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Out on a wooden platform extending over San Diego’s Mission Bay, young women sway from side to side, riding an imaginary wave to the beats. Steps away, a man does the “Crank Dat” dance as a young child bounces on his shoulders in gleeful entrancement. Vendors weave through the packed crowd hawking cans of beer, hard seltzer and jalapeño-tequila and cherry vodka Jell-O shots, served in plastic syringes.

“Take a sip of water now,” Soulja Boy tells the crowd after performing his booty-shaking anthem “Donk.” He still has an hour to go.

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Much of the audience looks like clones of the star rapper, dressed in extremely oversized white tees, baggy denim, thick gold chains, tilted snapbacks and white-framed sunglasses with words written across the lenses. As the sun dips below the horizon, a fleet of onlookers on jet skis and boats idle on the water to catch a peek of the vivacious scene.

The concert has all of the energy of a 2000s MTV “Spring Break” or BET Spring Bling special. Except here, parents can bring their kids along for the festivities and check out a penguin exhibit or ride a roller coaster all in the same night.

“Usually I just come here for the rides and watching animals, but the concert is time for the parents to have fun,” says Ricky Roman of San Diego.

It’s all part of SeaWorld San Diego’s Summer Spectacular, an annual concert series that just wrapped up at the park’s Bayside Amphitheater. The lineup was packed with beloved hip-hop and R&B throwback artists like Too $hort, Ginuwine, Ashanti, Warren G and E-40. What began as a way to reintroduce locals and entice newcomers to the 62-year-old marine park, which is known for its shows and programming focusing on aquatic life, has turned into a multigenerational phenomenon and one of the season’s most anticipated events.

Paul Wall co-headlined a July concert with Soulja Boy at SeaWorld San Diego’s summer concert series.

“The people watching is crazy,” says Bootleg Kev, a hip-hop radio personality who hosted the recent Soulja Boy concert, which was co-headlined by Houston rapper Paul Wall.

He describes the vibe of the event. “It’s in the middle of the water, Shamu is like feet away. There’s a lot of parents in here getting twisted. There’s hella babies.” (It should be noted that Summer Spectacular does not feature killer whales or any live animals.)

Though SeaWorld has hosted the event since 2019, it’s taken years to find the right formula and the concert series has only recently taken off.

“There were certain acts that just filled the house and certain ones that didn’t,” says the park’s president, Tyler Carter, adding that early performances swung drastically from hip-hop to Christian rock entertainers. But after hosting a successful show with rappers and teen sensations Bow Wow and Soulja Boy (who’ve performed at SeaWorld multiple times), Carter and his team wondered, “How do we lean into the nostalgia that Southern California millennials love?” he says. The answer was hip-hop, R&B and pop acts from the late 1990s and early aughts.

Their hypothesis was confirmed when footage of a Ying Yang Twins performance went viral in 2025. Executives had found an unexpected pairing that works: Inviting people to the theme park — a place many associate with childhood and simpler times — to experience the music they grew up listening to.

SeaWorld has faced a number of challenges since the 2010s, many stemming from the intense public criticism over its captive orca breeding program, which the company ended in 2016. SeaWorld’s parent company, United Parks & Resorts, has reported a general decline in attendance, revenue and earnings across its parks, most recently in the 2025 fiscal year. Park officials say the concert series, which also takes place at SeaWorld’s Orlando and San Antonio locations, has helped boost ticket sales and brand awareness.

What helps make the event effective is its lower barrier of entry. While tickets to throwback concerts or festivals can easily cost upward of $100 a ticket, SeaWorld’s shows are included with a regular park ticket (starts at $99.99) or an annual pass. Seating is first come, first served, but guests can purchase a reserved spot to guarantee a prime spot. Given that the shows happen every week throughout the summer, many annual pass holders attend each one.

“It’s lowkey a free concert,” says pass holder Juanita Jones, a San Diego resident who was wearing a custom graphic tee with her and Soulja Boy’s faces imprinted on it. She and her friends get a personalized shirt made for every show.

Although SeaWorld has been hosting the summer shows since 2019, they have only recently taken off.

