Wolverines threatened with extinction as climate change melts their snowy mountain refuges, US says

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Wolverines threatened with extinction as climate change melts their snowy mountain refuges, US says

BY MATTHEW BROWN
Updated 9:14 AM EST, November 29, 2023

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The North American wolverine will receive long-delayed federal protections under a Biden administration proposal released Wednesday in response to scientists warning that climate change will likely melt away the rare species’ snowy mountain refuges.

Across most of the U.S., wolverines were wiped out by the early 1900s from unregulated trapping and poisoning campaigns. About 300 surviving animals in the contiguous U.S. live in fragmented, isolated groups at high elevations in the northern Rocky Mountains.

In the coming decades, warming temperatures are expected to shrink the mountain snowpack wolverines rely on to dig dens where they birth and raise their young.

The decision Wednesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service follows more than two decades of disputes over the risks of climate change, and threats to the long-term survival of the elusive species. Officials wrote in the proposal that protections under the Endangered Species Act were needed “due primarily to the ongoing and increasing impacts of climate change and associated habitat degradation and fragmentation.”

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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/wolverine-species-endangered-climate-change-024ec09a032851a26a248fab93ad7d0e

[Marcuse]

1. Mourning in Columbus.

[Think. Again.]

2. Just the beginning.

Each new species extinction has rolling effects on the local ecology it is a component of.

These effects continue to ripple out to the interdependent species that are also under stress from the effects of climate change.

After a while, the entire system begins to falter from the imbalances and stresses accumulating within it.