ENDANGERED ANIMALS
By some estimates people are forcing species into extinction at a rate 100 to 1,000 times higher than the natural rate. The World Wildlife Federation (WWF) estimates that world’s wildlife population was reduced around a quarter between the 1970s and the 2000s and that there was a 52 percent average decline in populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish around the globe between 1970 and 2010. Marine species have been particularly hard hit but birds and land animals have also suffered. Frogs and other amphibians are the most at risk of extinction. Coral reefs are the most threatened habitat.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services issued an exhaustive report in 2019 that concluded that humans had altered the natural world so drastically that 1 million plant and animal species were at risk of extinction. In 2020, another U.N. report said that nations had made little progress on international commitments, made in 2010, to tackle catastrophic biodiversity collapse. [Source: Elena Shao, New York Times, July 10, 2022]
Humans pose the biggest threat to threatened animals, with activities including hunting, fishing and other forms of overexploitation impacting 70 percent of the species on a U.N. list. Habitat loss has affected up to 75 percent of the species. A February 2024 U.N. report urged governments, among other things, to avoid disrupting habitats and migration paths when installing infrastructure such as dams, pipelines or wind turbines. [Source: David Stanway, Reuters, February 12, 2024]
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Websites and Resources on Animals: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; BBC Earth bbcearth.com; A-Z-Animals.com a-z-animals.com; Live Science Animals livescience.com; Animal Info animalinfo.org ; Encyclopedia of Life eol.org , a project to create an online reference source for every species; World Wildlife Fund (WWF) worldwildlife.org the world’s largest independent conservation body; National Geographic National Geographic ; Endangered Animals (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) iucnredlist.org ; Biodiversity Heritage Library biodiversitylibrary.org
Endangered Species
CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) has 184 member countries. It list 40,900 plants and animal species as varying degrees of endangered. The IUCN Red List by the World Conservation Union lists endangered species and their status. As of November 2024, more than 166,000 species have been assessed for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The IUCN Red List assesses a wide range of species, including amphibians, birds, mammals, angelfish, butterflyfish, crocodilians, freshwater crabs and crayfish, groupers, gymnosperms, and lobsters. In 2023, 42,108 species surveyed for the IUCN Red List were considered at risk of extinction due to human activities, such as overfishing, hunting, and land development. In 2004, there were a record 15,589 organisms listed as threatened species by the IUCN, with 3,000 new additions. According to the list one in four mammals species is threatened along with one in eight birds and one in three amphibians and almost half the turtles and tortoises.
A species is considered extinct if there has been no reliable sighting for 50 years. According to a study by the 52-members Alliance for Zero Extinction published in December 2005, 795 species are on the brink of extinction. According to Conservation International 300 rare species are unprotected.
The hunting of mammals, birds and reptiles for bush meat is a big problem. The number of endangered primates has risen recently 50 percent, mainly as a result of the demand for "bush meat." Demand for animal parts for traditional medicine is another problem. A controversial topic among conservationists is whether or not endangered animals should be cloned, raised with surrogate mothers or reproduced using other advanced reproductive techniques.
