One Quarter of World's Mammals Face Extinction

South and Southeast Asia are home to the most threatened mammals, from monkeys to rare rats. And many mammals in the species-rich tropical Andes Mountains of South America, Africa’s Cameroonian highlands and Albertine Rift as well as the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are also in trouble. Deforestation, along with hunting or gathering food are the prime causes of the rapid declines in land mammals, such as elephants in Asia; most endangered marine mammals, like the vaquita in Mexico’s Gulf of California, are killed by fishing nets, ship strikes or pollution.

The “general trend is that many more mammal species are rapidly declining than we had suspected,” Schipper says. “Fifty percent of species are declining and 5 percent of species are in an upward recovery—that’s just not enough.”

The baiji dolphin is functionally extinct, orangutans are disappearing and even some species of bats—the most numerous of mammals—are dying out. A new survey of the world’s 5,487 mammal species—from rodents to humans—reveals that one in four are facing imminent extinction.

“Mammal species that are just declining, not necessarily near extinction, that’s 50 percent,” says conservation biologist Jan Schipper of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps the Red List of Threatened Species. “And 836 species—especially rodents and bats—we determined they are threatened but we don’t know how threatened, because we don’t know enough about them.”

Schipper and more than 1,700 scientific colleagues spent the past five years surveying the state of the world’s mammals. The results, published in Science to coincide with IUCN’s conference on biodiversity this week, reveal that 1,139 mammals around the globe are threatened with extinction and the populations of 52 percent of all mammal species are declining.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.