‘Megalodon' goldfish found in Pennsylvania waterways
While conducting an electrofishing survey, the USFWS came across a larger-than-life pet goldfish that someone released into the waterway, creating what they call an 'invasive problem.'
Pennsylvania releases 2025 trout stocking schedule: what anglers need to know
'This goldfish isn't supposed to be here. But someone released it, thinking they were being kind,' they wrote in their post. 'Instead, they created an invasive problem that can last decades.'
Goldfish can grow massive and wreak havoc in the wild, including stealing food from native fish, turning lakes and waterways into murky messes, and ruining water quality. Some goldfish can grow to four pounds if released in the wild.
'If you can't keep your fish, rehome it. Just don't let it loose,' they added along with the hashtag InvasiveSpeciesWeek.
Officials also brought up that it's legal to use goldfish as live bait in 16 states, however, it is not legal in Pennsylvania, according to the PA Code.If you're looking to end things with your pet goldfish, the USFWS has a few tips to help you out with the big breakup. Click here to read more.
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Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Pennsylvania ranked top ten ‘most religious states' in new study
PENNSYLVANIA (WTAJ) — With more than two-thirds of adults being religiously affiliated nationally, a new study shows that Pennsylvania ranks within the top ten of 'most religious states.' The study, conducted by SmileHub, compared all 50 states based on 13 key metrics. The data set ranges from the number of faith and religious support charities per capita to the share of people who pray at least daily. The report also focused on three key dimensions: religious interest and places of worship, religious education and careers and religion-affiliated organizations. Pennsylvania ranked overall in spot 10, with a total score of 52.16. In the aforementioned categories, the Commonwealth ranked: Religious interest and places of worship: 24 Religious education and careers: 10 Religion-affiliated organizations: 7 The top nine spots were secured by Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina, Mississippi, Indiana and Georgia, respectively. New Hampshire was ranked last, with Maine ranking in 49 and Vermont ranking 48th. Pennsylvania residents predominantly identify as Christians, with 62% of residents reporting they practice the religion from 2023-2024. Other religions reported in the Commonwealth include Jewish (2%), Muslim (1%) and Buddhist (less than 1%). 30% of Pennsylvanians reported being religiously unaffiliated, with 20% identifying as 'nothing in particular,' 5% identifying as Atheist and 5% identifying as Agnostic. Interestingly, in 2014, 73% of Pennsylvania residents identified as Christians, with an even higher number of 82% being logged in 2007. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
San Francisco Chronicle
6 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California's newest invaders are beautiful swans. Should hunters kill them?
On an early August morning, it didn't take long to spot the first pair of huge white swans with orange and black bills and graceful, curving necks as they swam in the marsh along the side of a Solano County levee road. They dabbled in the vegetation as a pickup drove through the Grizzly Island Wildlife Area. A short drive later, past a herd of a dozen tule elk, two more swans appeared in the marsh alongside the dirt road. Then four more. A few hundred yards down the road, out in the distance past a thicket of swaying reeds, dozens of swans swam in the water. For casual bird watchers, the sight of all these majestic animals might be a pleasure and bring to mind swan-themed works of literature, such as 'Leda and the Swan' and 'The Ugly Duckling.' But for wetland biologists and others with a stake in the health of the surrounding Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast, the birds represent the latest — and an exponentially growing — threat to the few remaining wetlands left in California. These are mute swans, native to Europe and Asia. Weighing up to 30 pounds and with a wingspan of up to eight feet, they're the biggest bird in the marsh, and they're not the least bit shy about throwing their weight around. Fiercely territorial, especially during breeding season, they've been known to drown smaller animals and have killed at least one American kayaker. They've displaced colonies of nesting native birds in other parts of the U.S. they have invaded. Mute swans also feed gluttonously on submerged vegetation, destroying the plant life on which other native wetland species depend. 'They might be a pretty, big, white bird … and they may be charismatic, but they can be pretty nasty,' said Brad Bortner, a retired chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's migratory bird management programs in Washington D.C. In 2008, California banned anyone without a special permit from keeping mute swans as pets or from importing them into the state. The hope was to head off yet another destructive invasive species taking hold in the state. It didn't work. The mute swan population exploded in just a few years. In 2022, state waterfowl biologists estimated there were 1,500 of them. This spring, they estimated more than 12,000, nearly double the year before. Most of the mute swans are in the Suisun Marsh, a sprawling complex of public wetlands, agricultural lands and private duck-hunting clubs on the outskirts of the Bay Area near Fairfield. 'We keep watching them climb and climb and climb,' said Melanie Weaver, waterfowl coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. A measure before the state Legislature aims to allow hunters and landowners to shoot the swans for the next five years to try to bring their numbers down to more manageable levels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and beyond. The hunting groups supporting Assembly Bill 764 essentially ask: If Californians are OK with spending more than $13 million since 2018 to kill nearly 6,000 nutria, the 20-pound, orange-toothed South American rodents that have invaded the same waterways, why not let hunters and land owners do the same to mute swans — but for free? 