Arabian oryx leaps back from near-extinction

Yahoo News 16 Jun 11;

GENEVA (AFP) – The Arabian oryx, a desert antelope that may have sparked the legend of the unicorn, has bounced back after being hunted almost to oblivion, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said on Thursday.

Native to the Arabian peninsula, Oryx leucoryx has two long slender horns that in profile look as one, which may have fuelled the myth of the unicorn, the IUCN said.

The last Arabian oryx in the wild was shot in 1972 but after a nearly 40-year effort in captive breeding, its population stands at 1,000 individuals, the IUCN said, trailing an update of its "Red List" of threatened species.

An oryx was successfully reintroduced to the wild in Oman in 1982 and other returns have taken place in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and more recently in Jordan.

The oryx has now qualified for a move under the Red List from "endangered" category to "vulnerable," the first time that a species that had been extinct in the wild has improved by three categories.

"To have brought the Arabian oryx back from the brink of extinction is a major feat and a true conservation success story, one which we hope will be repeated many times over for other threatened species," the IUCN quoted Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, head of Abu Dhabi's environment agency, as saying.

The Red List, an assessment of 59,508 plant and animal species, is a major guide to policymakers.

It is the biggest biodiversity compendium available, although it still covers only a fraction of the world's vast range of species.

The update says that 797 species are extinct and 64 are extinct in the wild.

Another 3,801 are "critically endangered" by global extinction; 5,566 are endangered and 9,898 are vulnerable to this threat.

A further 4,533 species are "near threatened" -- meaning they are close to the "threatened" threshold -- or are dependent on conservation efforts.

Of the remaining species, 25,853 fall into a category of "least concern" while there is insufficient data to judge the status of 8,996 others.

Those in this latter category include the Wallace's tarsier, a primate found last year in two small areas of forest in central Sulawesi, Indonesia.

The IUCN sounded the alarm for amphibians, saying that 41 percent of species were at risk of extinction as a result of habitat loss, pollution, disease and competition from invasive species.

The IUCN's methodology, and that used by the 2005 UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, were questioned in a study published last month.

It agreed that biodiversity was under extreme pressure but said the true rate of extinctions, if based on the criteria of habitat loss, was less than half.

The IUCN's media officer, Borjana Pervan, said the agency had taken note of the study but was satisfied with its methods, including the uncertainties of calculating species threat.

"The actual number of threatened species is often uncertain because it is not known whether data-deficient species are actually threatened or not," the IUCN said.

Arabian 'unicorn' thrives again in wild
John Heilprin Associated Press Yahoo News 17 Jun 11;

GENEVA – The Arabian Oryx, whose distinctive horns are widely believed to have given rise to the unicorn legend, is back from the brink of extinction in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula.

About 1,000 of the wild Arabian or White Oryx now exist owing to nearly three decades of successful breeding, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said Thursday.

The global environmental network said efforts to breed captive oryx and release them back into the Arabian Peninsula, the only place this species is found, began in Oman in 1982, a decade after the last one was apparently shot in the wild.

It said the breeding program demonstrated that captive oryx could adapt to harsh wild conditions, first in Oman and later in the deserts of Saudia Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and, most recently, in Jordan.

"To have brought the Arabian Oryx back from the brink of extinction is a major feat and a true conservation success story, one which we hope will be repeated many times over for other threatened species," said Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, director general of the UAE government's Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi.

The Arabian Oryx — a large species of antelope with two long horns — is known locally as Al Maha, and figures heavily in Arabic poetry and paintings.

The creature can smell water from miles away, has wide hooves that let it easily navigate shifting sand and lives in small herds of eight to 10 animals.

When its long, narrow horns that curve slightly at the tip are viewed in profile, they can appear as one, like the fabled unicorn. But another antelope species, the Saola of Southeast Asia, is also seen as a possible source of the unicorn legend.

The improvement by the Arabian Oryx is reflected on the Gland-based conservation union's "Red List" of thousands of endangered plants and animals. The group operates in more than 160 countries, and has assessed the condition of 59,508 species.

This year it was reclassified as "vulnerable," the best improvement to date for a species once thought to be extinct in the wild.