Over the past century the grasslands of northern Mexico have been taken over by shrubby mesquite and turned to desert. Ecologist Gerardo Ceballos is on a mission to turn them back. Can he restore an entire prairie ecosystem? Ceballos hopes he can, with the help of an unlikely ally. Ari Daniel Shapiro reports from Chihuahua. Podcast transcript Image Credit: Arthur Chapman, Flickr: EOL Images. CC BY-NC-SA read moreDuration: 5:28Published: Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:17:45 +0000
The Degu is a small caviomorph rodent that is endemic to central Chile. It is sometimes referred to as the Brush-tailed rat, and is also called the Common Degu.www.degus.com/deguz.html
Female with young based on her naked swollen teats. These Prairie Dogs have come under threat from a combination of over hunting(many a red-neck likes to pass their time "shootin potguts",which they don't eat,and just leave to rot in the sun),conversion of steppe to agricultural land or in recent years real estate development , and the introduced sylvatic plague. They are listed as threatened under the U.S. endangered species act,and endangered by th IUCN, and it is now a felony to shoot these "potguts", although that doesn't stop it from happening. They also are the only terrestrial vertebrate endemic to Utah