PHOTOS: Pinellas detective rescues young owl from busy Clearwater parking lot
The sheriff's office said Detective Smith was walking in a parking lot when he spotted an Eastern Screech Owlet on the ground and in the path of vehicle traffic.
Smith quickly moved the owlet to a safer location and waited to see if the owl's parents would return for their baby.
Popular social media chef says he's cancer-free after given 30% chance to live
'When no adult appeared despite the morning hour for this nocturnal little one, he knew it was time to call the pros,' the sheriff's office posted on Facebook.
The detective contacted the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission for assistance. Then, an FWC officer took the owlet to a specialized raptor rehabilitation center.
'If an animal is in immediate danger (like this owlet in a busy parking lot), safely moving it nearby is appropriate. When in doubt, contact a local wildlife rehabilitation center for professional guidance,' the sheriff's office said.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Chicago Tribune
11 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Scientists race to save Lake Michigan whitefish as invasive mussels, warming waters are wiping out population
Sitting by a dock near the northern tip of Door County, Wisconsin, Charlie Henriksen looked out at the surrounding waters, where Green Bay meets Lake Michigan. 'Our dock is 5 miles from what used to be the greatest fishing in the Great Lakes,' Henriksen said. The lifelong Wisconsinite has run his commercial fishing business, Henriksen Fisheries, for over 37 years, and has been fishing in this area for 50. For much of his career, Henriksen said fisheries in Green Bay and across Lake Michigan, including his, were anchored by the lake whitefish — a species of freshwater fish native to the Great Lakes. Yet as climate change and invasive species threaten the whitefish's reproductive patterns, experts say the species is at risk of disappearing entirely from Lake Michigan in the next few years. '(The decline) kicked the business in the head. It was just devastating,' Henriksen said. From salted whitefish exports that poured out of Chicago's harbor in the late 1800s, to whitefish dinners in northern Michigan and Wisconsin, to their integral role in some Anishinaabe creation stories, they've been a cultural and culinary cornerstone of the region for thousands of years. They're also a major economic engine for fisheries across the Great Lakes, which bring an estimated $5.1 billion to the region annually. Today, whitefish populations have dwindled to between 1% and 10% of their historic highs, according to Jason Smith, a biologist with the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. While the decline has been steady over the past 15 years, Smith said it's getting to the point where there are hardly enough fish to sustain commercial fishing in northern Lake Michigan. Now, researchers across the Great Lakes are racing against time to restore whitefish populations — and figure out why these Lake Michigan fixtures are still thriving in a few small pockets of the Michigan and Wisconsin coastlines. 'Even in the leanest times of whitefish, that relationship between the people and Atikameg always continued,' said Smith, referring to the word for whitefish in the Indigenous Cree language. 'Really, the reason I do this work is to make sure that that relationship continues.' One of the main reasons for their decline lies in plain sight. While Lake Michigan's floor is flat and sandy in most places, much of the lake bottom today is carpeted in the shells of quagga mussels. This invasive species, along with zebra mussels, another invasive mussel, were first found in the Great Lakes in the mid-1990s. Both species are filter feeders, meaning they absorb phytoplankton and zooplankton, which young whitefish rely on as a source of food and nutrients. 'How nutrients transfer through the food web has kind of been cut off and altered by mussels,' said Will Stacy, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. 'They blanket the bottom in a lot of areas, and they filter out a lot of that primary production.' Over the past 20 years, these two species have expanded across much of the Great Lakes, filtering plankton and other nutrients out of the water. When zebra mussels first appeared in the lake, whitefish were able to adapt, moving deeper below the surface where nutrients were still plentiful. But when quagga mussels started to spread, local fishers noticed that whitefish began to struggle. 'The quagga mussels changed everything, for everything in the lake,' Henriksen said. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists estimated about 300 trillion mussels covered Lake Michigan in a 2015 count. Without plankton to support the bottom of the food chain, it's become harder and harder for whitefish to reproduce and sustain their offspring. 'The population is just more and more dominated by older fish,' said Jared Homola, an assistant professor in Michigan State University's department of fisheries and wildlife. 