Chinese animal advocates ask state TV not to air magician's goldfish trick

BEIJING — Animal activists in China say a now-famous magic trick with goldfish swimming in sync for the Lunar New Year may have involved abuse including implanted magnets, and are asking the state broadcaster not to air it again.

Hundreds of millions of people watched the magic trick during a China Central Television gala on the Jan. 30 eve of the Lunar New Year festival. The gala is China's most-watched broadcast of the year.

Goldfish are a symbol of wealth in China, but the image of six of them swimming in perfect sync under magician Fu Yandong's direction alarmed some Chinese, who worried that magnets were implanted in the fish or that they were controlled by electric current.

Fifty-three animal rights groups and other groups have sent a letter to CCTV asking it not to let Fu perform the trick again during Thursday's broadcast of the Lantern Festival, which ends the Lunar New Year events.

"We should stand for nonviolence, harmony and tolerance, but to my great surprise CCTV, the state broadcaster, tells the public we can use animals for entertainment. I think this is just wrong," said Qing Shaona, director of the Capital Animal Welfare Assn.

Progress made on protecting sharks, but none on Atlantic bluefin tuna, environmental groups say

PARIS — An international conservation conference in Paris made progress Saturday on protecting sharks but didn't do anything to save the Atlantic bluefin tuna, which has been severely over-fished to feed the market for sushi in Japan, environmental groups said.

Delegates from 48 nations spent 11 days in Paris haggling over fishing quotas for the Atlantic and Mediterranean, poring over scientific data and pitting the demands of environmentalists against those of the fishing industry.

Conservation groups said delegates took steps in the right direction with moves to protect oceanic white tip sharks and many hammerheads in the Atlantic, though they had hoped for more. Sharks were once an accidental catch for fishermen but have been increasingly targeted because of the growing market in Asia for their fins, an expensive delicacy used in soup.

WWF, Greenpeace, Oceana and the Pew Environment Group all strongly criticized the 2011 bluefin quotas set by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT, which manages tuna in the Atlantic and Mediterranean as well as species that have traditionally been accidental catches for tuna fishermen.

Environmental groups had hoped to see bluefin fishing slashed or suspended, saying illegal fishing is rampant in the Mediterranean and that scientists don't have good enough data to evaluate the problem.

Federal court halts killing of salmon-eating sea lions in the Columbia River

PORTLAND, Ore. — Sea lions that have faced death by lethal injection for making banquets of endangered fish in the Columbia River won a reprieve Tuesday when a federal appeals court told Oregon and Washington wildlife officials to cease killing them.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the federal government failed to explain why it lets state officials kill sea lions, while humans are allowed to take comparable or larger catches of the endangered salmon and steelhead.

Angry fishermen along the river have protested over the last decade as growing numbers of the sea lions clustered at the base of Bonneville Dam, where fish waiting to head upriver to spawn are easy pickings.

In 2008, the federal government gave Oregon and Washington state agencies the go-ahead to kill the hungriest of the sea lions, a decision challenged by the Humane Society of the United States.

In the last two years, 24 of the California sea lions have been killed. They are captured at the dam and taken to a facility where they are given a lethal injection by a veterinarian.

Groups sue Environmental Protection Agency over lead ammunition and fishing tackle

WASHINGTON — Three environmental groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday to force it to prevent lead poisoning of wildlife from spent ammunition and lost fishing tackle.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court by the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the hunters group Project Gutpile. It comes after the EPA denied their petition to ban lead ammunition and lead fishing tackle, which the groups say kills 10 million to 20 million birds and other animals a year by lead poisoning.

"The EPA has the ability to protect America's wildlife from ongoing preventable lead poisoning, but continues to shirk its responsibility," said Jeff Miller, conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity.

The lawsuit asks a judge to order the EPA to develop rules to prevent wildlife poisoning from spent lead ammunition and fishing tackle.

Environmentalists urge increased protection for sharks at international fishing meeting

PARIS — With their pointy teeth and fearsome reputations, sharks may not be the best poster children for species in danger, but environmentalists say the predators are in dire need of protection.

Marine experts and conservation groups hope an Atlantic conservation conference in Paris this week will bolster what they say are disastrously inadequate rules on shark capture.

"There are shark populations that have declined by 99%, so it's a real severe situation, and there are virtually no protections at an international level," said Elizabeth Griffin Wilson, a marine wildlife scientist at conservation group Oceana.

Oceana wants delegates to toughen the existing ban on shark-finning -- the practice of slashing prized fins off the animals and tossing them overboard to die -- as well as prohibiting the capture of some threatened Atlantic sharks and setting catch limits for others.

Only one shark species is under international protection in the Atlantic -- the big-eye thresher -- and there are no catch limits on others, it said in a report released Monday.

Elaborate international fishing regulations and quotas govern other types of fish, such as tuna, the main focus of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, meeting this week through Saturday in Paris.

Meeting in France to address fishing quotas for Atlantic bluefin tuna

PARIS — It's succulent and sought-after, a prized fish with a steep price: A single bite of Atlantic bluefin tuna can sell for more than $20 in Tokyo sushi restaurants.

But that demand has led to overfishing, and environmentalists say the world needs to act now to save the species at a meeting that started Wednesday in Paris.