Ricky Roman grew up going to SeaWorld and now takes his two children to the park on a weekly basis. But on this day, which was also his 29th birthday, he decided to leave his kids at home.

“Usually I just come here for the rides and watching animals, but the concert is time for the parents to have fun,” he says.

Jackson flew in from Washington, D.C., with a group of college friends to celebrate a 40th birthday at the show, after seeing several unfiltered videos from the past shows — most notably a clip of a mother twerking on a bleacher seat with a baby strapped to her chest in a carrier during a Ying Yang Twins performance in June.

SeaWorld executives encourage attendees to come early or stay after the concert to check out the many animal exhibits at the marine park.

“We’re millennials and we’ve been seeing this on TikTok. We were like, ‘It’s starting to look like it’s getting out of hand. Let’s go before this gets out of control,’” she says, laughing.

While some people go solely for the concerts, others come early or stay late to explore the park, which stays open roughly two to three hours after the show. Even the headliners check out the marine life, Carter says.

“When the Ying Yang Twins were here, I was riding rollercoasters with them,” he says. “I ended up taking Baby Bash’s kids around during sound check and we rode Shipwreck Rapids three times in a row and were soaking wet, having a blast.”

While the concerts have been mostly welcomed by locals, outside protests still occasionally find their way to the amphitheater. During Ashanti’s July performance, PETA activists sailed a 49-foot yacht displaying a “SeaWorld Kills” banner in protest of animal welfare at the park and Miami rapper Trina received letters regarding her performance last year.

SeaWorld officials, however, encourage critics to check it out for themselves.

“Our animal care team does an incredible job caring for these animals,” says Carter, noting that the park performs “significant amounts of rescues” per year.

Carter and Jackie Plaza, the park’s vice president of marketing, are already planning for next season’s lineup that will be announced in January. In the meantime, SeaWorld fans can check out its other music programming including the Bayside Bands, Brew & BBQ concerts, which feature performances from Uncle Kracker on Aug. 22 and Skillet on Aug. 29.

As attendees make their way out of the venue, excitement lingers through the air. Groups of friends are still singing the words to their favorite Soulja Boy songs and parents are strapping their antsy toddlers into strollers. A lengthy line begins to form in front of the amphitheater where an orca show will happen.

“That was wild,” one guest says.

A friend agrees. “Now, let’s go see some animals.”

Audience members are splashed during an “Orca Encounter” live presentation at SeaWorld San Diego.

WASHINGTON — A person has been arrested in connection with vandalism at the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., U.S. Atty. for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced Friday.

Pirro announced on X that her office was filing two felony charges against Melissa L. Farris. Pirro said the felony charges are “Depredation Against Property of the United States and Destruction of Veterans’ Memorials.” The offenses carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

On Thursday, the words “Clean hands dirty $” were found painted on the monument and bubbles filled a fountain.

“Vandalizing our World War II Memorial is a despicable attack on a sacred monument honoring the Americans who fought and died for our freedom. Those Americans include my father and grandfather,” Pirro wrote.

A woman identified on her Facebook page as Melissa Lovewell posted a video Thursday in which she is seen taking cans of spray paint from her bag and then painting the monument.

“I will wait here to be arrested for spraying our veterans’ fountain,” she says. “It was me, I’m doing it, it’s on camera.”

In a video posted Friday, the woman, who in a separate post said she had been in Washington for three weeks, said she was turning herself in.

The arrest warrant filed in the case indicated that witnesses took pictures of the vandalism occurring, which were circulated among U.S. Park Police officers.

One officer recognized the suspect as someone they arrested Aug. 10 “for unlawfully camping on federal property” just blocks away. She livestreamed that arrest, the warrant said.

The suspect was identified by her Kentucky driver’s license as Melissa L. Farris, of Elizabethtown, Ky.

Farris was expected to be arraigned Friday. The public defender’s office said she was not yet listed in the system and had not been assigned an attorney.