'It's what we call recruitment failure, when reproduction is failing. If the whitefish are successfully reproducing, the young just aren't surviving to be able to reproduce themselves.' Whitefish populations have suffered from invasive species in the past. During the 20th century, the invasive sea lamprey was introduced to the Great Lakes. This species preyed directly on lake whitefish, leading to sharp declines in the 1960s and '70s. Along with state and federal agencies, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, which works with both Americans and Canadians to manage commercial fishing in the lakes, launched efforts to control sea lamprey populations. They've reduced the species' population by an estimated 90%. By the turn of the century, whitefish had rebounded to their 'highest ever abundance,' Smith remembers. Today, though, the threats to whitefish are much harder to control — and are receiving much less funding. The EPA's Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funds several invasive mussel research and control projects. In 2023, federal agencies put a total of $1.6 million toward GLRI-run mussel projects. Their main invasive mussel research project has gotten a total of $2.45 million in federal funding since it started in 2015. In comparison, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission budgets over $20 million annually toward sea lamprey control, with a smaller slice of funding also coming from Canada. Agencies that partner with the commission on lamprey control were targeted by Donald Trump's administration earlier this year, but after some delays, the program is back on track. Funding for mussel restoration projects has remained intact under the Trump administration, according to Erika Jensen, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission. Given the scope of the mussels' impact on the food chain, Smith said it can also be harder to pinpoint effective ways to combat their spread. Typically, when fish populations run low, local authorities can gradually restock fish, raising fish in hatcheries and introducing them to the lake to supplement the population. But this, Smith said, is an 'ecosystem-driven decline.' Even if new fish are introduced to the lake, it doesn't address the root of the problem: less nutrients in the water column to support whitefish larvae. 'The easy levers to pull, like harvest stocking, all of those sorts of things are really not super helpful in this situation,' Smith said. These shifts in the food chain are also coupled with another threat to the lake ecosystem: warming temperatures. Whitefish and other native species typically lay their eggs in nearshore reefs in the fall. As the eggs incubate over the winter, ice cover along the Great Lakes coastlines helps protect them from winter storms and UV radiation until they hatch in the spring. But over the past 50 years, surface water temperatures in the Great Lakes have consistently increased. In Lake Michigan, the coldest lake surface temperatures recorded each winter averaged 43% warmer from 1970 to 2022 than they were averaging from 1941 to 1970, according to a recent study produced by the University of Michigan. With warmer lake surface temperatures comes less ice cover — and less protection for whitefish larvae. 'If these fish were simply adapted to hatching in a very sheltered environment, and then all of a sudden, due to climate change, there's no longer ice cover, and they're getting that direct sunlight as a very small, fragile larvae, it seems like it's maybe causing higher mortality,' Stacy said. In Illinois, it's hard to track this trend in a definitive way. Lake whitefish are generally few and far between in southern Lake Michigan. That's been the case for several decades, even before zebra and quagga mussels were introduced to the lake, Stacy said. When Illinois' commercial fisheries were still active, whitefish catches in the region were simply lower than their counterparts in Wisconsin and Michigan. The state ceased all commercial fishing in the 1990s. Farther north, Smith said there are still a few spots, such as Wisconsin's Green Bay or the St. Mary's River that connects lakes Superior and Huron, where zooplankton levels are high enough to sustain whitefish populations. 'The northern bay seems to be, not completely, but somewhat in lockstep with Lake Michigan,' Henriksen, the Green Bay-based fisherman, said of whitefish populations in the area. 'But the southern bay is its own little world, and it's thriving.' By establishing strict quotas on how much whitefish local fishermen can catch, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and other local authorities have helped preserve at least part of the whitefish population in the nutrient-rich waters. Still, Henriksen said, it's not quite enough. 'There's no way that we could acquire enough quota in the lower bay to produce at the levels we produced when there was a lot of fish in the northern bay and in Lake Michigan,' he said. 'So we've made some adjustments.' At MSU, Homola and his team are testing out a method called close-kin mark-recapture to more accurately track whitefish populations. Through this strategy, researchers use fish tissue samples to identify individual fish that are related. Based on the number of parent-offspring pairs or 'family groups' they find in their data, Homola said they can calculate how many total fish are in a population. Currently, most Great Lakes agencies estimate whitefish populations based on the amount of whitefish caught in surveys. But Homola noted that this becomes far more difficult as whitefish populations shrink. 'The fewer lake whitefish there are, the more important it is to know how many there are,' he said. Smith and other researchers at tribal fisheries are also working on incubating whitefish eggs in tributaries of Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior. Nutrients are typically more abundant in rivers, so by introducing them in these more stable habitats, Smith said they're hoping to give young whitefish 'a chance to keep going.' Other Indigenous researchers with the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians are raising Atikameg, or whitefish, in natural ponds. Last year, they released over 45,000 whitefish into the waters around the eastern end of the Upper Peninsula. These methods are meant to serve as a 'bridge' to rehabilitation, Smith said. In the past, government-run fish restocking projects have relied heavily on man-made hatcheries, leading to a lack of genetic diversity in fish populations. 'I don't think any of us are thinking about restocking hundreds of millions of fish through this method,' he said. 'What we're trying to do is make sure that that wide variety of genetics continues.'
