Green Sea Turtles in the waters of Bora Bora, Tahiti are seen in this undated photograph from an exhibit titled “Irreplaceable: Wildlife in a Warming World,” recently shown at the Peerless building in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. The exhibit showcased animals most threatened by global warming, such as green sea turtles. The gender of sea turtle eggs are determined by temperature, which means global warming would upset the natural gender balance.

A grizzly bear looks on at St-Felicien Wildlife Zoo in St-Felicien, Quebec September 24, 2008. Parks Canada estimates that up to 20,000 grizzly bears remain in western Alberta, the Yukon and Northwest Territories and British Columbia. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada lists grizzly bear as a “Special Concern”.

A blacktip shark is seen in this undated handout image released on October 10, 2008. Scientists using DNA testing have confirmed the second-known instance of “virgin birth” in a shark - a female of this species named Tidbit that produced a baby without a male shark. The shark died after being removed from the tank at a Virginia aquarium for a veterinary examination, and a subsequent necropsy revealed that Tidbit was carrying a fully developed shark pup nearly ready to be born. Virgin birth, known scientifically as parthenogenesis, also has been documented in Komodo dragons, snakes, birds, bony fish and amphibians.

A zebra eyes visitors at the zoo in Chisinau, Moldova Sunday Sept. 28, 2008.

Bears are seen in their enclosure in a reservation near Zarnesti, 250km north of Bucharest, Romania on August 11, 2008. With half of Europe’s brown bears living in Romania’s largely unspoiled Carpathian mountains, environmentalists and local authorities are struggling to keep the wild animals and residents in mountain towns like Brasov safe from each other.

In this photo released by the Wildlife Conservation Society, a Chilean pink flamingo preens its feathers at the Bronx Zoo in New York, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008.

This new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant, Martialis heureka, was discovered in the Amazon by Christian Rabeling at The University of Texas at Austin. It belongs to the first new subfamily of living ants discovered since 1923, and is a descendant of one of the first ant lineages to evolve over 120 million years ago.

A giant kangaroo rat is seen in this undated photo provided by the Nature Conservancy. When the San Joaquin Valley was an arid grassy plain, giant kangaroo rats were the seed-hording gardeners that helped propagate native plants. Now scientists are turning to satellite technology to determine how climate change and rainfall patterns are affecting the endangered species’ remaining habitat.

This photo, released on September 19, 2008, shows a piece of soft coral recently found on Australia’s coral reefs. Hundreds of new marine species have been found there recently, surprising an international team of biologists who announced details of their findings September 18, 2008. The three expeditions to Lizard and Heron islands, and Ningaloo Reef, included a first systematic scientific inventory of spectacular soft corals, named octocorals for the eight tentacles around each polyp.

A halo around the Sun is seen behind a Rothschild giraffe as it leans over a wall to take food from the hands of visitors at The Giraffe Centre in the Lang’ata suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008. Run by the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, The Giraffe Centre was founded in 1979 and aims to protect the endangered Rothschild giraffe.

An Atlantic wolffish,is seen at a Portland, Maine, fish store, on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008. The Conservation Law Foundation recently asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to list the Atlantic wolffish as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

This handout picture from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) dated July 19, 2008 shows a gray whale emerging offshore in North-Eastern Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East. Russian environmental groups launched legal action against an oil and gas project led by US energy giant Exxon on October 3, 2008, for threatening critically endangered whales in Russia’s far east.

Indah, a three week old Malayan tapir chews on a twig during her first photocall at Edinburgh zoo, Scotland October 16, 2008. Malayan tapirs, which are an endangered species, are hoofed animals related to rhinos and horses and are found in the forests of Malaysia, Thailand, Burma and Sumatra.