a rare occurrence. The last known stranding occurred in 1986, when three whales in a pod of 40 stranded themselves at Cedar Key, along Florida's western coast. Six years before, 28 whales stranded off of Key West. And a January 1970 report from southeastern Florida describes a stranding that may have included 150 to 175 individuals, though researchers at the time could not confirm these estimates.

These numbers pale in comparison to the largest stranding on record, when 835 false killer whales beached themselves on Argentina's shores in 1946.

The cause of the stranding remains unknown, though NOAA says that biologists will be analyzing samples taken from the dead animals in the coming months. It's a tricky task: Of the 62 "unusual mortality events" tracked by NOAA since 1991, causes have been found for just 30, ranging from toxic algal blooms to run-ins with humans, such as collisions with shipping vessels.

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82 Dolphins Die in Mysterious Mass Stranding

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Dozens of false killer whales have died under mysterious circumstances after stranding themselves on a remote shoreline in Florida's Everglades National Park. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Service reports that 95 false killer whales stranded themselves at Hog Key, on Florida's southwestern coast. Since the U.S.

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This article discusses the new found research of 31 primatologists stating that the primate species are in danger. These species, which are most similar to humans, are at risk of endangerment and extinction (varying depending on the primate). Much of this is caused by human actions such as, mining, hunting, and agriculture destruction. Some effects are also caused our daily use of palm oil in many products. Forests are quickly being exchanged for plantations to create more of this oil, destroying the homes of numerous primates. This article also talks about the upsetting thought of losing the opportunity to find out more about humans if this species go extinct, since we have already learned so much about ourselves from primates in the past.

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Our fellow primates are in trouble.

In a study of unprecedented scope, a team of 31 primatologists has analyzed every known species of primate to judge how they are faring. The news for man's closest animal relatives is not good.

Three-quarters of primate species are in decline, the researchers found, and about 60 percent are now threatened with extinction. From gorillas to gibbons, primates are in significantly worse shape now than in recent decades because of the devastation from agriculture, hunting and mining.

"I think we're going to get quite a number of extinctions within next 50 years if things go on the way they are," said Anthony B. Rylands, a senior research scientist at Conservation International and a co-author of the new study, which was published in Science Advances.

"It's a landmark paper," said Anne D. Yoder, the director of the Duke Lemur Center, who was not involved in the study. "It's alarming without being alarmist."

Taking stock of every primate species on Earth was a huge challenge, in part because scientists keep finding new ones. Since 2000, 85 new primate species have been identified, bringing the total to 505.

Just last week, a team of researchers described a new species of gibbon in China. Dr. Rylands said he knows of at least seven new primate species to be announced this year.

Scientists are finding so many new primate species in part because the destruction of forests is making it easier to reach populations that were once remote.

"There is a certain rush of people in a panic, realizing that if they don't find and describe them, they will be lost without us ever knowing them," said Dr. Rylands.

Another reason for the burst of discovery is that scientists have started investigating the DNA of primates, finding that some populations had unique mutations..

"There are distinct species that have been around for millions of years, even though they look to our eyes very similar," said Dr. Yoder. Unfortunately, she noted, new species revealed by DNA often turn out to exist in perilously low numbers.

The new research was not all bad news for primates.

"Some species are doing O.K.," said Katherine C. MacKinnon, an anthropologist at Saint Louis University and a co-author of the study. "The ones that are doing O.K. are the ones that aren't super-specialists, the ones that are most flexible."

But most species are not so flexible. Every species of ape (including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and 19 species of gibbons) is threatened, while 87 percent of lemur species are. Other species that are critically endangered include the brown-headed spider monkey of Ecuador, the Niger Delta red colobus, and the crested macaque, an Indonesian species famous for having taken a selfie with a photographer's camera.

"It's worse than we thought 10 years ago," Dr. MacKinnon said.

