Wins for Pangolins, Green Sea Turtles and More
Every day an imperiled species goes unprotected brings it closer to extinction. That's why the Center works to make sure the government doesn't drag its feet on protection decisions. And in the past 10 days, our legal work brought progress in that arena to three kinds of animals and one plant.
For pangolins, the world's most trafficked mammals, we won an agreement from the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide on Endangered Species Act protection by next June. For critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, we won a deadline of May 2021 for new regulations to prevent the animals from getting entangled in fishing gear, which can be deadly. For threatened and endangered green sea turtles, we won an agreement that federal agencies will propose critical habitat by June 2023.
And following our lawsuit, the Service proposed protecting the marrón bacora, a flowering shrub found only in dry forests on St. John, Virgin Islands, and identified 2,549 acres of potential critical habitat.
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