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Wild Life: What's Down is Up
What's Down is Up
More species are at risk of extinction than previously thought, according to a new report by the World Conservation Union.
A total of 15,589 species, including 7,266 animals and 8,323 plants and lichens, are in danger of disappearing, says the report. A third of amphibians, an eighth of birds, a fourth of mammals and almost half of turtles and tortoises are threatened. The actual number of endangered plants and animals is likely much higher, since only a small percentage of the planet’s species have been discovered and catalogued.
Current extinction rates are as much as a thousand times higher than “natural” rates, because of habitat destruction, climate change, the introduction of exotic species, pollution and disease, among other causes.
Going With the Ice Floe?
Important things sometimes come in small packages. In Antarctic waters, those small packages are shrimp-like crustaceans known as krill. And their decline, likely caused in part by global warming, may imperil penguins, seals and other larger creatures, according to recent research.
Krill numbers in their main stronghold, the Atlantic part of the Southern Ocean, have dropped by about 80 percent since the 1970s, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Krill feed on algae that form beneath sea ice, and also depend on ice to shelter their larvae from predators. But global warming, which led to a 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit rise in temperatures within this area during the past 50 years, has caused a dramatic decline in the ice.
With the ice, go the krill. And with the krill may go marine mammals and birds that feed on the small creatures. The loss of sea ice could explain declines in several species of penguin, for example.
“This is the first time that we have understood the full scale of this decline,” says the British Antarctic Survey’s Angus Atkinson, the lead author of the study. “We don’t fully understand how the loss of sea ice here is connected to the warming, but we believe that it could be behind the decline in krill.”
What is understood, though, is that the disappearance of the small may also lead to the endangerment of the great. And that would be a huge tragedy.
By the Skin of Their Tusks
New research may save African elephants by the skin of their tusks. Scientists have developed a new DNA test that allows them to pinpoint the origin of poached elephant tusks and thus target hot spots for law enforcement.
Despite a 1989 agreement banning ivory trade, three of the largest seizures of illegal ivory sales have occurred since 2002. Prior to the agreement, the African elephant population had plummeted by 60 percent—from 1.3 million to 500,000—between 1979 and 1987.
The new DNA studies will help monitor poaching particularly in the forested parts of central and western Africa, where it is harder to survey elephant populations than in the more open savannas found in the eastern and southern parts of the continent.
“Those forests are where elephants are currently being slaughtered wholesale,” says Samuel Wasser, the lead author of the study, and a professor from the University of Washington. “My colleagues working in the forests are saying, ‘There are no elephants left here.’ That’s the problem—in the forest you don’t notice the change in population until it’s so dramatic that it’s almost too late to do anything about it.”
Hopefully, the animals’ tusks will save their skin just in the nick of time.
