
Earthjustice
A bill that overrides a bipartisan, court-approved settlement to restore the San Joaquin River in California was passed by the House of Representatives, despite the fact that President Obama has already pledged to veto it. The bill passed with strong Republican support and against the wishes the vast majority of California Democratic House members.
The bill called the “San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act” (H.R. 1837) is also opposed by the State of California, California’s two senators, the California Attorney General, the leaders of the California State Legislature, commercial and recreational fishing associations, environmental groups, water districts, local governments, delta farmers and others.
Among other things the bill, introduced by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), would toss out the 2009 San Joaquin River Restoration Agreement, which was agreed to by parties in a federal court settlement in California. The bill also sets a dangerous precedent for preempting state water rights, leaving other states vulnerable to this kind of federal interference.
Farmers and fishermen, whose livelihoods depend on a healthy Bay-Delta oppose the bill because it would take water needed to grow crops and healthy salmon runs. If passed, the Representative Nunes bill would reverse efforts to restore the Bay-Delta estuary and improve the reliability California’s water supplies.
Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, a trade group representing commercial salmon fishermen said, “This bill is a jobs killer for fishermen and fishing communities. It’s clear that Mr. Nunes and his fellow travelers have greased the way for a massive giveaway of a public resource to these San Joaquin Valley water profiteers.”
“The Nunes bill is a blatant attempt to boost corporate profits for some of the world's wealthiest agribusinesses and to wipe out important environmental protections that the bill’s supporters never liked,” said Marjorie Mulhall, Earthjustice associate legislative counsel. “The changes proposed by Big Ag will result in more species going extinct, including species like Pacific salmon that are critical to the economies of West Coast states.”
At stake is the largest estuary on the West Coast of North America. It is a maze of wetlands and farmlands, islands and waterways, where torrents of the Sierra Nevada mix with tides from the Pacific Ocean. It provides a haven for fish and wildlife, quenches the thirst of millions of Californians, contains thousands of acres of farmland while watering hundreds of thousands more, and nurses salmon runs that sustain fishing ports along a thousand miles of coastline.
A Bush-era water giveaway to junior water rights growers and a billionaire water-broker shattered the estuary’s delicate life balance and caused natural flows to reverse course, dragging tens of thousands of young salmon and other native fish to their deaths. Earthjustice won court victories to stop this runaway water diversion scheme—victories now under attack in Congress.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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