One in Four Mammals at Risk of Extinction

Kimberly Johnson, National Geographic News 6 Oct 08;

One in four of the world's 5,487 known mammal species face extinction, according to a new conservation "report card" unveiled today.

Marine mammals face even steeper odds, with one in three species at risk of disappearing, according to the study.

The assessment, done as part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN's) Red List of Threatened Species, took more than 1,700 experts from 130 countries five years to complete.

The report's findings were released today in conjunction with this week's IUCN meeting in Barcelona, Spain, and will appear later this week in the journal Science. "Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," the study authors wrote.

Humans are mostly to blame, as habitat loss, pollution, and hunting continue to squeeze at-risk species.

Under Threat

The new report updates the last IUCN survey conducted in 1996 and adds 700 species not previously assessed.

"Perversely, the species that humans show greatest affinity toward—the largest mammals such as primates, big cats, and whales—are significantly more likely to be threatened with extinction," Barney Long, a biologist at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C., said in an email.

Some of the most threatened species are found in Asia, a region undergoing rapid human population and economic growth.

"This is leading to habitat loss due to agricultural expansion; development of infrastructure such as roads, which fragment critical landscapes; and increasing areas for industrial crops such as oil palm and pulp for paper," said Long, who helped create the new assessment.

Currently, 79 percent of Asia's primate species face extinction.

Worldwide, habitat loss affects roughly 40 percent of threatened mammal species, while human hunting affects 17 percent, Long said.

Seventy-eight percent of marine mammals are threatened by accidental deaths, such as becoming bycatch in fishing nets intended for other species.

Marine mammals are "threatened purely because humankind does not care enough to mitigate deaths that do not even benefit our species," Long said.

"All these threats represent human-driven activities that, if not controlled, will soon lead to a dramatic increase in the 76 species of mammal that are known to have gone extinct since 1500," Long said.

Restoration

Timothy Ragen is executive director of the U.S. government's Marine Mammal Commission in Bethesda, Maryland.

"We are causing a period of excessive decline or loss in the diversity of nonhuman life over time," he said, adding that the problem will only get worse as human populations grow.

"If we expect to be good stewards, we will have to reexamine our relationship with other forms of life and be willing to make the changes needed to conserve our natural world," Ragen said.

The IUCN Red List is apolitical in scope, but political will is required to reverse species' downward spirals, added lead study author Jan Schipper, director of global mammal assessments for IUCN and the nonprofit Conservation International based in Arlington, Virginia.

"The species that are recovering are the ones we're focusing restoration and recovery efforts on," he said.

According to the report, 5 percent of threatened species have seen rebounds due to conservation efforts.

Mammals facing extinction threat
Richard Black, BBC News website 6 Oct 08;

At least 25% of the world's mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to the first assessment of their status for a decade.

The Red List of Threatened Species says populations of more than half of mammalian species are falling, with Asian primates particularly at risk.

The biggest threat to mammals is loss of habitat, including deforestation.

But there is good news for the African elephant, whose recovery leads to removal from the high-risk list.

This year's Red List looks at 5,487 mammals, and concludes that 1,141 are currently on the path towards disappearance.

This may be an under-estimate, the authors caution, as there is not enough data to make an assessment in more than 800 cases. The true figure could be nearer to one- third.

"Within our lifetime, hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," said Julia Marton-Lefevre, director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) which publishes the Red List.

"We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend, to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."

The report's authors said the current concern with financial matters must not be allowed to obstruct the decline in the Earth's natural systems.

"The financial crisis is nothing compared with the environmental crisis," the deputy head of IUCN's species programme, Jean-Christophe Vie, told BBC News.

"It's going to affect a few people, whereas the biodiversity crisis is going to affect the entire world. So there is a risk that because of the financial crisis, people are going to say 'yeah, the environment is not that urgent'; it is really urgent."

About 40% of mammal species are compromised because human expansion is putting a squeeze on their habitat.

This is especially important across the tropics, the regions with the highest diversity of land-based mammals.

South and Southeast Asia are identified as regions where extinctions are especially likely in coming years, as that is where the size and living standards of the human population are rising fastest.

The second biggest threat on land is identified as hunting, for food or medicines.

However, where hunting has been controlled and conservation programmes implemented, as with southern and eastern populations of the African elephant, populations and entire species can recover.

The elephant's risk status is lowered from Vulnerable to Near Threatened.

Some species are included for very specific reasons, such as the Tasmanian devil which has been decimated by a viral cancer.

In the seas, bycatch - entanglement in fishing nets, which is usually although not always accidental - emerges as the biggest factor behind current declines, affecting a staggering 79% of marine mammals.

The assessment - which is also published in the journal Science - warns that lack of data about marine mammals may be masking a bigger decline.

"Whales, dolphins, porpoises, and sirenians (manatees and dugong) are so difficult to survey that declines that should result in a Vulnerable listing would go undetected at least 70% of the time," the authors write.

Outside the mammal arena, the Indian tarantula enters the Red List for the first time, a consequence of over-harvesting for the pet trade.

