The Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced that a mature male Chinese mitten crab was collected at the mouth of the Patapsco River by a commercial waterman fishing crab pots. The species is native to East Asia, and is a potential invasive that could have negative ecological impacts.
Read (Southern Maryland Online)
Virginia environmentalists and officials borrowed an idea from successes in South Carolina: Encourage seafood lovers in Virginia Beach
to recycle their clam and oyster shells instead of tossing them in the
garbage. By next spring, organizers hope to dump 1,500 bushels of
shells into the Lynnhaven River as part of a recycling program that wants to use the shells to build artificial reefs. The project, called Save Oyster Shell, began this summer in Virginia Beach, with help from a grant from the state’s Chesapeake Bay license-plate fund.
Read (AP via WTOP)
Bumblebees prefer to visit warm flowers and can use color to predict the bloom’s temperature, research suggests.
Read (BBC)
It seems electronic waste recycling, or “e-cycling,” is catching on
nationwide. More grass-roots nonprofits are springing up, dedicated to
tackling the waste problem caused by discarded electronics. A growing
consumer awareness of the lasting environmental impact of “e-waste” –
more than 250 million personal computers and 100 million cellphones are
tossed aside each year in the United States – has prompted some states
to pass legislation banning certain toxic materials from landfills, and
a number of domestic manufacturers now offer e-cycling programs to
their customers as an additional selling point.
Read (Christian Science Monitor)
Crutchfield has announced that they are now recycling electronics at their Charlottesville store.
The public should not be alarmed by a report showing nearly two-thirds of rivers and streams monitored by the state are polluted, a Virginia Department of Environmental Quality official said Tuesday.
The DEQ studied about 14,300 miles of rivers and streams – nearly 30 percent of the state’s total – from 2000 through 2004. About 9,000 miles were listed as “impaired,” meaning they fail to fully support at least one of six usage categories: aquatic life, fishing, shellfishing, swimming, public water supplies and wildlife.
The impaired waters are up from 6,931 miles, or 61 percent of the total studied for the last five-year assessment, released in 2004.
[Read](http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=25&sid=846945) (AP via WTOP)
The West African black rhino appears to have become extinct, according to the World Conservation Union. They have declined in recent decades due primarily to poaching, which has also brought the northern white rhino close to extinction, too.
[Read](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5167266.stm) (BBC)
The Chesapeake Bay is a key stop in the migratory route of the geese, which travel from Canada’s Hudson Bay to North Carolina, prompting the U.S. Department of Agriculture to designate Maryland a “Tier One” state in its monitoring program for the H5N1 avian flu strain.
[Read](http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=25&sid=841617) (AP via WTOP)
Since 1984, a fish consumption advisory has been in effect for the South River. The South River, long ago contaminated by mercury from a former DuPont plant, which stopped using mercury in the making of its fibers in 1950, has not seen a dip in mercury levels since the mid-1970s, when mercury was discovered in and around the water.
Nature, it was believed, would take its course and cause mercury levels to drop, but they haven’t. In other rivers across the United States where mercury contamination is an issue, the levels have almost always declined.
[Read](http://www.wvec.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D8IK0JQG3.html) (WVEC)
Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s [South River Mercury Page](http://www.deq.state.va.us/fishtissue/mercury.html)
USGS’ [South River Mercury Page](http://va.water.usgs.gov/projects/south_river_hg.html)
Virginia Department of Health’s
[South River Advisories Page](http://www.vdh.state.va.us/HHControl/ShenandoahRiver.asp)
[Whole Foods](http://www.wholefoods.com) will attempt to build up a system of animal-compassionate small farms, buying more local food, setting up a loan program for small farmers, opening their parking lots for local farmers to sell directly to consumers, and increasing consumer education on the subject of local food.
[Read](http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/6/29/143121/559?source=daily) (Grist Magazine)
It’s been raining since Sunday, and the neighbor’s bank collapsed this afternoon and landed in the street.
The Chesapeake Bay could have fewer low-oxygen zones this summer, but there’s a high likelihood of a dangerous algae bloom in the Potomac River, according to a water quality forecast released Thursday by the Chesapeake Bay Program.
[Read](http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=25&sid=808493) (AP via WTOP)
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is concerned about whether the risks of an environmental accident or unknown disease outweigh the commercial benefits of attempting to restore Virginia’s part of the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster stocks with a disease-resistant Asian variety.
[Read](http://fredericksburg.com//News/FLS/2006/052006/05282006/194711) (AP via Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star)
Slash and burn tactics by illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and drug traffickers in [Guatemala](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala “Wikipedia Guatemala page”) are repeating the mistakes of their ancestors and destroying enough trees to fill an area the size of [Dallas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas “Wikipedia: Dallas covers 385 square miles.”) each year.
One theory for the relatively sudden Mayan collapse 1,200 years ago is that clear-cutting of trees led to widespread erosion and evaporation.
Studies of settlement remains show the deforestation coincided with a dramatic drop in the Mayan population around 950 AD.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12972648/from/RSS/) (MSNBC)
Another reason to worry about global warming: more and itchier poison ivy. [Poison ivy])http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_ivy “Wikipedia: in the family Anacardiaceae, is a woody vine that is well-known for its ability to produce urushiol, a skin irritant that causes an agonizing, itching rash for most people”) grows faster and becomes itchier as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise, researchers said in a new study.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13046200/from/RSS/) (MSNBC)
[Cow-nosed rays](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_nose_rays “Wikipedia: the most common type of ray found in the Chesapeake Bay, a voracious eater.”) arrived early this year and ate 90% of the 775,000 oysters in an artificial reef days after they were planted in the Piankatank River to help revive the Chesapeake Bay’s declining shellfish population. The oysters were planted by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and The Nature Conservancy on a man-made reef in the Piankatank River.
[Read](http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=25&sid=804893) (WTOP)