Human Reliance on and Disturbance of the World’s Animals and Ecosystems
Elena Shao wrote in the New York Times: Billions of people worldwide rely on some 50,000 wild species for food, energy, medicine and income, according to a sweeping new scientific report that concluded humans must make dramatic changes to hunting and other practices to address an accelerating biodiversity crisis. The report, prepared for the United Nations over four years by 85 experts from 33 countries, draws upon thousands of scientific studies and other references, including a body of Indigenous and local knowledge. Indigenous and poor communities are among the most immediately affected by overuse of wild species, the report said. “Half of humanity benefits from and makes use of wild species, and often without even knowing that they’re doing so,” said Marla Emery, one of the co-chairs of the assessment, which was conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. [Source: Elena Shao, New York Times, July 10, 2022]
The Economist reported: “The Earth is a big thing; if you divided it up evenly among its 7 billion inhabitants, they would get almost 1 trillion tonnes each. To think that the workings of so vast an entity could be lastingly changed by a species that has been scampering across its surface for less than 1 percent of 1 percent of its history seems, on the face of it, absurd. But it is not. Humans have become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scale — but at a far-faster-than-geological speed. [Source: The Economist May 26, 2011]
Almost 90 percent of the world’s plant activity, by some estimates, is to be found in ecosystems where humans play a significant role. Although farms have changed the world for millennia, the Anthropocene advent of fossil fuels, scientific breeding and, most of all, artificial nitrogen fertiliser has vastly increased agriculture’s power. The relevance of wilderness to our world has shrunk in the face of this onslaught. The sheer amount of biomass now walking around the planet in the form of humans and livestock handily outweighs that of all other large animals. The world’s ecosystems are dominated by an increasingly homogenous and limited suite of cosmopolitan crops, livestock and creatures that get on well in environments dominated by humans. Creatures less useful or adaptable get short shrift: the extinction rate is running far higher than during normal geological periods.
Impact of Biological Activity on Human Affairs
By the some token matters of biology are not addressed by economics and the social sciences. Lovejoy wrote in the Washington Post, “A major reason the biology of the planet is largely ignored in human affairs, is that its critical contributions to human wellbeing are not taken into account in the formal economy. The world’s poor, for example, derive 40 to 89 percent of their annual “income” from nature, both directly through the goods it provides (e.g., food and fiber) and indirectly through its services.
A project initiated by the Group of 8 leading industrialized nations known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, or TEEB, being released in Nagoya makes the case for bringing these factors into the economic calculus as much as possible. For example, conventional economics would always support the removal of mangrove ecosystems to make way for shrimp aquaculture. However, if economic subsidies are subtracted, the choice to develop rather than leave untouched becomes pretty marginal.Furthermore, if the service function of mangroves as nurseries for local fisheries is added to the value of the intact ecosystems, the numbers very clearly argue for maintenance of the mangrove ecosystem.
A classic study in Costa Rica shows that coffee plantations close to forest areas have 20 percent greater yield because of pollination services from wild pollinators. That translates to an additional $60,000 in income for a farmer with an adjacent forest. Costa Rica has a pioneering ecosystem services law that, among other things, rewards landholders financially for maintaining forests and thus reliable water flow for downstream hydroelectric generation. On a larger scale, the TEEB project reckons the annual value contributed by global wetlands at $3.4 billion. On land the project calculates the annual loss of natural capital from natural ecosystems like forests at $2 trillion to $4.5 trillion.
Despite many laudatory efforts, the Earth’s vital signs are very disturbing and its biological infrastructure is degrading rapidly. Almost all indicators are negative and many are in decline exponentially. Fifteen tipping points, like dieback of the southern and southeastern Amazon forest, loom. We can see plainly in Haiti what happens when the biology of a nation is largely destroyed; indeed it is clear that for the country to have any hope in its future Haiti needs substantial ecosystem restoration and reforestation.
One in Five Plant Species Faces Extinction
Juliette Jowit wrote in The Guardian, “One in five of the world's plant species — the basis of all life on earth — are at risk of extinction, according to a landmark study. Scientists randomly selected 7,000 species from across the major plant groups as a representative sample of the estimated 380,000-400,000 so far known to science. Of these, 3,000 were found to have too little information to begin making an proper assessment — a result that was expected and so built into the selection process. [Source: Juliette Jowit, The Guardian, September 29 2010]
The remaining 4,000 species were assessed and the level or risk based on a combination of the absolute number of plants estimated in the wild, the known decline, and the total area in which they are thought to live. Of the 4,000, 63 percent were found to be of "least concern", 10 percent near threatened, 11 percent vulnerable, 7 percent endangered and 4 percent critically endangered. Another 5 percent were rated "data deficient".
The proportion of plant species deemed at-risk is similar to that of the IUCN's red list for mammals, worse than that for birds (less than 10 percent at-risk) and better than the number for amphibians (more than a quarter under threat). Nearly two-thirds of threatened plant species are found in tropical rainforests, five times the proportion for the nearest other habitats — rocky areas, temperate forests and tropical dry forests. This is because of their huge density of biodiversity and the widespread risks of logging and clearance for other agriculture, said analysts.