The incident sparked harsh rebukes from Pirro and President Trump and comes after the president blamed damage to the nearby Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on vandals, without providing evidence. That case prompted charges against multiple people, which were dropped when Pirro said evidence showed the damage came from botched repairs after Trump’s renovation at the site.

“Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals,” Trump said on Friday on his Truth Social site. “First the Reflecting Pool, now this.”

The Interior Department said that the U.S. Park Police were on the scene following the Thursday vandalism and an investigation was ongoing. “The public should know we will find the person responsible for this disgusting act,” the department said.

The Friends of the National World War II Memorial, a nonprofit organization that helps maintain the site, said: “There are many places in our country for expression, debate, and disagreement. A national memorial honoring those who served and those who never returned home should never be used as a canvas for vandalism.”

The Veterans of Foreign Wars called the vandalism “an act of profound disrespect, a slap in the face to the veterans who served and sacrificed and to the families who carried that burden at home.”

A former Olympian was charged in late July with deliberately damaging the Reflecting Pool, but the Justice Department later moved to dismiss that case, saying evidence prosecutors had received refuted the idea that vandals were to blame.

Trump sharply criticized Pirro’s assessment that damage to the Reflecting Pool was the result of shoddy construction and not the work of vandals, as he claimed.

The case dismissal was an embarrassing setback for a Justice Department that had previously echoed Trump’s claims and billed the prosecution as accountability for damage at a Washington landmark, a pet project of Trump. Pirro’s decision to drop the case was also a rare moment during Trump’s second term of an aide or political appointee openly defying him.

Fields writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Proposed legislation to protect animals from “Frankenstein”-like medical experimentation died in the state Senate on Thursday, and supporters blame election year politics for its demise.

Assembly Bill 1382 by Assemblymember Leticia Castillo (R-Home Gardens) would have banned the sale of genetically modified animals in California, such as glow-in-the-dark rabbits and horned “unicorn” horses.

While the business of cosmetically modified, futuristic-looking pets remains in its infancy, animal rights groups worry that eventually the creatures will be created, sold and later discarded in crowded municipal shelters.

Castillo’s bill passed unanimously in the Assembly earlier this year and sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee in June with bipartisan support.

On Thursday, the legislation died in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The chair of that powerful committee is Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) whose sister, Clarissa Cervantes, is challenging Castillo in the Nov. 3 election.

Cervantes never brought up the bill during Thursday’s hearing, which effectively kills it. Cervantes’ office didn’t respond to requests about why the legislation died.

Judie Mancuso, the founder of Social Compassion in Legislation, the bill’s sponsor, called the outcome “ludicrous.”

“When you’ve worked in the Capitol as long as I have, you understand that good bills can become political assets or political liabilities during an election cycle,” said Mancuso.

Castillo pledged Thursday to continue her focus on animals and cosmetic genetic engineering.

“This bill was never about politics — it was about protecting animals from being turned into novelty products,” Castillo said in a statement. “I’m disappointed AB 1382 did not move forward, but I am not done fighting for these animals. The technology that makes ‘designer pets’ possible isn’t going away, and neither am I.”

A 2025 Wired article entitled “Your Next Pet Could Be a Glowing Rabbit” profiled a Texas company seeking to create gene-edited pets. Josie Zayner, the founder of the company, told the Times in July that she opposed Castillo’s bill.

Castillo, at a hearing earlier this year, said she understands the concept of gene-editing animals for health reasons, but doesn’t want to see the alterations for cosmetic reasons.

Glow-in-the dark fish were exempt from her bill, which proposed civil penalties of at least $5,000.

Though the Judicial Council of California, the policy-making body for the courts, reviewed the legislation and didn’t have any fiscal concerns about it, the Senate Appropriations Committee analysis warned of “potentially significant workload cost pressures to the state funded trial court system” to resolve any civil cases related to the bill.

“The fiscal impact of this bill to the courts will depend on many unknowns, including the number of cases filed and the factors unique to each case,” the analysis stated.

The Democratic-controlled legislature uses appropriations committees to cull through hundreds of bills placed on what is referred to as the “suspense file.”

