essay on extinction of animals

Liked to death? The social media race for nature photos can trash ecosystems – or trigger rapid extinction

Senior Lecturer in Wildlife Ecology, Edith Cowan University

Associate Professor, Behavioural Ecology, Curtin University

Adjunct Associate in Ornithology and Marine Ecology, Murdoch University

Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Edith Cowan University , Curtin University , and Murdoch University provide funding as members of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

Have you ever liked or shared a social media post about nature? It could have been a photo of a rare orchid or an unusual bird. Or you might share a stunning photo of an “undiscovered” natural place.

It feels good to do so. You’re sharing something beautiful, an antidote to negativity. But not even this simple act is problem-free.

Social media have become a huge force. It’s come with many positives for nature, such as greater visibility and interest in citizen science and public knowledge about the species we share the planet with. Australia’s largest citizen science project, the Aussie Bird Count , collected reports of 3.6 million birds in backyards in one week, for example, making good use of social media.

There is, unfortunately, a dark side to this effortless sharing of information. It is possible to love species to death, as our new research has found.

How? Viral photos of undisturbed natural beauty can lead thousands of people to head there. As more people arrive, they begin destroying what they loved seeing on screen.

And then there’s the competitiveness among photographers and content-makers hoping to gain influence or visibility by posting natural content. Unethical techniques are common, such as playing the calls of rare bird species to lure them out for a photo.

Social media do not directly cause damage, of course. But the desire for positive feedback, visibility or income can be very strong incentives to act badly.

Can social media really damage species?

The critically endangered blue-crowned laughingthrush now lives in only one province in China. Its wild population is now around 300 .

So many people went to find and photograph this rare bird that the laughingthrush was forced to change how it nested to avoid flashlights and the sound of camera shutters.

Or consider bird call playback. For scientists, playing a bird’s calls is a vital tool. You can use calls to entice seabird colonies back to former nesting grounds or to monitor threatened or hard-to-spot species.

It’s very easy for birdwatchers and photographers to misuse this power by using bird ID apps and a speaker to draw out rare species. It might seem harmless, but drawing shy woodland birds out into the open risks predation, or can entice a mother off her nest. Playing calls can also make birds aggressive, change important behaviours, or disrupt their breeding.

Baiting, drones, poaching and trampling

The list of bad behaviours goes on and on.

Wildlife photographers are known to use baiting to get their photo – putting out food sources (natural or artificial), scent lures and decoys to boost their chances. But when baiting is done routinely, it changes animal behaviour. Baiting by tourist operators who offering swimming with sharks has led to reduced gene flow, changed shark metabolism and increased aggression.

Drone photography, too, comes with problems . Drones terrify many species of wildlife, causing them to break cover, try to escape or to become aggressive. In Western Australia, for instance, an osprey suffered injuries after a photographer flew their drone into it.

Then there are the world’s rare or fragile plants. Social media give us beautiful images of wildflower meadows and rainforests. But when we collectively go and see these places, we risk trampling them. Unlike animals, plants can’t run away.

Take orchids, a family of flowering plants with many human admirers. During the 18th century, “ orchidelerium ” gripped Europe. Rich people paid orchid hunters to roam the globe and collect rare species.

In our time, orchids face a different threat – social-media-driven visitors. Orchids are very particular – they rely on specific fungal partners . But this makes them highly vulnerable if their habitat changes. One study found that of 442 vulnerable orchid species, 40% were at risk from tourism and recreation.

Sharing locations is a big part of the problem. Even if you deliberately don’t make reference to where you took the photo, the GPS co-ordinates are often embedded in a photo’s metadata.

In 2010, a new species of slipper orchid ( Paphiopedilum canhii ) was discovered in Vietnam. Photos with location information were posted online. Just six months after discovery, more than 99% of all known individuals had been collected . The orchid is now extinct in the wild.

What should be done?

Broadly, we need to talk about the need to make ethical choices in how we present nature on social media.

But there is a specific group who can help – the admins of large social media groups devoted to, say, wild orchids, birdwatching or scuba diving. Admins have significant influence over what can be posted in their groups. Better moderation can go a long way.

