Thursday, March 18, 2010Last Update: 5:07 PM PT

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The Department of the Interior will release human remains from museums and natural history collections to Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations that had a historic or prehistoric presence on the land from which the remains originally were taken. This will be true even when the remains cannot be definitively traced to the tribe or organization, according to new department rules, effective May 14.
     Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, culturally unidentifiable Native American remains have been repatriated for burial or other disposition only after consultation with a Review Committee that advises the Secretary of the Interior on disposition approval. The new regulation will eliminate the review process, and the remains would be turned over to the requesting tribe or native organization after the request was announced in the Federal Register.
     The act, which was passed in 1990, requires all museums and federal agencies to identify Native American cultural items in their collections, such as human remains, funerary objects, and sacred objects, to lineal descendents and culturally affiliated Indian tribes. As of Sept. 2009, museums and federal agencies have listed the remains of nearly 40,000 individuals and almost one million funerary objects on their inventories.
     The most famous case of unaffiliated remains was the discovery in 1996 of the skeleton of a prehistoric man on a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick Washington on land owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Five Indian tribes claimed ownership of the remains, which became known as Kennewick Man, and sought to dispose of the remains according to traditional burial practices without subjecting them to scientific examination.
      In 2004 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the claims of the tribes because they could not establish cultural affiliation or kinship to the remains. Later testing revealed that Kennewick Man was approximately 9,000 years old and that his DNA could not be definitively tied to any modern Native American tribes.

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has proposed to revise employee notification requirements for Hexavalent Chromium exposure, so employers are required to notify workers of the results of all determinations of exposure, not just those that exceed the permissible exposure limit. (This requirement also has been published as a direct final rule with an effective date of June 16, if no opposition is filed.) Hexavalent Chromium is carcinogenic when inhaled. Exposure may occur during work with stainless steal or certain pigments, among other jobs.
     The agency's action is in response to a remand of the issue of employee notification, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, after Public Citizen Health Research Group and other parties petitioned for review of the Hexavalent Chromium exposure standard.
     The court had directed the agency to either provide an explanation for its decision to limit employee notification requirements to circumstances in which exposures exceed the permissible exposure limit or take other appropriate action with respect to that paragraph of the standard.
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     WASHINGTON (CN) - The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that the world wide population of loggerhead turtles can be divided into nine distinct population segments. The agency plans to list seven of them as endangered and the remaining two as threatened, according to an agency proposal.
     First listed as threatened across its range in 1978, the loggerhead occurs throughout the temperate and tropical regions of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans with the majority of loggerhead nesting occurring at the western rims of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Each population has distinct DNA strains that remain distinct because the range of each population is limited and defined by ocean currents or gyres that allow only a few individuals to leave their own population and mate into another.
     The agency proposes to recognize the following discrete population segments: The North Pacific; the South Pacific; the North Indian Ocean; the Southeast Indo-Pacific Ocean; the Southwest Indian Ocean; the Northwest Atlantic Ocean; the Northeast Atlantic Ocean; the South Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea Distinct Population Segment.
     The agency has found that the Southwest Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic Ocean segments face sufficient risk of extinction in the foreseeable future to warrant a threatened listing under the Endangered Species Act, while the remaining populations warrant an endangered listing under the act.
     Fishing, both net and long-line, is the number one threat to loggerheads, despite provisions in most world fishing conventions to protect the species.
     Loggerhead hatchlings have a 40 percent survival rate overall but individual populations have suffered drastic declines in hatchling viability due to habitat destruction and deliberate hunting of nesting females.
     Climate change has a significant impact on the loggerhead's reproductive success as the temperature of the sand around their nest determines the sex of the hatchlings, with higher temperatures favoring females and lower temperatures favoring males.
     Because females have up to a 25 year span for reproduction, and can live to be over 50 years old, long term trends in the population can be predicted based on the survival rates and sexual population biases measured in a single female's successive broods.
     The agency will accept comments on the proposed listing until June 14 and comments calling for public hearings until June 1.

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is poised to ban the importation and interstate trade of nine species of constrictor snakes harmful to human health and native species in areas where they have escaped captivity.
     Acting on a petition from the South Florida Water District, where large numbers of exotic reptiles have been released into the wild and are taking to the pools and backyards of houses abandoned during the recession, the agency proposes to add the Indian python, reticulated python, Northern African python, Southern African python, boa constrictor, yellow anaconda, DeSchauensee's anaconda, green anaconda, and Beni anaconda to the list of injurious reptiles. Florida also HAS seen the spread of exotic reptiles into the Florida Everglades National Park where they are displacing native species.
     If the proposed rule is made final, live snakes, gametes, or hybrids of the nine species or their viable eggs could be imported only by permit for scientific, medical, educational, or zoological purposes, or without a permit by federal agencies solely for their own use.
     Constrictor snakes most often enter the U.S. through the commercial pet trade, where 22 inch hatchlings are typically sold for as little as $35. The snakes grow rapidly, are adept at escape, and are very powerful so can break out of cages. Because the snakes need to bathe in water, once they get large, owners often remove them from their cages to put them in bathtubs, and from there they can escape through heating ducts and crawl spaces.
     The constrictors are large and expensive to maintain, and they live for a long time. An Indian python, for example, can grow to more than 20 feet long, weigh 200 pounds, live more than 25 years, and must be fed rabbits and other large animals. As a result, many snakes are released by their owners into the wild when they can no longer care for them.
     Once in the wild, Indian pythons quickly move beyond eating rabbits and have been known to eat alligators, antelopes, dogs, deer, jackals, goats, porcupines, wild boars, bobcats, pea fowl and great blue herons.
     The agency is taking public comment on the proposal and is interested in the life histories of the nine species and evidence of their impact on indigenous species.