She and her colleagues identified a number of human activities pushing primates to the edge, such as hunting. In West Africa, for example, there is a strong demand in local markets for primate meat.

"The forests are still standing, but they've shot everything out of it," said Dr. Rylands.

The incentives to kill primates are not only local, though. A lot of primate meat is making its way to China, along with body parts falsely believed to have healing powers.

"They'll import enormous amounts from around Southeast Asia," said Dr. Rylands. "They're a driving force through the whole region."

Primates are also threatened by the wholesale destruction of forests to make way for agriculture. In the Amazon, the jungle is being converted to cattle ranches and soybean fields, while in Madagascar, rice paddies are taking the place of lemur forests.

Western countries are also helping push primates toward extinction. Palm oil can be found in everything from doughnuts to lipstick to biodiesel fuel. New palm oil plantations are completely replacing forests in Southeast Asia - one of the most primate-diverse parts of the world.

Even cellphones can add to the risks. In central Africa, miners go into rain forests to dig for an ore called coltan that ends up in phone circuits. Those miners hunt for their meals. "They live on primates," said Dr. Rylands.

Humans have already driven some primate species extinct, but it's hard to say exactly how many. Madagascar was once home to giant lemurs that could weigh as much as 350 pounds.

While Western scientists never laid eyes on these remarkable creatures, the fossil record shows that 17 lemur species became extinct after humans arrived there 2,000 years ago.

More recently, a monkey called Miss Waldron's red colobus has disappeared from its range in West Africa. It has not been spotted for over 25 years and is believed to be extinct. In China, a subspecies called the white-handed gibbon may have gone extinct as well.

Some of the most endangered primate species are down to just a few dozen survivors. Their prospects are grim, because many of them live in parts of the world where human populations are projected to grow the fastest.

In Madagascar, for example, humans may have to move deeper into lemur habitats for new farmland. "It's a pressure cooker, and there's no way to relieve the pressure," said Dr. Yoder.

The authors of the new study offer a number of reasons it is worth trying to halt the crisis.

Recent research has shown that primates are extremely important to the ecosystems in which they live. As they feed on leaves and fruit, for example, they move pollen between trees. They pass seeds in their droppings, allowing plants to spread across a healthy range.

"People used to think of primates as icing on the cake, as not being vital for ecosystems," said Dr. MacKinnon. "But now we know they are."

Primates have also been invaluable for understanding ourselves.

The first primates evolved roughly 80 million years ago, and then split into the living lineages over millions of years. By comparing our biology to those of other primates, we have learned about the evolution of our brains, our vision and our vulnerability to diseases.

If those species become extinct, we will lose the opportunity to learn more.

While the prospects are dire, Dr. Rylands said there were concrete steps that can be taken to help primates. "You have to stop hunting them and give them a place to live," he said.

That is easier said than done, he acknowledged, since the local communities where primates live are often struggling to feed their families. In some cases, it may be possible to take the pressure off primates by building fish farms as an alternate source of protein.

In other cases, communities may be able to make more money over the long term from tourist operations in intact forests than from slash-and-burn agriculture.

Dr. Rylands pointed to the golden lion tamarin as an example of how a primate species can be saved. It once lived in huge numbers in the Atlantic coastal forests of Brazil. After the forests were nearly wiped out to make way for sugar plantations and other forms of agriculture, the species nearly vanished.

In 1983, the U.S. National Zoo led an international effort to bring them back. Monkeys were bred in captivity, forests were conserved and hunting was banned.

Today, the species has a small but stable population of some 3,500 individuals in the wild.

"There are cases where you can bring them back from the brink," said Dr. Rylands. "But the immensity of the destruction of tropical forests makes it very difficult."

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Most Primate Species Threatened With Extinction, Scientists Find

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Our fellow primates are in trouble. In a study of unprecedented scope, a team of 31 primatologists has analyzed every known species of primate to judge how they are faring. The news for man's closest animal relatives is not good. Three-quarters of primate species are in decline, the researchers found, and about 60 percent are now threatened with extinction.