'If the population gets too large and out of control, it may be beyond our ability then to really effectively manage them,' Mark Hennelly, a lobbyist for the California Waterfowl Association, told the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee this spring. 'So we want to get ahead of the problem.' Animal welfare groups object That argument has so far been a surprisingly easy sell in the Legislature, despite California's passionate and influential anti-hunting activists. Similar swan-killing proposals have led to protests in other states. The measure easily passed the Assembly without any lawmaker voting against it. It's now pending in the California Senate. No group has opposed the measure so far, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database, but that might soon change. Mute swans, unlike nutria, have a dedicated group of supporters, mostly on the East Coast. Nicole Rivard, a spokesperson for Friends of Animals, said she and fellow members of the animal welfare organization believe mute swans shouldn't be treated like vermin. The birds arrived here through no fault of their own, brought by humans, and they don't deserve to be killed for it, she said. Rivard believes the California legislation is motivated by hunters looking for an excuse to have yet another bird to legally shoot. Currently, mute swans can only be killed by landowners if the birds 'are found to be injuring growing crops or property,' according to state regulations. 'We're anti-hunting, so we don't like the idea that (hunting) might be, you know, part of the reasoning behind this,' Rivard said. Arguing that claims of mute swans' environmental damage and aggression are overblown, Friends of Animals and other groups opposed killing them decades ago, after Mid-Atlantic states proposed eradication when their populations began expanding dramatically in the 1990s and early 2000s. The groups protested, filed lawsuits and proposed legislation to try to stop the killing. They had mixed success. Some states began killing the nonnative swans over the animal welfare groups' objections. Notably, Maryland was able to knock the mute swan population down from around 5,000 birds in the early 2000s to around 200 by 2010. 'Continued control and maintenance operations have reduced that number to just a handful of birds today,' said Josh Homyack, the game bird section leader for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. In Maryland, government agency employees raided mute swan nests and destroyed eggs, captured and euthanized swans when they were flightless during their feather-molting season and shot them in carefully coordinated operations, Homyack said. The state also issued a few permits to kill the birds to local landowners. In New York, the mute swan lobby got a law passed that made it harder to kill the birds, requiring state officials to 'fully exhaust non-lethal control measures' such as nest destruction and capturing birds and moving them to wildlife facilities ' prior to any lethal removal.' The mute swan population in New York has stayed steady at around 2,000 to 3,400 birds. Charisma matters with invasive species On the East Coast, mute swans have been around since before the turn of the last century. They were first imported as ornamental livestock for zoos, parks and estates. Some of California's mute swans likely came in the same way. Weaver, the California waterfowl coordinator, said others were likely brought in the past few years to chase away Canada geese that have increasingly become a nuisance at parks and golf courses. 'People were buying these (swans), and they were just throwing them out there,' she said. Weaver noted their owners didn't do the responsible thing and clip their wings to keep them from flying off. That's hardly surprising. It's no easy task to grab a hissing 25-pound swan, big and angry enough to swamp a kayaker. So with nothing to stop them, the birds flew to nearby marshlands and began reproducing. 'Here we are, not very many years down the road, with a population that is really increasing at a rapid rate,' Weaver said. So far, California's wildlife agency hasn't enacted a mute swan eradication plan similar to the one it started almost immediately — and publicly promoted — a few years ago, after nutria first started turning up in the San Joaquin Valley. Nutria are similarly destructive feeders on aquatic plants. The South American swamp rodents also burrow holes in levees, posing a threat to the state's flood-control and water-supply infrastructure. Dave Strayer, a retired invasive species expert with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, said he's not surprised state officials haven't been as aggressive with the beautiful mute swans, given the uproar over killing them in other states. He said research has shown that when it comes to invasive animals, charisma matters. The more attractive a problematic non-native species is, the less appetite there is to wipe it out. Stayer gave an example: Few complain about killing common nonnative rats, but you're apt to get death threats at even the suggestion of wiping out ecologically harmful feral cat colonies in the same habitats. He noted that no one has ever complained about efforts to eradicate one of his research subjects, the nonnative zebra mussels that have also invaded California. 'I never had even one person stand up for zebra mussels and say, 'No, these are beautiful, elegant God's creatures' and so forth,' he said. Few wetlands and too many mute swans Supporters of the swan-killing legislation say reducing the number of mute swans should be fairly easy since the giant white birds are easy to spot, identify and kill. Their size and the color and shape of their bills also reduce the risk they'll be confused with other protected bird species, they say. California's native tundra and trumpeter swans would still be protected and illegal to shoot if the bill becomes law. Despite their undeniable beauty, Weaver, the state waterfowl coordinator, sees mute swans similarly to nutria. The swans pose too great a threat to native species reliant on the few wetlands left in California, which has lost at least 90% of the habitats to agriculture and urban sprawl. 'They don't move around the state all that much, and they really like the Delta-Suisun Marsh area, so it's still easy to handle the issue,' Weaver said. 'The longer we wait, it won't be.'