A further 366 amphibians have been added to the list. This is the most threatened animal group of all, with about one-third on the high-risk list.

A new assessment of climate impacts on the natural world suggests that many species not currently on the danger list will enter it as temperatures rise, particularly in East Africa and parts of South America.

The Red List is published approximately once every year. Although designed as the definitive global list of threatened species, in practice the rankings come from assessments covering different types of plants and animals, and some areas of the list will be more up to date than others.

An assessment of sharks, originally slated for inclusion this year, was delayed and will probably be released later in the year.

In an attempt to make species assessments more certain, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is developing what they colloquially term a "Dow Jones index" for biodiversity.

The idea is to take a random sample of all the world's species, which will be representative of the whole, and revisit it regularly - perhaps once every five years - to gain a better idea of global trends.

"We are now emerging from the dark ages of conservation knowledge, when we relied on data from a highly restricted subset of species," said Jonathan Baillie, ZSL's director of conservation programmes.

The first group to be assessed this way is the land-dwelling vertebrates, but the project will eventually encompass insect, fungi, plants, and various types of marine creatures.

Half of mammals 'in decline', says extinction Red List
Marlowe Hood, Yahoo News 6 Oct 08;

Half the world's mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, said an update Monday of the "Red List," the most respected inventory of biodiversity.

A comprehensive survey of mammals included in the annual report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which covers more than 44,000 animal and plant species, shows that a quarter of the planet's 5,487 known mammals are clearly at risk of disappearing forever.

But the actual situation may be even grimmer because researchers have been unable to classify the threat level for another 836 mammals due to lack of data.

"In reality, the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent," said IUCN scientist Jan Schipper, lead author of the mammal survey, in remarks published separately in the US-based journal Science.

The most vulnerable groups are primates, our nearest relatives on the evolutionary ladder, and marine mammals, including several species of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," said Schipper.

The revised Red List, unveiled at the IUCN's World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, is further evidence that Earth is undergoing the first wave of mass extinction since dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, many experts say.

Over the last half-billion years, there have only been five other periods of mass extinction.

The Red List classifies plants and animals in one of half-a-dozen categories depending on their survival status.

Nearly 40 percent of 44,838 species catalogued are listed as "threatened" with extinction, with 3,000 of them classified as "critically endangered," meaning they face a very high probability of dying out.

There were a few slivers of good news showing that conservation efforts can prevent a species from slipping into the category from which there is no return: "extinct."

The black-footed Ferret, native to the United States, was moved from "Extinct in the Wild" to "Endangered" after it was successfully introduced into seven U.S. states and Mexico.

The European bison and the wild horse of Mongolia made similar comebacks from the brink starting in the early 1990s.

But these remain exceptions that highlight the need to act before other species populations dwindle beyond the threshold of viability, experts say.

"The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to prevent future extinctions," said Jane Smart, the head of the IUCN's Species Programme. "We now know what species are threatened, what the threats are and where."

The window of opportunity for great apes and monkey appears to be closing far more quickly that scientists realised, the new study shows.

"I was blown away when I saw the results, even though I was deeply involved in the work," said Michael Hoffman, a mammal expert at Conservation International who helped compile the Red List.

"Nearly 80 percent of primates in Asia are threatened with extinction, overwhelmingly because of hunting and habitat loss."

A voracious appetite in China for traditional medicines and prestige foods is the main driver of primate loss in Southeast Asia, he said.

Sea mammals are also highly vulnerable. "The situation is particularly serious ... for marine species, victims of our increasingly intensive use of the oceans," said Schipper.

Mile-wide fishing nets, vessel strikes, toxic waste and sound pollution from military sonar kill up to 1,000 air-breathing, ocean-dwelling mammals every day, previous research has shown.

There are many drivers of species extinction and all of them stem either directly or indirectly from human activity, scientists say.

Overwhelmingly, the main threat is habitat loss, with hunting and pollution major factors as well.

But climate change is also emerging as a menace.

Species dependant on sea ice such as polar bears and harp seals, for example, are especially vulnerable to shrinking ice cover in the Arctic Circle.

Scientists are also alarmed by "catastrophic declines" in fresh-water amphibians and some mammals caused by poorly understood infections, said Schipper.

More than 60 percent of Tasmanian devils, for example, have been wiped out in the last decade by a disfiguring facial cancer that spreads through physical contact.

"Disease has always had a role to play in affecting populations, but now we are seeing diseases that are highly pathogenic," said Hoffman.

With 11,000 volunteer scientists and more than 1,000 paid staff, the IUCN runs thousands of field projects around the globe to monitor and help manage natural environments.

More than 8,000 ministers, UN officials, NGOs, scientists and business chiefs began brainstorming Sunday for 10 days in the Spanish city of Barcelona on how to brake this loss and steer the world onto a path of sustainable development.

More links from the IUCN website

• Press release
• Red List segment of the IUCN website has high resolution photosand case studies on species and a 2 minute video B rollprepared by Arkive (www.arkive.org)
• IUCN Red List of threatened species