Officially, the suspense file is a tool for legislative leaders to evaluate costly bills by weighing them against one another and deciding what to advance to a vote by the Senate and Assembly. Unofficially, it’s used as a way for Democrats who control the Legislature to kill controversial bills out of the public eye.

California Democrats are making an aggressive push to unseat Castillo from the Assembly in the November election, Politico reported.

Castillo defeated Clarissa Cervantes in 2024 by nearly 600 votes to represent parts of Riverside County and San Bernardino County. Castillo lost to then-Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes in 2022.

After the bill was moved to the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this year, animal advocates reached out to state Senate Pro Tempore Monique Limón’s office to question the move.

“It’s my belief that there is some kind of political game going on,” Michelle Kelly, chief executive of the nonprofit welfare organization Los Angeles Rabbit Foundation, told the Times last month.

“Why would anyone not want to move forward with this bill?” Kelly said.

A representative for Limón declined to comment.

The Ebola outbreak currently ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was caused by a new transmission from animals to humans rather than by variants linked to earlier outbreaks, according to a new study published in the medical journal Nature Medicine.

The virus in eastern DRC has killed more than 2,000 people of 4,449 recorded cases, making it the fastest-moving Ebola outbreak on record. It was formally declared on May 15 , though genetic sequencing later revealed the virus had actually begun circulating in February.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the current Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus is spreading faster than health authorities can contain it and is on track to become the deadliest outbreak on record.

So what have scientists discovered about how it was transmitted to humans? And can it be contained?

Here’s what we know:

What does the new study say about this Ebola outbreak?

In a report published this week in the medical journal Nature Medicine, researchers from the DRC, Uganda, Belgium and other countries analysed the genetic make-up of virus samples from 22 patients in the DRC and Uganda. They found that the outbreak strain was genetically distinct from previous Bundibugyo Ebola viruses seen in outbreaks in 2007 and 2012.

The report suggested that the virus began with a new animal-to-human transmission incident, which then spread to other people.

The animal source has not been specified but the researchers said the outbreak in Uganda was linked to the outbreak in the DRC.

Earlier, health officials in the region said the outbreak is being driven by the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which no vaccine has yet been developed.

Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases doctor with experience in Ebola and outbreak response, explained that the study citing a “new animal transmission” as the reason for the outbreak, does not mean that a new form of Ebola has suddenly emerged or that animals are now transmitting the virus differently.

“What the genomic data suggest is that the current outbreak began with a new ‘zoonotic spillover’ event – meaning the virus likely crossed independently from an animal reservoir into a person – rather than resulting from continued circulation or re-emergence of virus from a previous human outbreak,” she said.

“After that initial spillover, the outbreak has been driven predominantly by human-to-human transmission,” she added.

How dangerous is this strain of Ebola?

On Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that at its current pace, the current Ebola outbreak is on track to eclipse the West African outbreak of 2014 to 2016. That crisis killed at least 11,300 people of a reported 28,600 cases and accelerated the push to develop a vaccine.

That was a different strain of the Ebola virus known as Zaire and the vaccine developed then does not work for the current strain, which is spreading.

Dr Abdirahman Mahamud, WHO’s director for health emergency alert and response operations, said the agency’s moderate projection has the outbreak peaking within six months. Under a more severe scenario, it could stretch on for nine to 12 months.

“Beyond the zoonotic spillover event from animals to humans, it is the human-to-human transmission dynamics of the Bundibugyo virus that make it dangerous,” Kaja Abbas, associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology and dynamics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Nagasaki University, told Al Jazeera.

Dr Kuppalli also emphasised that the way this strain of the virus was initially transmitted to humans does not make it intrinsically more dangerous.

How is it treated?

Kuppalli said the animal origin of the virus does not change required treatment.

“Once someone develops Ebola disease, management is based on the virus causing the illness and the patient’s clinical condition, not whether their infection ultimately originated from an animal or from another person. What matters here is that Bundibugyo virus (BDBV) currently does not have the same licensed, proven virus-specific therapeutics that we have for Zaire ebolavirus,” she said.