Site admins can make expectations clear in their codes of conduct. They could, for instance, ban photos of rare orchids until after the flowering season, or put a blanket ban on posts with locations, as well as explain how photos can have embedded location data.

Park and land managers have other tools, such as banning drones from specific areas and making it harder to access environmentally sensitive areas. There’s a very good reason, for instance, why the location of wild populations of Wollemi pines is a secret .

Many of us won’t have given much thought about how social media can damage the natural world. But it is a real problem – and it won’t go away by itself.

Dr Belinda Davis from Western Australia’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions contributed to this article.

• Conservation
• Social media
• Environment
• Location data
• Wildlife photography

Service Delivery Consultant

Newsletter and Deputy Social Media Producer

College Director and Principal | Curtin College

Head of School: Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences

Educational Designer

Cookies on GOV.UK

We use some essential cookies to make this website work.

We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use GOV.UK, remember your settings and improve government services.

We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services.

You have accepted additional cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.

You have rejected additional cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.

• Defence and armed forces
• Ministry of Defence estate

Work to save rare British moth from extinction in England

The rare dark bordered beauty moth exists at one last known site in England – a military training area near York.

A dark bordered beauty moth on a blade of grass.

The Ministry of Defence is working with partners to save the moth from extinction while continuing to use the site to conduct essential training to keep Britain safe.

The Ministry of Defence owns most of the moth’s English habitat, Strensall Common, which is a 570-hectare area of open heathland, designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Lying east of the North Yorkshire village of Strensall, in the Vale of York, the site is used for military training, with some areas managed by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Forestry England.

The small but striking moth is a priority species in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. Numbers of the dark bordered beauty moth have declined by over 90% since recording first began at Strensall Common, with as little as 50 to 100 believed to remain at the site. The moth’s presence has been recorded at the common since 1894.

The moth favours sheltered locations at the woodland’s edges where its sole foodplant, creeping willow, can be found growing. Creeping willow habitats are threatened by factors such as wildfires and sheep grazing – leading to a steep decline in the moth’s population since systematic monitoring began in 2007.

Grazing of cattle and sheep on Strensall Common is essential to prevent the growth of trees and shrubs and maintain the site’s internationally important lowland heath habitats. However, grazing has caused the loss of creeping willow plants, meaning fewer good sites for the moth caterpillars to feed, and reduced opportunities for the moths to lay eggs in the summer.

To help save the moth from extinction in England, Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) has provided funding and materials through its Conservation Stewardship Fund to create fenced enclosures around areas of low-growing creeping willow across the training area. Additional funding has been provided by Yorventure, an independent not-for-profit initiative supporting community and environmental projects in the City of York and North Yorkshire.

Defence Minister Luke Pollard said:

The first duty of any government is protecting our citizens, and I commend these conservation efforts to protect the wildlife that call our estate home and have no impact on our essential training activity. It’s brilliant to see the work we’re doing with partners to safeguard the survival of this wonderful moth while conducting training at the same site to keep Britain secure.

The work has been carried out by the Butterfly Conservation charity with the support of ecologists working for DIO, volunteers from the MOD Strensall Conservation Group, and experts from the University of York’s Department of Biology. Volunteers have also planted creeping willows grown from local seeds across Strensall Common to bolster habitats for the moth.

While these efforts have been instrumental in preventing the loss of the dark bordered beauty moth from Strensall Common, its population remains low and under threat. Conservationists are therefore considering trialling a captive breeding scheme to establish new populations of the moth in surrounding regions of York. This follows a recent project which saw the release of 160 dark bordered beauty moth caterpillars into a site in Scotland’s Cairngorm mountains, where the only other surviving populations of the moth in Britain can be found.

In the meantime, it is hoped that the continuing work to protect habitats for the dark bordered beauty moth at Strensall Common will ensure the site remains a stronghold for the species.