Tom's Guide
2 days ago
- Tom's Guide
Experts recommend this dryer sheet hack to keep your walls looking pristine — here's how it works
Keeping walls looking fresh after they've recently been painted can be an endless task, especially if you have children in your home. However, a home improvement expert has shared how you can keep your paint looking perfect by following an easy cleaning hack. By following this weekly task, you can keep your painted walls pristine without using any harsh cleaning products. And all it takes is one household product that you probably already have stored in your cupboards. So, instead of scrubbing fingerprint marks and everyday grime, which will damage your painted walls, try this gentler approach that stops dirt from accumulating. 'After years of working with various paint finishes and helping customers maintain their properties, I've found that prevention beats deep cleaning every time,' says Dale Smith, founder of Fence Guru. He shares his secret weekly maintenance tip to keep painted walls clean and professional-looking long after they've been painted. There's no complicated science behind Smith's method; it simply involves using a dryer sheet. He recommends wiping painted walls once a week with a standard sheet to lift settled dust while creating a light static layer that actively repels grime and airborne particles. 'Most people don't realise that dryer sheets are designed to attract and capture dust particles,' explains Smith. 'When you run one across your painted walls, it picks up all that fine dust that settles daily without requiring any moisture or cleaning products that might damage the paint finish.' Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. I've used a similar technique to clean my baseboards, although it also involved a vacuum cleaner. Apart from adding to your laundry to soften your clothes, reduce creases and make them smell fresh, these Bounce laundry sheets can also be used for other cleaning chores. They help to repel dirt and grime and can be used to clean painted walls and baseboards. As the dryer sheet moves across the wall surface, it reduces static, preventing future dust from sticking. The benefit is that you're walls won't need cleaning as frequently. 'Think about how dust clings to your television screen or computer monitor,' says Smith. 'Painted walls face the same issue, especially in high-traffic areas or homes near busy roads where there's more environmental exposure.' Apart from stopping dust from settling, the gentle friction of the dryer sheets lifts embedded particles, without the need for abrasive cleaners that can damage the delicate paintwork. This dryer sheet method works on most painted surfaces, but it's particularly effective on satin, eggshell, and semi-gloss paints, whose slight sheen allows the dryer sheet to glide smoothly without catching or tearing. 'These finishes already have some durability built in, so they can handle the light friction while maximising the anti-static benefits,' notes Smith. 'Flat or matte paints can still benefit, but you'll want to use an even lighter touch.' If you can't spare the time to clean all of your painted walls, stick to high-traffic areas. And Smith suggests cleaning around windows, air conditioning vents, and exterior doors, where dust circulation is higher. He also recommends cleaning hallways, living rooms, and children's bedrooms, as they tend to accumulate dust faster, especially if you have pets or live in a dusty environment. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Who is Taylor Stanberry? Meet the first woman to win Florida Python Challenge
For the first time, a woman won the Florida Python Challenge in July and collected her $10,000 reward this week. More than 900 people from 30 different states and even some from Canada participated in the 2025 Florida Python Challenge last month, removing a record-breaking number of 294 invasive Burmese Pythons in just 10 days. But there was one Florida-native python hunter who removed more of the gigantic snakes than anyone else who participated, securing a $10,000 prize that was awarded to her by the FWC this week. Taylor Stanberry, who stands at less than half the height of most of the snakes she catches, pulled in a whopping 60 pythons during the challenge. Here's what we know about Taylor and what the Python Challenge is, if you aren't familiar. Q&A with the winner: Florida Python Challenge winner captured 60 snakes and $10K. How she did it How does the Florida Python Challenge work? The Florida Python Challenge is one of the many efforts the FWC has in place to keep the python population in the state as low as possible. It offers a cash prize to the python hunter who removes the most pythons over a 10-day period. Although the event is usually held in August, it was held in July this year and included a broader range of hunting grounds. This year, the challenge began on Friday, July 11 at 12:01 a.m. and lasted through Sunday, July 20 at 5 p.m. 