“Supportive care, which includes aggressive fluid and electrolyte management, treatment of shock and organ dysfunction, and management of co-infections, remains critical, while investigational therapeutics are being evaluated,” she added.

“Ebola outbreaks have historically begun through zoonotic spillover. The bigger concern is what it tells us about our preparedness: we still do not fully understand where and when these spillover events will occur, making prevention and early detection extremely difficult.”

“In this outbreak, there also appears to have been substantial transmission before the outbreak was recognised, which gave the virus an opportunity to establish multiple chains of transmission,” she added.

What can be done to contain this outbreak?

Researchers who worked on the new study said increasing “decentralised laboratory diagnostics capacity, including genomic sequencing capacity and timely detection ” could help pre-empt future outbreaks.

Clinicians are also working to develop treatments.

“While no licensed treatments or vaccines exist today, experimental therapeutics and vaccines are in the clinical development pipeline that are specifically targeted towards the strains of the Bundibugyo virus currently circulating in the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda during 2026,” Abbas said.

While a vaccine against the latest strain is being developed, a WHO official said in May that medical supplies, including personal protective equipment (PPE) ⁠⁠to prevent Ebola, were being sent to ⁠⁠the DRC.

“We have sent 12 tonnes of supply. An additional six are arriving. These include personal protective equipment for ⁠⁠front-line health workers [and] samples,” Anne Ancia, WHO representative in the DRC’s Ituri province, told media in May.

At the forefront of the fight to break the spread in the DRC are health workers who have been treating patients while also dealing with the risk of becoming infected themselves.

More than 100 health workers have been infected and about 35 have died.

The response to the outbreak has been further complicated by several factors, including strikes by unpaid health workers, misinformation and cultural traditions. These have included open-casket family burials of some of those killed by the virus, potentially increasing the risk of further transmission.

Kuppalli said better Ebola preparedness is required, not just focusing on stopping transmission once an outbreak has been recognised.

“We also need much stronger health surveillance at the human-animal interface, broader diagnostics capable of detecting different Ebola viruses and medical countermeasures that work across Ebola species,” she said.

“This outbreak is showing us the consequences when the virus gets a several-month head start.”

How have other countries responded?

Many countries have raised concerns about the latest Ebola virus outbreak and some, such as Bahrain, have suspended entry for 30 days for foreign travellers arriving from South Sudan, the DRC and Uganda.

Neighbouring countries, including Rwanda and Uganda, have introduced measures to prevent the virus from crossing their borders.

Rwanda imposed health restrictions, including barring entry to foreign travellers who had been in the DRC in the previous 30 days.

The US warned that travellers, including US citizens, who have been in the DRC within 21 days before departure will not be allowed to board commercial flights to US destinations.

Governments across Asia have also begun introducing border screening and bolstering quarantine preparedness.

This time, it’s personal for Eric Goode.

The director’s first two docuseries — “Tiger King” and “Chimp Crazy” — were smash hits about larger-than-life characters engaging in questionable and illegal activity surrounding the care and ownership of animals. Both had an underlying conservation message but drew viewers in with the colorful and chaotic worlds they depicted.

Goode’s third, “Monsters of God,” premiering Thursday on HBO, is both a direct descendant and forges a new path. While it also features a hugely entertaining menagerie of criminals, who speak frankly about many of their illegal acts and how much they dislike each other, “Monsters” is largely a historical look at reptile smuggling going back more than half a century — unlike the contemporaneous stories in “Tiger King” and “Chimp Crazy.”

Goode had opportunities to bring in current events — one dealer was rearrested shortly after being filmed and there were major smuggling arrests in California in recent years — but realized he couldn’t keep piling on more stories. “We’re just setting the tone of this multibillion-dollar reptile-smuggling industry that you’ve probably never heard of,” says Goode’s producing partner Jeremy McBride.

But the other difference is that Goode has spent his entire life immersed in the world of reptiles, starting long before he even contemplated making a documentary. Goode had a pet tortoise when he was 6 and slept with a tegu lizard in his bed as a teen. He also saw the industry underbelly up close and personal. “In the ’70s and ’80s, I even bought reptiles from some of the very people that I chronicle in ’Monsters of God,’” he says.