UPI
04-08-2025
- UPI
More than $100M in grant money to be used to protect migratory birds
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum (pictured at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in January) said the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission has approved $102.9 million in federal funding for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners to 'conserve, restore or enhance' some 548,242 acres of wetland for migratory birds. File Photo by Jemal Countess/UPI | License Photo Aug. 4 (UPI) -- The federal government is approving more than $100 million in federal grant money for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for wetland conservations efforts in more than a half-million acres of critical migratory bird habitats. The U.S. Department of Interior said Monday its Migratory Bird Conservation Commission approved $102.9 million in federal funding for the wildlife service and its partners to "conserve, restore or enhance" some 548,242 acres of key wetlands and its associated upland habitats across North America for migratory birds. In addition, more than $201 million in matching funds will be granted by Fish and Wildlife partners. According to the department, the financial infusion for wetland preservation came as part of the 1989 North American Wetlands Conservation Act. U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement that NAWCA has "fostered partnerships and an investment in wetland conservation that yield both ecological and economic returns for local communities and a broad range of industries," which he said includes tourism, commercial fisheries, and the forestry and agriculture industries. Burgum, who sits as chair of the migratory bird commission, said the federal grants will "increase and maintain healthy bird populations and wetland habitat" while "supporting local economies and improving public access to recreational activities for American traditions" such as hunting, fishing and birdwatching. Interior said NAWCA is the only federal grant program targeted for the conservation of wetland habitats for migratory bird species. More than $7.1 billion in federal funding since 1991 has advanced the conservation of wetland habitats in all 50 states, Canada and Mexico, according to DOI. It added that more than 7,100 partners from private landowners to state, tribal and local governments, conservation groups, sportsmen's clubs, land trusts and corporate entities had taken part in more than 3,400 federal projects. On Sunday, a noted Marine biologist and conservationist said on social media that U.S. wetlands "are disappearing at a staggering rate" and pointed out that its restoration "can take centuries" to fix. "This hits your safety, your health, your wallet -- your future," Dr. Tom Montgomery posted on X. Montgomery noted that among 170 nations represented at the recent global summit on the wetland crisis in Zimbabwe that there were "two empty seats labeled 'USA,'" he wrote. A 2023 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court significantly curtailed the regulatory power of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate and protect water in wetlands under the Clean Water Act of 1972. Yet DOI officials say the commission has aided in the conservation of "much of" America's "most important" waterfowl habitats, saying the NAWCA legislation signed by then-President George H.W. Bush is one of the "most effective tools" the federal government has at its disposal for migratory bird conservation. "NAWCA funding supports projects that enhance or establish areas for hunting and birdwatching, uplifting local economies and improving public access to recreational activities for future generations," stated Justin "J" Shirley, principal deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Similar efforts by the prior Biden administration at wetland preservation included over $46 million last year in September to restore some 91,425 acres of wetland habitat in 17 states for waterfowl, shorebirds and other species. It came with nearly $100 million in partner matching funds. In 2023 the year before a total of $50.9 million in NAWCA grants was matched by over $73 million in private partner grants.
