Reuters
This pair of gray wolves will be moved from the Red Feather Lakes, Colorado wolf refuge, to a new refuge in northern New Jersey. It will be the first time in over 200 years that the endangered animals will be living in the area.
President Donald Trump's administration wants to roll back critical protections for endangered species.
Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke proposed a set of changes last week to the 45-year-old Endangered Species Act (ESA), which could undermine the basis of the law and put a number of endangered species at risk of extinction.
Zinke has said the changes are intended to "streamline" the policy, but the proposal would in practice gut the law of most of its power.
One major change would involve how the decision to list an animal as endangered is made. Zinke wants to remove language that instructs policymakers to avoid economic considerations in choosing which animals to protect. So under his proposed changes, the decision-making process could take into account the economic impact of listing a species as endangered, rather than relying solely on ecological considerations.
A second change has to do with the difference between species listed as threatened and those that are endangered. Currently, the ESA affords the same protections to both. But Zinke wants to end that - which would remove protections from threatened species and potentially undermine decades of effort to restore their populations.
Third, Zinke's proposed changes would make it more difficult for a species to be listed as threatened in the first place.
Congress has also proposed some rollbacks of the ESA. When it was signed into law in 1973, the Act put scientists and other experts in charge of the process to establish which species should be listed and which habitats to protect. But various proposed measures in the House and Senate aim to give state governments more influence over these decisions while weakening the role of scientists. In practice, that could allow state governments that rely on habitat-disrupting industries like mining to give greater concessions to those groups.
The ESA is credited with bringing back a number of charismatic species from the brink of extinction, like humpback whales, gray wolves, and peregrine falcons.
Below, we've collected a list of 10 species that have been saved by the Act, but could be in danger if the Trump administration is successful in changing the law.