National Wildlife Magazine: National Wildlife Federation’s award-winning, full-color nature magazine!

Treatment of America's wild creatures and places through full-color photo galleries, natural history features, outdoor adventure articles and news items of ecological concern. Conservation-minded magazine of nature and the environment. (Amazon.com)

The National Wildlife Federation is the largest American conservation organization, with over 5 million members and supporters in 47 state-affiliated organizations; its annual budget is over $125 million as of 2006. Its mission statement is: "inspire Americans to protect wildlife for our children's future."

View National Wildlife Magazine, February/March 2008

About This Issue
By Mark Wexler, Editorial Director

PERHAPS NO CREATURE on Earth generates as much fear among humans as a shark. And without a doubt, certain species of sharks can be extremely dangerous to people. But our fears of these powerful animals are far out of proportion to the actual dangers they pose.

Consider this: In 2006, only 62 shark attacks on humans were recorded throughout the world; only four of those attacks resulted in fatalities and none of those deaths occurred in this country. As a U.S. Navy shark expert once told me: “Riding to the beach in a car remains far more hazardous than swimming once you get there.”

Sharks, on the other hand, have good reason to fear us. According to a 2006 study based on real harvesting data, as many as 73 million of the marine predators are killed by people each year worldwide—many just for their fins, which are considered a delicacy in some countries. As a result, populations of most large shark species have suffered devastating declines in the past 50 years and those losses are having disastrous effects on food chains in every part of the planet.

Nowhere may this be more evident in this country than along the North Carolina coast. As the article “The Most Important Fish in the Sea” explains, scientists are discovering that the absence of these large predators in waters off the state may have enabled prey species such as cownose rays to multiply. And without sharks to feed on them, the rays are ravaging some once-flourishing shellfish beds. The real story, says one researcher, “is not shark-bites-man, but rather man-bites-shark."

In this issue, you can also read about how climate change is altering the chain of life in the Bering Sea off Alaska, where half of the U.S. seafood catch comes from and where 25 species of marine mammals depend on sea ice for survival. As the region’s ice pack continues to retreat earlier and faster each year, scientists are racing against time to learn as much as possible about the region’s ecology. See “Bering Sea Blues.” The news is brighter on the Big Island of Hawaii, where reforestation efforts at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge have helped restore populations of some of the Aloha State’s most endangered species. “This is one of the few places in the state where the native bird population is stable or increasing,” says refuge biologist Jack Jeffrey, whose photos illustrate “Rebirth of a Hawaiian Forest.”

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