ICYMI: Gator Pants, Space Pirates, Lucky Asteroid & More

After a traffic stop at which a Florida woman is found to have been collecting turtles and other wildlife, police ask if she has anything else. She pulls a foot-long alligator from her yoga pants. The alligator is returned to the wild. 

Climate scientists tell Tampa Bay to be prepared for up to 8.5 feet of sea level rise by 2100.

Loud electronic dance music from the Ultra Music Fest at Virginia Key, Florida, causes a “significant stress response” in fish swimming nearby.

The remote Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean are covered by 413.6 million pieces of plastic debris weighing 238 tons. 

Nearly every country on Earth agrees to a legally binding framework to reduce plastic pollution—with the exception of the United States.  

Thirty hammerhead sharks captured at the Great Barrier Reef and sent to Europe’s biggest aquarium in Boulogne, France, have all died.

A coalition of environmental organizations submits a record number of public comments—nearly 900,000, of which 35,000 are handwritten—opposing a proposal by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to remove federal protections from the gray wolf. The agency extends the comment period by an additional 60 days. You can comment here.

The EPA’s inspector general says that former agency administrator Scott Pruitt and his staff spent nearly $124,000 on luxury air travel and suggests that the EPA should ask Pruitt to reimburse the agency. Current EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler declines to do so.  

Coal company AES is relocating its infamous coal ash pile from Puerto Rico (where much of the ash blew into the ocean during Hurricane Maria) to Osceola County, Florida, home to the second-largest concentration of Puerto Rican refugees in the state.

Days after Wyoming governor Mark Gordon voices his optimism about the future of coal, Cloud Peak Energy, which operates two huge coal mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, files for bankruptcy protection. 

Asked whether he was concerned that atmospheric CO2 has exceeded 415 parts per million for the first time in 3 million years, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt says, “I haven’t lost any sleep over it.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R), a climate denier, is concerned about the threat posed to the nation by space pirates.

An Oakland, California, jury awards over $2 billion to a couple who say that they contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of spraying their property with Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide, Roundup. It is the third such judgment against Monsanto’s new owner, Bayer; 13,000 similar cases are in the works. 

The Trump administration renews two key mineral leases for Twin Metals, the company that wants to open a huge copper-nickel mine adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. 

Washington, DC, endures its wettest 365 days in recorded history.

In April 2029, on Friday the 13th, a 340-meter-wide asteroid called Apophis will pass within 19,000 miles of Earth, the closest such a large asteroid has come in recorded history.