“I had personal connections in these worlds, which helped us go much deeper than in my other stories,” he says. “I don’t know if it’ll be anywhere near as successful, but in terms of investigative journalism, we went much further.”

An archival photo of director Eric Goode with a southwestern pond turtle. In addition to filmmaking, he created the Turtle Conservancy in Ojai.

(A24 / Goode Films / HBO)

(He also acknowledges that his earlier series could tilt toward sensationalism and be exploitative. “I was naive when I started all this and learned a lot from ‘Tiger King,’” he says, adding that there was internal friction about what direction to go with the material. “Now we’ve refined the like-mindedness of what we were trying to do.”)

He credits his mother with opening his eyes to the larger issues when he was younger. “She struggled with me keeping things in captivity and would say, ‘You can’t play God, these animals belong in the wild.’”

That said, while he is proud the Big Cat Public Safety Act passed in the aftermath of “Tiger King” and believes people should be banned from raising chimps at home, he views reptiles differently. “Kids should be able to have a bearded dragon or a leopard gecko or ball python. It nurtures a love for nature and for reptiles,” he says, adding that he’s focused more on the harm caused by smuggling.

Despite his love of animals and a high school obsession with making Super 8 film, Goode was not, for much of his life, a likely candidate to be directing these documentaries. “My whole trajectory doesn’t make a lot of sense on paper,” he acknowledges.

After attending the School of Arts and Sciences, which his father founded in Marin County, Goode moved to New York. He worked as a production assistant on big films. “I hated it,” he recalls. “I hated being a cog in a wheel, just moving things around.” (Today, even as his productions have grown more elaborate, he still goes into the field with a small team. “I like that intimacy.”) He also went to art school but was largely bored there.

“I saw the creative energy in New York in the nightlife there,” he says. So while Goode was working as an artist, he also created Area, one of the city’s biggest nightclubs of the 1980s, where he brought in collaborators like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Hockney and Kenny Scharf, with rotating themes like a carnival or natural history (which featured snakes and lizards). “Everyone came from somewhere else or were misfits and I was bringing in these interesting characters, which is very similar to what I’m doing in these films,” he says. “I like lifting up the rocks and finding the eccentrics out there.”

Area’s success led to a big career in nightclubs, restaurants and hotels. Then 20 years ago, he took his profits, along with his passion for reptiles, and created the Turtle Conservancy in Ojai. “I realized that the two most endangered groups of vertebrates in the world were primates and turtles,” he says, adding that nearly half of the smuggled animals seized at LAX in the last three years were turtles. When officials recently confiscated 350 turtles there, they brought them to the conservancy to care for them. “I’m going to go feed them after this interview,” Goode says.

The conservancy now has a worldwide reach in protecting turtles and their habitats and has become a leader in trying to stave off extinction for the ploughshare tortoise, whose fate is a major storyline in “Monsters of God.”

Tom Crutchfield, one of the reptile smugglers featured in the docuseries, with a monitor lizard in a photo taken circa 1970s.

(Photograph by Bill Love. Courtesy of Goode Films / HBO)

As filming was finishing, the conservancy became home to the first ploughshare births in captivity. “It was such a coincidence but really meaningful,” McBride says. “It anchors the film’s purpose and gives a little bit of hope in what otherwise feels bleak.”

This docuseries has been in the works for nearly 20 years, since Goode read Brian Christy’s “The Lizard King” in 2008 and tried to option it. “I even filmed him badly back then — the sound was terrible and the camera fell off the tripod during the interview,” he recalls. (Christy appears in the docuseries.)

In 2014, he finally got started but it was always on and off again as other projects got in the way. In “Tiger King,” Goode shows he’s first drawn to that story when he sees a guy with a snow leopard in his van, which happens while he’s filming Tom Crutchfield, one of America’s most notorious reptile smugglers. “But while I was making these other stories, I was always opportunistically filming reptile people,” he says, adding that they interviewed not only the criminals but federal law enforcement and others, seeking a broader scope than his previous films. “It was critical for us to get all sides of the story. Part of the reason it took so long was it sometimes took years to get someone to agree to talk.”

