1,200 Rare Salamanders Released in Florida Days After 42 Snakes Were Set Free in the State
Frosted flatwoods salamanders are endangered due to habitat destruction and climate change
Biologists released the amphibians to improve Florida's ecosystemsFlorida is gaining more amphibian residents!
According to the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy (ARC), biologists released 1,204 frosted flatwoods salamanders in the wetlands of the Florida panhandle in late April.
Frosted flatwoods salamanders are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. The April release was an effort to help bolster the amphibian population and save the salamanders from extinction.
The Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy is committed to helping salamander species through releases and habitat restoration.
"Along with our incredible partners here, we're carrying out a multi-faceted strategy for frosted flatwoods salamanders. We're not only releasing more salamanders onto the land; we're building better habitats and making sure the ecosystem contains what these amphibians need, all to give them a fighting chance against the big threats they face," JJ Apodaca, the executive director of ARC, shared.
The salamanders released into Florida are part of a process called head-starting. Biologists collected the animals as unhatched eggs in the wild, hatched them, and raised them in protected environments. Then, the biologists released the salamanders back into the wild once they reached a size more suitable for surviving in the wild.
ARC is also working on a captive breeding program for frosted flatwoods salamanders and plans to release the salamanders that result from the initiative.
"This is a species persisting in the face of a lot of adversity, and there's a committed team of people mirroring that persistence by working hard to help them in many ways," ARC project coordinator Nicole Dahrouge said.
While the salamanders have numerous supporters at ARC and the organization's partners, the amphibians still face mounting hazards.
"The looming climate threats are pretty worrisome; with storm surges and flooding, the coastal populations are increasingly at risk," Dahrouge added.
Still, Dahrouge remains optimistic about the frosted flatwoods salamander's future and the "positive changes" ARC is making for them.
"These animals matter, even if most people never see them or might not even notice their absence if they were lost," she said. "They're part of a system that's been in place long before we arrived, and the tragedy of their loss would be an avoidable one."
The release of the over 1,200 salamanders comes days after a large snake release. On April 25, The Nature Conservancy and its partners released 42 young eastern indigo snakes, 22 females and 20 males, at the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve (ABRP) in Florida.
Indigo snakes are non-venomous apex predators that bring balance to the longleaf pine ecosystems they are native to. The species is also the longest snake native to the U.S.
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"In restoring ecosystems, each species plays a part in bringing back natural balance," the ABRP preserve manager, Catherine Ricketts, said in a statement. "In our longleaf pine-wiregrass savannas, we want the complete suite of species here, including birds, mammals, insects, and an apex predator: the eastern indigo snake. These snakes are a key component of restoring north Florida's longleaf pine forests."
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Forbes
31-07-2025
- Forbes
Going Wild (Again): Feral Rabbits In Australia Evolve New Morphologies
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From wild to domestic and in between: how domestication and feralization changed the morphology of rabbits, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 292:20251150 | doi:10.1098/rspb.2025.1150 © Copyright by GrrlScientist | hosted by Forbes | Socials: Bluesky | CounterSocial | LinkedIn | Mastodon Science | Spoutible | SubStack | Threads | Tumblr | Twitter
Yahoo
28-07-2025
- Yahoo
Experts warn drastic action may be necessary in communities along US East Coast: 'We're dealing with something completely unprecedented'
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Associated Press
21-07-2025
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Sapient Intelligence Open-Sources Hierarchical Reasoning Model, a Brain-Inspired Architecture That Solves Complex Reasoning Tasks With 27 Million Parameters
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With only about 1000 training examples, the HRM (~27M parameters) surpasses state-of-the-art CoT models on ARC-AGI, Sudoku-Extreme, and Maze-Hard* The Sapient Intelligence team is already running new experiments and expects to publish even stronger ARC-AGI scores soon. Real-World Impact HRM's data efficiency and reasoning accuracy open new opportunities in fields where large datasets are scarce yet accuracy is critical. In healthcare, Sapient is partnering with leading medical research institutions to deploy HRM to support complex diagnostics, particularly rare-disease cases where data signals are sparse, subtle, and demand deep reasoning. In climate forecasting, HRM raises subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecasting accuracy to 97 %, a leap that translates directly into social and economic value. In robotics, HRM's low-latency, lightweight architecture serves as an on-device 'decision brain,' enabling next-generation robots to perceive and act in real time within dynamic environments. Path Forward Sapient Intelligence believes that HRM presents a viable alternative to the currently dominant CoT reasoning models. It offers a practical path toward universally capable reasoning systems that rely on architecture, not scale, to push the frontier of AI and, ultimately, close the gap between today's models and true artificial general intelligence. Availability The source code is available on GitHub at About Sapient Intelligence Sapient Intelligence is a global AGI research company headquartered in Singapore, with research centers in San Francisco and Beijing, building the next-generation AI model for complex reasoning. Our mission is to reach artificial general intelligence by developing a radically new architecture that integrates reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms, and neuroscience research to push beyond the limits of today's LLMs. In July 2025, we introduced the Sapient Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), a hierarchical, brain-inspired model that achieves deep reasoning with minimal data. With just 27 million parameters and approximately 1,000 training examples, without pre-training, Sapient HRM achieves near-perfect accuracy on Sudoku Extreme, Maze Hard, and other high-difficulty math tasks and outperforms current models that are significantly larger on the ARC-AGI. Early pilot applications will include healthcare, robot control, and climate forecasting. Our fast-growing team includes alumni of Google DeepMind, DeepSeek, Anthropic, and xAI, alongside researchers from Tsinghua University, Peking University, UC Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Alberta, working together to close the gap between today's language models and true general intelligence. For more information, visit Media Contact [email protected], [email protected] Media Contact Company Name: Sapient Intelligence Contact Person: Gen Li Email: Send Email Country: China Website: Source: EmailWire