At first glance, the 20 percent figure looks far better than the previous official estimate of almost three-quarters, but the announcement is being greeted with deep concern.The previous estimate that 70 percent of plants were either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable was based on what scientists universally acknowledged were studies heavily biased towards species already thought to be under threat.
Today the first ever comprehensive assessment of plants, from giant tropical rainforests to the rarest of delicate orchids, concludes the real figure is at least 22 percent . It could well be higher because hundreds of species being discovered by scientists each year are likely to be in the "at risk" category."We think this is a conservative estimate," said Eimear Nic Lughadha, one of the scientists at Kew Gardens in west London responsible for the project.
The plant study is also considered critical to understanding the level of threat to all the natural world's biodiversity, said Craig Hilton-Taylor of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which runs the world's offical "red list" of threatened species. "Plants are the basis of life, and unless we know what's happening to plants it has many implications," said Hilton-Taylor.
"This is a base point," said Nic Lughadha. "What we do from now is going to lead to the future of plants. We need to challenge the idea that plants are there to be exploited by us, we need to move to a system where we're nurturing plants much more carefully [and] actively taking steps to conserve them." By far the biggest threat to plants is human — rather than natural — causes, especially intensive agriculture, livestock grazing, logging and infrastructure development. Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, said the results were deeply troubling. She added: "Plant life is vital to our very existence, providing us with food, water, medicines, and the ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change."
One in Five Vertebrates Threatened

The International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species categorizes one-fifth of the world's vertebrates as threatened with extinction, but the situation would be much worse without global conservation efforts, according to a study titled "The Impact of Conservation on the Status of the World's Vertebrates," published in the journal Science. [Source: Heather Howard, Daily Yomiuri, October 28, 2010]
Based on data for about 25,000 species from the Red List, the study says an average of 50 species of mammals, birds and amphibians move closer to extinction each year due to the impacts of agricultural expansion, logging, over-exploitation and invasive alien species. However, the study also says the status of biodiversity would have declined by nearly 20 percent if conservation action had not been taken and highlights 64 mammal, bird and amphibian species that have moved at least one Red List category away from extinction due to successful conservation activities.
"There've been a lot of messages around the conference of the parties that the status of biodiversity is getting worse, that species are continuing to decline, that everything is doom and gloom," said Thomas Brooks, one of the study's authors and chief scientist of NatureServe, a nonprofit organization working to provide scientific underpinnings for conservation action.
"Yes, absolutely, the situation is very bad. But what this data show...is that conservation can and does work. We know what to do to conserve biodiversity, to stop biodiversity loss, we just need much more of it," Brooks said.
According to the study, the percentage of vertebrates threatened by extinction ranges from 13 percent of the world's birds to 41 percent of amphibians. A total 174 authors from 115 institutions worldwide were involved in the study.
World’s Migratory Species: Half in Decline, 20 Percent Risk Extinction
Nearly half of the world's migratory species are in decline, according to a United Nations report released in February 2024. Christina Larson of Associated Press wrote: Many songbirds, sea turtles, whales, sharks and other migratory animals move to different environments with changing seasons and are imperiled by habitat loss, illegal hunting and fishing, pollution and climate change.“These are species that move around the globe. They move to feed and breed and also need stopover sites along the way,” said Kelly Malsch, lead author of the report released at a U.N. wildlife conference in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. [Source: Christina Larson, Associated Press, February 12, 2024]
Habitat loss or other threats at any point in their journey can lead to dwindling populations. “Migration is essential for some species. If you cut the migration, you’re going to kill the species,” said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the report. The report relied on existing data, including information from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List, which tracks whether a species is endangered.