McBride says they finished with 1,500 hours of footage and interviews with a hundred different people, including the most notorious smugglers (some of whom were also murderers and drug dealers) and the law enforcement officials who dedicated years of their life undercover to catch them.

It’s a true crime story on some level but Goode says the series is more layered and complex than his previous projects.

“I don’t want people to think we’re the animal police,” Goode says. “Law enforcement has good intentions but they sometimes backfire with unintended consequences. Often, the more laws you create to prevent people from having a reptile, the more they want them. But sometimes prohibition does work.” (In Asia’s wet markets, the most endangered animals sell for more money with their protected status used as a marketing tool.)

“Hopefully, people come away recognizing that we have to think about doing things differently than maintaining the status quo, because a lot of what we’re doing is not working,” Goode says. “It’s a messy story without easy answers.”

BILLINGS, Mont. — The U.S. Interior Department on Friday canceled a rule meant to protect plants and animals that are determined to be threatened with extinction, the latest step by the Trump administration to dismantle key provisions of the landmark Endangered Species Act at the behest of industry.

Instead of receiving automatic protections, imperiled species will need individualized protection plans once they are added to the threatened species list. That’s a potentially lengthy process in which companies could seek exemptions for oil and gas drilling, mining and other development where those species live.

Opponents said it would make it harder to save wildlife awaiting federal protections and in danger of disappearing, such as monarch butterflies and alligator snapping turtles.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement that the Endangered Species Act had been used for too long “to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security.”

“Success should be measured by species recovery and delisting, not by adding more species to the list,” Burgum added.

A second change finalized Friday requires officials to analyze economic effects when deciding whether habitat is critical to a species’ survival. Critics say it gives corporations an opportunity to put their thumb on the scale so officials will allow development in those areas.

“If you’re exempting certain industries that cause habitat destruction, in many instances you’ll be exempting the main threat to those species,” said Noah Greenwald with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity.

Officials made similar changes during Trump’s first term, but they were reversed under the Biden administration.

The rules that gave what some consider “blanket protections” to threatened species were first adopted for wildlife in 1975 and for plants in 1977.

Two groups, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Property and Environment Research Center, sued the Biden administration in 2024 after officials restored the blanket protections rule. They argued the rule unfairly imposed the same restrictions on landowners when a species’ status improves from endangered, which is more dire, to threatened.

That removed incentives for landowners to participate in species recovery, said Jonathan Wood, vice president at the Montana-based research center.

Wood said the Trump administration’s approach allows officials to “better reward progress and encourage proactive conservation.”

There have been no species added to the endangered or threatened lists in Trump’s second term. By comparison, more than 20 species were added in Trump’s first term, and about 60 under President Biden.

About 30 species are currently proposed to be listed as threatened. Besides monarchs and alligator snapping turtles, they include California spotted owls and various snakes, fish, clams and insects.

Changes to government policies for endangered plants and wildlife have come faster and extended further in Trump’s second term than in his first.

The administration in March exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said environmentalists’ lawsuits threatened to hobble domestic energy supplies as the U.S. wages war against Iran.

A week before the latest rule change, Interior officials sharply narrowed the definition of what constitutes “harm” to a species. The change would allow development in critical wildlife habitat so long as the animals themselves are not immediately killed or injured.

Officials this week sharply reduced the amount of critical habitat in the Rocky Mountains designated for Canada lynx, forest-dwelling wildcats that are threatened by climate change and other pressures.

Also this week, Burgum said in a visit to Montana that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would turn over more management authority for grizzly bears to states where the bruins live. That’s been a long-standing priority for the Republican governors of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

The Endangered Species Act is credited with bringing back animals including the California condor, the bald eagle and the American alligator from the brink of extinction.

Burgum noted Friday that 97% of the species that have been given protections still have them. That’s a frustration for Republican lawmakers who say species should be taken off the endangered and threatened lists more quickly once they’ve recovered.

Brown writes for the Associated Press.