Representatives from 48 countries are preparing to set fishing quotas for the Atlantic bluefin, which swims waters from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean and which conservation group WWF says is "on the brink of extinction."

Environmentalists are pressing for dramatic cuts to the current annual quota of 13,500 metric tons in the Mediterranean, where they say fraud and overfishing is rampant. Some are even demanding a suspension of bluefin fishing entirely at the meeting, which runs until Nov. 27.

Conservationists say the tracking system is full of holes and that scientists don't have enough data to make an informed recommendation about what the quota should be.

The bluefin is the "poster child for mismanagement," Susan Lieberman, director of international policy for the Pew Environment Group, told the Associated Press.

Virginia researcher works to save Atlantic sturgeon

HOPEWELL, Va. — Researcher Matt Balazik wears his passion for saving the Atlantic sturgeon on his right arm -- a tattoo of the ancient fish -- and lives it by counting the bottom-feeding giants in the James River.

The 30-year-old doctoral student is part sturgeon wrangler, part census taker as he patrols the river in a small boat, checking 1,000-foot-long nets for what scientists believe is the last viable reproductive population of Atlantic sturgeon in the Chesapeake Bay. Sturgeon, which have survived virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, are dwindling worldwide under the influence of human beings.

You hear these monster fish before you see them -- Atlantic sturgeon leap out of the water and land with a loud splash, like a log dropped from above.

On a recent languid fall day on the river, in one of his last checks of the day in this shoestring recovery effort, Balazik snares a sturgeon in his net and hauls it into the well of his boat.

Working with the skill of a Savile Row tailor, he records the big male's length, girth and gender, tags it, then lifts it onto a scale before posing with his trophy for a picture and tossing the 6-foot-long, armor-plated fish back into the river's silt-flecked waters.

Environmental Protection Agency denies conservationists' petition to ban lead fishing tackle

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency denied on Thursday a petition by several environmental groups to ban lead in fishing tackle, two months after rejecting the groups' attempt to ban it in hunting ammunition.

The EPA said that the petition did not demonstrate that a ban on lead in fishing tackle was necessary to protect against unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment, as required by the Toxic Substances Control Act.

In a letter to the American Bird Conservancy, one of the groups that filed the petition, EPA Assistant Administrator Stephen A. Owens said that a number of steps are being taken to address the concerns of lead in fishing tackle. Among them: limitations of lead in fishing gear on some federal lands; bans or restrictions on the state level; and federal and state outreach and education efforts.

"The emergence of these programs and activities over the past decade calls into question whether the broad rulemaking requested in your petition would be the least burdensome, adequately protective approach," Owens wrote to the conservancy's director of conservation advocacy, Michael Fry.

In their petition, the groups had argued that lead from spent hunting ammunition and lost lead fishing gear causes the deaths of 10 million to 20 million birds and other animals a year by lead poisoning.

Maine diver documents encounter with hungry porbeagle shark on video

PORTLAND, Maine — A scuba diver who came face-to-teeth with a shark used a camera to fend off the animal when it came at him with its teeth bared -- and he has the frightening video to prove it.

Scott MacNichol, 30, was shaken up but uninjured after a porbeagle shark apparently mistook his camera equipment for food Saturday while diving near Eastport, off the eastern tip of Maine. He estimated the shark was 8 feet long and weighed about 300 pounds.

MacNichol saw the shark swimming above him while he was filming the ocean floor under empty salmon pens as part of an environmental assessment for Cooke Aquaculture Inc. The animal then came at him, jabbing at the camera with its snout. In the video, its sharp teeth fill the frame before it swims off.

"He took a couple of bites at the camera. When he did that I was pretty much petrified," MacNichol said Wednesday. "If you watch the video, you can hear me screaming underwater."

Porbeagles are coldwater sharks that have a similar body shape and tail to mako and great white sharks. Their diet is primarily herring, mackerel and other bony fish.

The shark was probably drawn to MacNichol from the camera's light, batteries and silver casing, said Chris Heinig, owner of MER Assessment Corp., who was on the dive boat on the surface when the shark lunged at MacNichol.

Recently completed Census of Marine Life offers insights into ocean-dwelling species

WASHINGTON — The world's oceans may be vast and deep, but a decade-long count of marine animals finds sea life so interconnected that it seems to shrink the watery world. An international effort to create a Census of Marine Life was completed Monday with maps and three books, increasing the number of counted and validated species to 201,206.

A decade ago the question of how many species are out there couldn't be answered. It also could have led to a lot of arguments among scientists. Some species were counted several or even dozens of times, said Jesse Ausubel of the Alfred Sloan Foundation, the co-founder of the effort that involved 2,700 scientists.

The $650-million project got money and help from more than 600 groups, including various governments, private foundations, corporations, non-profits, universities, and even five high schools. The Sloan foundation is the founding sponsor, contributing $75 million.

But what scientists learned was more than a number or a count. It was a sense of how closely life connects from one place to another and one species to another, Ausubel said.

Take the bizarre and minuscule shrimp-like creature called Ceratonotus steiningeri. It has several spikes and claws and looks intimidating -- if it weren't a mere two-hundredths of an inch long. Five years ago this critter had never been seen before. No one knew of its existence.