David Stanway of Reuters wrote: Of the 1,189 species covered by a 1979 U.N. convention to protect migratory animals, 44 percent have seen numbers decline, and as many as 22 percent could vanish altogether, the report added. The numbers were based on assessments and data provided by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as well as the Living Planet Index, which collates population numbers for more than 5,000 species from 1970 onwards. [Source: David Stanway, Reuters, February 12, 2024]
The report gives "a very clear direction" about what governments need to do to tackle the threats to migratory species, said Amy Fraenkel, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. "It's always about implementation," she said. "We need to look at the top levels of government decision making," said Fraenkel "and what is being planned so that we can make sure that we can ... address human needs while not sacrificing the nature we all need to survive." The pressures are being compounded by temperature changes, which disrupt the timing of migrations, cause heat stress and drive increasingly destructive weather-related events such as drought or forest fires. "The changes that had been already predicted some years ago are now happening," Fraenkel said.
World's Sixth Mass Extinction May Be Underway
In March 2011, Discovery News and AFP reported, “Over the past 540 million years, five mega-wipeouts of species have occurred through naturally-induced events. But the new threat is man-made, inflicted by habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species, and by climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases, says a study published in Nature. [Source: Discovery News, AFP, March 3, 2011]
Palaeobiologists at the University of California at Berkeley looked at the state of biodiversity today, using the world's mammal species as a barometer. Until mankind's big expansion some 500 years ago, mammal extinctions were very rare: on average, just two species died out every million years.But in the last five centuries, at least 80 out of 5,570 mammal species have bitten the dust, providing a clear warning of the peril to biodiversity.
"It looks like modern extinction rates resemble mass extinction rates, even after setting a high bar for defining 'mass extinction," said researcher Anthony Barnosky. This picture is supported by the outlook for mammals in the "critically endangered" and "currently threatened" categories of the Red List of biodiversity compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
On the assumption that these species are wiped out and biodiversity loss continues unchecked, "the sixth mass extinction could arrive within as little as three to 22 centuries," said Barnosky. Compared with nearly all the previous extinctions this would be fast-track. Four of the "Big Five" events unfolded on scales estimated at hundreds of thousands to millions of years, inflicted in the main by naturally-caused global warming or cooling.
The most abrupt extinction came at the end of the Cretaceous, some 65 million years ago when a comet or asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula, in modern-day Mexico, causing firestorms whose dust cooled the planet.An estimated 76 percent of species were killed, including the vertebrates.
The authors admitted to weaknesses in the study. They acknowledged that the fossil record is far from complete, that mammals provide an imperfect benchmark of Earth's biodiversity and further work is needed to confirm their suspicions. But they described their estimates as conservative and warned a large-scale extinction would have an impact on a timescale beyond human imagining.
"Recovery of biodiversity will not occur on any timeframe meaningful to people," said the study. "Evolution of new species typically takes at least hundreds of thousands of years, and recovery from mass extinction episodes probably occurs on timescales encompassing millions of years." Even so, they stressed, there is room for hope. "So far, only one to two percent of all species have gone gone extinct in the groups we can look at clearly, so by those numbers, it looks like we are not far down the road to extinction. We still have a lot of Earth's biota to save," Barnosky said. Even so, "it's very important to devote resources and legislation toward species conservation if we don't want to be the species whose activity caused a mass extinction."
Asked for an independent comment, French biologist Gilles Boeuf, president of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, said the question of a new extinction was first raised in 2002.So far, scientists have identified 1.9 million species, and between 16,000 and 18,000 new ones, essentially microscopic, are documented each year."At this rate, it will take us a thousand years to record all of Earth's biodiversity, which is probably between 15 and 30 million species" said Boeuf."But at the rate things are going, by the end of this century, we may well have wiped out half of them, especially in tropical forests and coral reefs."
Hunting Animals and Its Costs
Sports hunters don’t like to be considered threats to animals. They argue that the hunting license system serves to keep wildlife within critical limits of food and water and the money spent on licenses goes to conservation. Hunter also provide data to researchers, help enforce game laws and report illegal hunting and poaching.
