Books about Endangered from Amazon.com

Know Your Tuna

• Tuna is the most popular food fish in the world. It is eaten raw, cooked, in sandwiches, in salads, and in catfood
• The total worldwide tuna harvest is four million tons.
• In the past, tuna fishermen in the eastern tropical Pacific set their nets around dolphins, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of dolphins.
• There are many kinds of tuna, but the most popular for the Japanese sashimi market is the bluefin, one of the largest of all fishes.
• The largest bluefin tuna ever caught weighed 1,496 pounds.
• The most expensive bluefin tuna was a 440-pounder that sold at the Tsukiji fishmarket in Tokyo for $173,600.
• Almost all of the bluefin tuna caught by commercial fishermen goes to Japan.
• The Japanese import 800,000 tons of tuna every year. (That's right: eight hundred thousand tons.)
• At the Tsukiji fishmarket in Tokyo, an estimated 1,000 bluefin tunas are auctioned off every day.
• Is there mercury in tuna? Yes. Is it at levels dangerous to humans? Not unless you eat tuna three meals a day.
• Many scientists consider the tuna the most highly-evolved fish in the world.
• Bluefin tunas, along with mako and great white sharks, are the only "warm-blooded" fishes; they can elevate their body temperature as much as 25 degrees above the water they swim in. This makes them particularly effective as predators.
• Bluefin tuna can swim 55 miles an hour. They can migrate across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, then turn around and do it again.
• MIT scientists built a robot tuna in an attempt to replicate the incredibly efficient swimming performance of the living fish. They failed.
• The bluefin tuna, and to a lesser extent, the yellowfin, are among the most sought-after of big-game fishes. Celebrated anglers like Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, and Phillip Wylie wrote ecstatically about their pursuit of giant tuna.
• Aquaculture ("fish farming") now accounts for 40% of the world's fish consumption.
• Tuna ranching now takes place in every country on and in the Mediterranean, and in Australia and Mexico as well. It is scheduled to begin in Hawaii and Alaska.
• Because of commercial overfishing, almost exclusively to feed the insatiable Japanese sashimi market, all populations of bluefin tuna are endangered.
• Overfishing in the Mediterranean has caused such a drop in the bluefin tuna population that the World Wildlife Fund has called for a complete halt to all tuna-fishing there.
• If we cannot learn to breed bluefin tuna in captivity, the great fish will become extinct, writing finis to commercial and recreational tuna fishing--and to the consumption of maguro sashimi in Japan.
• In March, 2008, an Australian company called "Clean Seas" succeeded in getting captive bluefin tuna to spawn. If they can raise them to market size (200-300 pounds), it may relieve the pressure on wild-caught fish.

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"Very funny and moving...The glimpses of rare fauna seem to have enlarged [Adams'] thinking, enlivened his world; and so might the animals do for us all, if we were to help them live."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Join bestselling author Douglas Adams and zooligist Mark Carwardine as they take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures. Hilarious and poignant--as only Douglas Adams can be--LAST CHANCE TO SEE is an entertaining and arresting odyssey through the Earth's magnificent wildlife galaxy..
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Fans of Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? will be delighted to see another title in this lilting call and response series. Much like their earlier picture books, Panda Bear features a string of fine feathered (and furry and scaly) friends watching over each other. In this book, however, all the animals are endangered, from a swinging spider monkey to a strutting macaroni penguin (kids will get a kick out of that name!) to a splashing sea lion. Carle's trademark tissue paper collages will be as familiar--and welcome--as the text ("Whooping Crane, Whooping Crane, what do you see?" "I see a black panther strolling by me."); young readers will quickly get the hang of the rhythm and join right in. The book concludes on a hopeful note, with a dreaming child seeing the ten f! eatured animals "all wild and free--/ that's what I see!" Martin includes a note on endangered species that may spark concern and interest in older readers--our hope for these disappearing creatures. (Ages 3 to 8) --Emilie Coulter.
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The eminent Harvard naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Wilson marshals all the prodigious powers of his intellect and imagination in this impassioned call to ensure the future of life. Opening with an imagined conversation with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, he writes that he has come "to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has happened to the world we both have loved." Based on a love affair with the natural world that spans 70 years, Wilson combines lyrical descriptions with dire warnings and remarkable stories of flora and fauna on the edge of extinction with hard economics. How many species are we really losing? Is environmentalism truly contrary to economic development? And how can we save the planet? Wilson has penned an eloquent plea for the need for a global land ethic and offers the strategies necessary to ensure life on earth based on foresight, moral courage, and the best tools that science and technology can provide. -- Lesley Reed.
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Is today's fast-paced media culture creating a toxic environment for our children's brains?

In this landmark, bestselling assessment tracing the roots of America's escalating crisis in education, Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., examines how television, video games, and other components of popular culture compromise our children's ability to concentrate and to absorb and analyze information. Drawing on neuropsychological research and an analysis of current educational practices, Healy presents in clear, understandable language:

-- How growing brains are physically shaped by experience

-- Why television programs -- even supposedly educational shows like Sesame Street -- develop "habits of mind" that place children at a disadvantage in school

-- Why increasing numbers of children are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder

-- How parents and teachers can make a critical difference by making children good learners from the day they are born.
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As her legions of loyal readers know, Nevada Barr is not a stripper nor a Las Vegas lawyer; she's a former actress and National Park Service ranger who writes excellent mysteries set in the wilderness. Her alter ego, ranger Anna Pigeon, is once again called upon to be mentally and physically astute--this time on Cumberland Island, off the Georgia coast, where the ghosts of the millionaires who used to live there are being added to by a determined killer. As usual, Barr is best at creating believable scenes of action in a setting that is beautifully detailed but never romanticized. Past Barr books in paperback: Firestorm, Ill Wind, A Superior Death, Track of the Cat..
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With three little words, an entire race was nearly obliterated Every mutant who dies is one number closer to zero. Now, the Beast races against the clock to save this once-thriving race. Collecting the X-Men: Endangered Species one-shot and Chapters #1-17..
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