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This article discusses the fact that 2016 was the hottest year to date and much of this heat is caused by humans, although there are other causes as well. From the end of 2015 through the beginning of 2016 an El Nino climate change pattern released a rush of heat into the atmosphere. This was one of the greatest in the past 100 years. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are still researching information regarding climate change and believe that global warming is nowhere near coming to an end. They have high presumptions for hotter days to come.

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In the historical record, months early in the year, like February and March, have moved further away from the norm than the rest of the year. Scientists expect that the early months of 2017 will continue to show levels of warming beyond the norm, but likely not at the level of 2016 because a strong El Niño weather pattern is now subsiding.

The Earth's temperature has risen since record-keeping began in the 19th century. Warming began to accelerate around the 1980s.

Human-induced climate change has made it at least 160 times more likely that three consecutive years after 2000 would be record-setting, according to Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

His findings show that if human-induced climate change was not part of the equation, the amount of warming in 2016 would have less than one-in-a-million odds of occurring.

"One could argue that about 75 percent of the warmth was due to human impact," Dr. Mann said.

2016 was the first time that the hottest year on record occurred three times in a row.

The later months of 2015 and the first half of 2016 experienced faster warming partly due to the El Niño climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which sent a surge of heat into the atmosphere.

The El Niño pattern occurs irregularly, in intervals of about two to seven years, and scientists say that the most recent El Niño was among the largest in a century. The peak of the most recent El Niño occurred during winter of 2015, and temperatures were dramatically higher than normal. It began to subside over the course of 2016.

Scientists are working to understand whether climate change is also making El Niño phenomena stronger.

Scientists predict that warming will continue to exceed records.

Historical records of global temperature are compiled by two American government agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Meteorological agencies in Britain and Japan also compile reliable datasets of global temperature.

The analyses by the agencies are based on thousands of measurements from weather stations, ships and ocean buoys around the world. Each group tracking global temperature uses different methods to take account of problems in the data, but usually reach similar conclusions about the significant long-term trend of global warming.

For 2016, the records from NASA were likely the most accurate, because of data collection in Antarctica and a more sophisticated statistical analysis in the Arctic. The combination allows NASA to have more reliable coverage in the polar regions of the world, which have been highly affected by rising temperatures. Global sea ice extent reached near record low levels late in 2016.

"We expect records to continue to be broken as global warming proceeds," Dr. Mann said.

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How 2016 Became Earth's Hottest Year on Record

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In the historical record, months early in the year, like February and March, have moved further away from the norm than the rest of the year. Scientists expect that the early months of 2017 will continue to show levels of warming beyond the norm, but likely not at the level of 2016 because a strong El Niño weather pattern is now subsiding.

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This article talks about the newly found benefits that come along with hurricanes in the U.S. It states that when the weather is in a specific state of being that causes Atlantic hurricanes, a barrier is formed that decreases the strength of the natural disasters as they get closer to the coasts of the  U.S.  But, at the same time when there is not a lot of hurricane action taking place, large storms have a greater possibility of getting stronger before hitting land which could cause additional harm/destruction. There is not much known about these tendencies yet, and what affects global warming may have on them.

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In October, Hurricane Matthew roared through the Caribbean as a near-worst-case Category 4 storm, with high winds that devastated Haiti and other countries. But when it made landfall in the United States a few days later, Matthew limped into South Carolina as a Category 1, bringing torrential rains and flooding but little else.

That storm was a prime example of what a new study suggests is a remarkable feature regarding Atlantic hurricanes and their impact: When climatic conditions favor a lot of hurricane activity, they also create a buffer zone that weakens the storms as they approach the coastal United States.

"It's an incredibly lucky phenomenon," said James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the author of the study, published Wednesday in Nature, which looked at hurricane data from 1947 to 2015. "It's given us a really nice barrier and decreased our threats."