DIO Training Safety Officer and Chair of the MOD Strensall Conservation Group Major (Retired) Patrick Ennis said:

The Defence estate is home to some of the most valuable sites for nature and wildlife in the UK. While the primary use of the land is to enable our military to train, we are equally committed to supporting nature recovery by balancing the conservation of species and their habitats with military training requirements. The determined efforts of the MOD Strensall Conservation Group, Butterfly Conservation and local experts and volunteers have been key to preventing the dark bordered beauty from becoming extinct at its last known site in England, but unfortunately its numbers are still in decline. Continued collaboration will be essential in giving the moth the best chance of recovering its population.

Head of Conservation (England), Butterfly Conservation Dr Dave Wainwright said:

Despite ongoing conservation work by Butterfly Conservation, MOD and our partners, the dark bordered beauty remains at risk of extinction in England. It is crucial that our work to protect it at Strensall continues; at the same time, we need to restore suitable habitat elsewhere and enable the spread of the moth if its chances of survival are to be enhanced.

Dr Peter Mayhew from the University of York’s Department of Biology said:

The dark bordered beauty population at Strensall Common is of enormous cultural importance as it was the population where the moth was first discovered in the UK, and has been most frequently visited by entomologists interested in finding the moth. The moth has only survived thanks to the protection of the heathland provided by the military training area. Seeing the moth fly on a sunny morning is a never-to-be-forgotten experience which future generations deserve to enjoy.

The work being undertaken to protect the moth’s habitats is in line with the Government’s commitment to protect and restore nature and deliver the Environment Act targets.

Share this page

The following links open in a new tab

• Share on Facebook (opens in new tab)
• Share on Twitter (opens in new tab)

Updates to this page

Is this page useful.

• Yes this page is useful
• No this page is not useful

Help us improve GOV.UK

Don’t include personal or financial information like your National Insurance number or credit card details.

To help us improve GOV.UK, we’d like to know more about your visit today. Please fill in this survey (opens in a new tab) .

More From Forbes

A herpetologist spotlights the 4 ‘coolest’ extinct reptiles (hint: none are dinosaurs).

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Extinct species are every bit as interesting as those that are found in the wild today–perhaps ... [+] moreso. Here are four reptiles that would make your jaw drop if they had survived into the present-day.

The class of animals that we refer to as “reptiles” or “reptilia” came into existence in the late Carboniferous period, around 320 million years ago. At present, there are around 12,000 living species of reptiles (not counting birds, which are actually also part of the reptile lineage). However, there have been many more that have come and gone over the ages, the most famous of which are the dinosaurs which disappeared from Earth approximately 65 million years ago.

Setting dinosaurs aside, here are four species of ancient reptiles that get my vote for “best in class.”

Illustration of Titanoboa, a colossal prehistoric snake that live around 60 million years ago.

Titanoboa was a species of giant snake native to Columbia that was first documented in a 2009 paper published in Nature . It is thought to be the biggest snake to have ever existed, although a recent discovery in India challenges this assumption.

Regardless, the Titanoboa was absolutely massive, likely exceeding 40 feet in length and weighing over a ton. To put this in perspective, the largest snakes that exist on planet Earth today, the green anaconda and the reticulated python, measure around 30 feet in length and 600 pounds at their biggest.

Titanoboa inhabited the warm, tropical environment of what is now northern Colombia. As a top predator of its time, Titanoboa would have preyed upon a variety of large vertebrates, employing its powerful constricting abilities akin to modern boa constrictors. Fossil evidence suggests that the snake lived approximately 60 million years ago, during the early part of the Paleogene period.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024.

Tylosaurus, an extinct genus of mosasaur lizards. These giant predatory marine lizards roamed the ... [+] seas until 66 million years ago, coexisting with dinosaurs.

The ancient mosasaur, a giant marine lizard, was a formidable predator that thrived during the late Cretaceous period, approximately 100 to 66 million years ago. These colossal reptiles, belonging to the reptile lineage Mosasauria, were characterized by their elongated, streamlined bodies, powerful tails and paddle-like limbs, which made them highly efficient swimmers. The are closely related to modern day lizards and snakes.