'The event, hosted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and the South Florida Water Management District, features an Ultimate Grand Prize of $10,000 for the registered participant who removes the most pythons,' the FWC's website says. 'An exciting addition to this year's event is the inclusion of Everglades National Park as one of eight official Florida Python Challenge competition locations.' Throughout the yearly python challenges, more than 1,100 of the invasive snakes have been removed. Last year's challenge alone removed 195 invasive Burmese pythons. This year, 294 snakes were removed. More about Taylor: Florida Python Challenge winner nabbed 60 pythons Who won the Florida Python Challenge in 2025? Taylor Stanberry, a Naples native, was the 2025 Florida Python Challenge winner. She captured 60 of the invasive snakes, finding 30 of those (hatchlings) in a single nest during one night of the challenge. Stanberry told The Naples Daily News that although she's been python hunting with her husband, Rhett, for years (she has more than a decade of experience), this was her first time participating in the challenge. The biggest python Stanberry caught in this year's challenge was between 9.5 and 10 feet long, more than double her height at 4-feet, 11-inches. Don't worry, she's aware that her height is one of the most recognizable things about her. She's known to her almost 69,000 Instagram followers as @taylor2short. Stanberry said that she also caught a 12-footer the day before the challenge kicked off, which obviously did not count toward her total of 60, since it was before the official start of the challenge. 'I have been catching pythons for over 10 years. It's all about knowing what areas to hunt, what habitat to look for and just putting in the time,' Stanberry said. 'Some nights I go out and won't find a single python, then other nights, I'll find a nest of 60 babies (hatchlings)! I would tell newbie hunters to just put in the time. I've heard from some that they've hunted for a few hours and caught nothing.' Who is Taylor Stanberry? Meet the 2025 Python Challenge winner Stanberry is a 29-year-old Naples native and the first woman to win the Florida Python Challenge grand prize. She works at a canine physical therapy rehab center, is a python contractor with the FWC, runs a small exotic animal rescue and posts online about her adventures with her husband to the tune of almost 69,000 Instagram followers and 227,000 YouTube subscribers. 'I've been looking for wildlife since I was a little kid. I used to go fishing with my dad and we would catch toads and I would bring them home to play with them,' Stanberry said. 'As I've gotten older, I've started traveling around the world looking for wildlife, especially snakes, to video and photograph.' She told The Daily News that she plans to use the prize money to expand her animals' enclosures and pay for gas to do more of what she does best: python hunt. How much is a license to hunt pythons in Florida? Since pythons are invasive and plentiful, you don't need a license or permit to hunt them in Florida. Hunting them in Florida is encouraged because Burmese pythons have very few predators. That's why the FWC runs the statewide python challenge to get the public involved in the hunt for the massive, invasive snakes. Although the chances of completely eradicating pythons from South Florida are low, the hunt helps control their numbers. "Hunters, anglers and outdoor recreationists with experience removing pythons or other large constrictors from the wild are encouraged to apply, with preference given to Florida residents and military veterans," the Fort Myers News-Press reported last year. The FWC also has a Python Action Team that hires contractors to kill the invasive snakes. This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Florida Python Challenge winner Taylor Stanberry caught 60 snakes Solve the daily Crossword