On the other hand, the study points out, in periods of low hurricane activity, storms - especially major ones - are more likely to intensify before making landfall, potentially leading to more damage.

The finding may help explain what has been described as a "hurricane drought" in recent years, in which, despite greater hurricane activity, fewer destructive storms have hit the Eastern United States. Some scientists think the Atlantic may now be entering a quieter period, which could result in more of the stronger storms making landfall.

It is unclear what impact global warming and the continuing rise in ocean temperatures may have on the trend.

Scientists say a long-term pattern of climate variability called the Atlantic meridional mode helps determine the level of hurricane activity. In one phase, the mode results in warmer surface water in the tropical Atlantic and less wind shear, or changes in wind speed with altitude. Both circumstances favor the formation of hurricanes.

But at the same time, conditions near the coastal United States are the opposite: colder water, which provides less energy to a hurricane, and more wind shear, which tends to rip a storm apart. So although more hurricanes may form in the open ocean, as they approach land they are more likely to weaken. This protective barrier, as Dr. Kossin called it, does not exist in the Caribbean.

In a period of less hurricane activity, the mode shifts and opposite conditions prevail, both in the ocean and along the coast. That means fewer hurricanes but a greater likelihood of their intensifying near the United States.

Dr. Kossin's research found that in the most recent quieter period, from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, hurricanes that did form were up to six times more likely to intensify rapidly near land, with wind speeds increasing more than 15 miles an hour over six hours.

Although it is difficult to single out any one factor in the evolution of a particular hurricane, Dr. Kossin said that Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm that devastated South Florida in 1992, was an example of a storm that intensified rapidly during the latest quiet period.

Suzana J. Camargo, a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who was not involved in the study, said it was an "interesting and important result." But she said more research was needed to better understand why it was happening.

"People have been talking so much about the hurricane drought," she added. "It's a good framework to think about why that happened."

Dr. Kossin agreed that more research was needed, especially on how global warming might affect this protective buffer zone.

"Will it enhance it and make it even better?" he said. "Or will it start to degrade it?"

A lessening of the protective barrier during periods of greater activity would mean that even more damaging hurricanes could hit the Eastern United States. "That would be a very unsettling prospect," Dr. Kossin said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: With More Hurricanes, a Buffer for the Atlantic Coast. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Conditions That Form More Hurricanes Also Protect U.S., Study Finds

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In October, Hurricane Matthew roared through the Caribbean as a near-worst-case Category 4 storm, with high winds that devastated Haiti and other countries. But when it made landfall in the United States a few days later, Matthew limped into South Carolina as a Category 1, bringing torrential rains and flooding but little else.

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This article discusses scientists who came to the conclusion that dinosaur eggs took two times as long to hatch than bird eggs of homogeneous size. They came to this conclusion by testing out a new method on the fossils of dinosaur embryos that were unhatched. The results of this discovery also provided new material on embryonic tooth age. Scientists studied the growth of teeth within the unhatched eggs and found that tooth growth took up approximately 40% of the time the dinosaur spent during their time incubating. Based off of this experimentation, it was uncovered that dinosaur embryo can take around six months to hatch, (and possibly longer for dinosaurs that are bigger), and will spend about 83 days incubating.

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For decades now, the drumbeat of dinosaur news has been their similarity to birds. They were warmblooded! They had feathers! And they're still around, because birds are actually dinosaurs.

All true, but those that were nonavian dinosaurs, as they are now called, were not all beak and tweet. They were closely related to other living reptiles like crocodiles, and new findings about how long their eggs took to hatch bring that point home.

Scientists reported on Monday that by using a new technique on exceedingly rare fossils of unhatched dinosaur embryos, they determined that those embryos took twice as long to hatch as bird eggs of a similar size. The embryo of a large duck-billed dinosaur took at least six months to hatch, and the eggs of larger dinosaurs may have taken even longer.