In many cases, the large, dominant males that carried the banner for their species no longer exist as they have been taken by trophy hunters and poachers. Large elephants, elk, Cape buffalo and bears that were routinely killed a century ago are now rare. Scientists say they are beginning to see an evolution in reverse with elephants with small tusks and elk with less antlers having a better chance of survival than those with them. A study of big horn sheep in North America found that both males and females are getting smaller and the size of the horns has shrunk by 25 percent in the last 30 years. Scientists are also finding more tuskless elephants in both Asia and Africa.
Plants and Animals and Global Warming
Though animals can migrate and make other adaptions to climate change they often move too slowly, and lag behind the shifts in climate. Chris Thomas, a professor of Conservation Biology at the University of York, is experimenting with relocating butterfly colonies in Britain, moving them to cooler habitats, to keep them abreast with changes in climate. The colonies so far are doing well in areas 65 kilometers north of the northern limit of their ranges. The scheme — known as assisted colonization — may not work so well with animals adapted to a specific habitat that is not found further north of their range.
Assisted colonization is costly. Many scientists are calling for the creation of green corridors to allow animals to migrate northward on their own. But that is no easy feat either with many roads, houses and developments lying in the way of potential green corridors.
See Separate Article: CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE — ON ANIMALS, PLANTS, FARMS AND OCEAN CURRENTS factsanddetails.com
Bringing Back Endangered and Extinct Animals
The black-footed ferret was (wrongly) declared extinct twice, and all living members are descended from seven individuals. In December 2020, Elizabeth Ann was cloned from the cells of a ferret that lived more than 30 years earlier. Mark Madison wrote in The Herald-Mail: “Cloning might work equally well on truly extinct mammals, like the wooly mammoth, in some future lab. Birds require "germ cell transmission," which has worked well in domesticated chickens for more than a decade. The hope is that genes from extinct birds could be introduced into closely related relatives. [Source: Mark Madison, The Herald-Mail, January 16, 2022]
There was a similar case in Europe. Carl Zimmer wrote in National Geographic: “On July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only to watch it become extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex. The bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was a large, handsome creature, reaching up to 220 pounds and sporting long, gently curved horns. For thousands of years it lived high in the Pyrenees, the mountain range that divides France from Spain, where it clambered along cliffs, nibbling on leaves and stems and enduring harsh winters. [Source: Carl Zimmer, National Geographic, April 2013]
“Then came the guns. Hunters drove down the bucardo population over several centuries. In 1989 Spanish scientists did a survey and concluded that there were only a dozen or so individuals left. Ten years later a single bucardo remained: a female nicknamed Celia. A team from the Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park, led by wildlife veterinarian Alberto Fernández-Arias, caught the animal in a trap, clipped a radio collar around her neck, and released her back into the wild. Nine months later the radio collar let out a long, steady beep: the signal that Celia had died. They found her crushed beneath a fallen tree. With her death, the bucardo became officially extinct.
“But Celia’s cells lived on, preserved in labs in Zaragoza and Madrid. Over the next few years a team of reproductive physiologists led by José Folch injected nuclei from those cells into goat eggs emptied of their own DNA, then implanted the eggs in surrogate mothers. After 57 implantations, only seven animals had become pregnant. And of those seven pregnancies, six ended in miscarriages. But one mother—a hybrid between a Spanish ibex and a goat—carried a clone of Celia to term. Folch and his colleagues performed a cesarean section and delivered the 4.5-pound clone. As Fernández-Arias held the newborn bucardo in his arms, he could see that she was struggling to take in air, her tongue jutting grotesquely out of her mouth. Despite the efforts to help her breathe, after a mere ten minutes Celia’s clone died. A necropsy later revealed that one of her lungs had grown a gigantic extra lobe as solid as a piece of liver. There was nothing anyone could have done.
See Separate Article: CLONING AND BRINGING MAMMOTHS BACK TO LIFE factsanddetails.com
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Mostly National Geographic articles. Also “Life on Earth” by David Attenborough (Princeton University Press), New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Natural History magazine, Discover magazine, Times of London, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated November 2024