Word: fishelis
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...Florida. Having spent much of this century channeling, damming and diverting Everglades water for urban and agricultural use, state and federal politicians have watched with growing alarm as these alterations threw the ecosystem into a tailspin. Wading-bird populations have plummeted; sport and commercial fish catches have fallen; 68 of the Everglades' resident species, including the manatee and the panther, have become endangered; and the capacity of the system to store water has shrunk even as human demand for it grows...
...lower Mississippi is the greatest freshwater coastal marshland in North America, a resplendently prolific nursery for fish, shellfish, furbearers and reptiles and a wintering haven for a third of North America's waterfowl. The saltwater invasion has cost the Cajun economy, rooted in fishing and trapping and hunting, dearly. But payment will soon be demanded farther north. Hydrologists are now proposing formerly unthinkable ideas--such as breaching the levees from New Orleans to the river's mouth--if only to spread enough silt to slow the Gulf's encroachment on the city. Even if that's done (it would probably...
...striking how, in just two or three decades, the U.S. has gone from building dams to not building dams to taking some of them down. Under serious discussion is the demolition of four brutish structures on the lower Snake River that have macerated millions of young fish...
...remarkable species, the "extremophiles," have achieved astonishing feats of physiological adaptation at the ends of habitable Earth. In the most frigid polar waters, fish and other animals flourish, their blood kept fluid by biochemical antifreezes. Populations of bacteria live in the spumes of volcanic thermal vents on the ocean floor, multiplying in water above the boiling point. And far beneath Earth's surface, to a depth of 2 miles (3.2 km) or more, dwell the SLIMES (subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems), unique assemblages of bacteria and fungi that occupy pores in the interlocking mineral grains of igneous rock and derive their...
Aggressive with hunger, the whining chick bites its parent's bill to stimulate her into regurgitating her payload. The adult hunches, retching, pumping out fish eggs and several squid. The chick swallows in seconds what its parent logged 4,000 miles (6,400 km) to get. The chick begs for more. The adult arches her neck and retches again. Nothing comes. We whisper, "What's wrong...