The long incubation times complicate thinking about dinosaur behavior. While some kinds of dinosaurs may have tended their eggs and young, for others the difficulty of hanging around for most of a year to watch buried eggs would have been too much. And long incubation times mean slow reproduction, a definite disadvantage when a comet or asteroid slams into the planet, as happened 65 million years ago, leading to the extinction of dinosaurs and many other species. But not birds.

Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University, the lead author of the study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the study was undertaken because fossil dinosaurs in the egg are so rare that "virtually nothing is known about their embryology."

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A hatchling Protoceratops andrewsi fossil from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Credit M. Ellison/American Museum of Natural History

David J. Varricchio at Montana State University, who has studied fossilized dinosaur eggs and was one of the scientists who reviewed the paper for the journal, said the research took a new line of evidence - embryonic tooth age - and the technique could prove valuable in future studies.

Scientific opinions have varied on incubation times. Dr. Varricchio and other scientists had studied how porous fossilized eggshells were, which led them to conclude that the vast majority of dinosaur eggs were buried. And that behavior, similar to living reptiles, suggested long incubation times, he said.

But, Dr. Erickson said, most researchers thought that because dinosaurs were closely related to modern birds their incubation rates were birdlike.

Dr. Erickson used teeth from rare fossil embryos found in fossilized eggs that were about to hatch. He and his colleagues counted daily growth markers in the teeth, calculating that tooth growth accounted for about 40 percent of incubation time.

He worked with Mark A. Norell, the head of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, a co-author of the paper, to study a sample of teeth from 71- to 75-million-year-old embryos of Protoceratops, a sheep-sized dinosaur found in Mongolia. They came up with an incubation time of at least 83 days, almost three months.

Dr. Erickson said the information from embryo teeth was the first direct evidence of how many days nonavian dinosaurs took to hatch.

Darla K. Zelenitsky, a co-author and a paleontologist at the University of Calgary, gave him access to the embryo of an Hypacrosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur that was about 30 feet long and laid eggs the size of soccer balls. The dinosaurs lived about 76 million years ago and laid their eggs in what is now Alberta, Canada. The incubation period for those eggs was at least 171 days, almost six months, the team concluded. David Ian Kay, a graduate student at Florida State, also contributed to the research.

Many dinosaurs were bigger than Hypacrosaurus, Dr. Erickson said, and because incubation increases with the size of the egg in both birds and reptiles, some eggs must have taken the greater part of a year just to hatch.

Such long incubation periods raise all sorts of questions, Dr. Erickson said. How could dinosaurs have migrated, as some have suggested, if they spent most of a year with their eggs?

"Do we expect them to have parental care?" Dr. Varricchio asked. He said that although there is evidence for parental care among some dinosaurs, those species had smaller eggs and most likely shorter incubation times. The very long incubation times would have meant dinosaur parents staying in one place for a whole year defending eggs and young.

Long incubation periods also meant that the dinosaurs had to pick nesting sites that would be protected for many months from floods, drought and predation.

They were also not reproducing as fast as other animals at the time of the mass extinction 65 million years ago, which may have contributed to their disappearance. Birds, for example, had already appeared and their incubation times were probably shorter.

The incubation times would have been only one strike against the dinosaurs surviving a planetwide catastrophe, however. Dr. Erickson said they had other disadvantages. "These animals were profligate wasters of energy," he said. They were big and warmblooded and "even the smallest dinosaurs took over a year to mature," including time after hatching.

"The dinosaurs found themselves holding some bad cards," he said. "They had a dead man's hand."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Study Puts a Little Distance Between Dinosaurs and Their Bird Relations. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Some Dinosaur Eggs Took Six Months or More to Hatch

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For decades now, the drumbeat of dinosaur news has been their similarity to birds. They were warmblooded! They had feathers! And they're still around, because birds are actually dinosaurs. All true, but those that were nonavian dinosaurs, as they are now called, were not all beak and tweet.