Friday, March 19, 2010Last Update: 5:12 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.
     Click the document icon for this regulation and others.

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The National Marine Fisheries Service is requesting public input as it begins five-year reviews of the listing status of Pacific salmon and steelhead under the Endangered Species Act.
     The 5-year reviews are conducted on every species listed under the act as way to see if the initial listing decisions was appropriate, if recovery plans to improve populations have been successful, and to examine new threats that may have emerged after a previous listing decision.
     The agency will review 16 Pacific salmon populations listed in 2005 and 11 steelhead populations listed in 2006, including the main fishery populations of salmon: The Sacramento River winter-run Chinook; the Upper Columbia River spring-run Chinook; the Central California Coast and Southern Oregon/Northern California coho.
     The review of listed steelhead will include the entire Columbia River Basin the Central and South-Central California Coast and the California Central Valley populations.
     Information on population size and productivity trends, changes in population distribution and spatial location, the status and trends of threats and changes to hatchery programs that may affect population genetics and inclusion in particular population units, is of particular interest to the agency.
           Information is due by May 17.

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is designating 1.6 million acres of land in 27 California counties as critical habitat for the California red-legged frog, the largest native frog in the western United States.
     The range of the California red-legged frog extends from Riverside County to Mendocino County along the Coast Range, from Calaveras County to Butte County in the Sierra Nevada, and in Baja California, Mexico.
     While the frog has adapted to many different landscapes, it is dependent on rainfall and may disappear entirely from parts of its known range during extended periods of drought.
     The agency is designating critical habitat in drought afflicted areas of the frog's range so it can recolonize habitat which might otherwise be developed because of the appearance that red-legged frogs are no longer endemic to the area.
     The agency estimates that the California red-legged frog has lost nearly 70 percent of its former range due to urban development, water diversion, non-native predators and habitat fragmentation.

     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.