Mosasaurs grew up to an impressive 50 feet in length, similar to a humpback whale although not weighing as much. Their large, conical teeth and strong jaws allowed them to prey on a variety of marine life, including fish, squid, molluscs and even other marine reptiles. As apex predators in their aquatic ecosystems, mosasaurs dominated the seas until their extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, coinciding with the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Meiolania, an extinct genus of giant, armored turtles native to Australasia from the Middle Miocene ... [+] until relatively recently.

Meiolania was a remarkable genus of prehistoric turtles that lived from the mid-Miocene (10-20 million years ago) until a few thousand years ago. Native to Australasia, Meiolania was notable for its large size and distinctive physical features. Unlike most modern turtles, they had a robust, armored shell and some species exhibited prominent, horn-like projections on their head and a large, spiked club-like structure at the end of their tail, which is believed to have been used for defense against predators. This formidable appearance suggests that Meiolania was a heavily armored herbivore that spent much of its time on land.

When exactly Meiolania went extinct is a subject of debate in scientific circles. Some scholars believe that rising sea levels following the retreat of the last ice age (12,000 years ago) led to their demise by reducing the land they inhabited (many Pacific islands were swallowed by the sea during this time). However, another theory suggests that megafaunal turtles like Meiolania lived alongside humans before going extinct–and that hunting by humans may have precipitated their demise. This is based on fossil evidence showing that Meiolania remains were layered above human remains in graveyard sites on islands such as Vanuatu and Fiji. In fact, the Meiolania bones found at the sites show evidence of being cut up and consumed.

Model of Gigarcanum delcourti, a recently extinct giant gecko most likely originating from the ... [+] island of New Caledonia.

Gigarcanum delcourti is an extinct species of giant gecko that inhabited either New Caledonia or New Zealand possibly up to the mid-19th century. It is the largest known gecko species, at least 2 feet in length, estimated to be 50% longer and substantially heavier than the largest extant gecko, New Caledonia’s Rhacodactylus leachianus commonly known as Leach’s giant gecko.

Interestingly, the species is known by one taxidermied specimen, which was collected in the 19th century and later rediscovered unlabelled in the basement of a museum in France. The specimen’s origin was not documented. Although it was initially believed to be from New Zealand, ancient DNA analysis has revealed that it most likely originates from New Caledonia.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

• False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
• Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
• Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
• Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

• Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Delegate Tracker
• AP & Elections
• 2024 Paris Olympic Games
• Auto Racing
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Wetland plant once nearly extinct may have recovered enough to come off the endangered species list

In this September 2020 photo provided by Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, a northeastern bulrush stands in a vernal pool in Tioga State Forest in Tioga County, Pa. The plant was in danger of extinction but recovery efforts have led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to propose that it be removed from the federal endangered species list. (Mary Ann Furedi/Western Pennsylvania Conservancy via AP)

• Copy Link copied

BOSTON (AP) — The federal wildlife service on Tuesday proposed that a wetland plant once in danger of going extinct be taken off the endangered species list due to its successful recovery.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is asking that the northeastern bulrush be delisted . The plant is a leafy perennial herb with a cluster of flowers found in the Northeast from Vermont to Virginia. The federal service’s proposal opens a 60 day comment period.

The plant was listed as endangered in 1991 when there were only 13 known populations left in seven states. It now has 148 populations in eight states, often in vernal pools, swamps and small wetlands.

“Our important partnerships with state agencies, conservation organizations and academic researchers have helped us better understand and conserve northeastern bulrush through long-term population monitoring, habitat conservation, and increased surveys in prime habitat areas,” said Wendi Weber, northeast regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Detailed surveys of the plant’s unique behavior have aided the recovery effort. The bulrush can disappear for years and reemerge when conditions are right.

Several states also worked to reduce invasive species that encroach on wetlands and protect land where the bulrush is found. Vermont, for example, has purchased two parcels for the bulrush.

In 2014, a coalition of soil and water conservation groups and a wetlands organization launched a successful pilot program to establish a new northeastern bulrush population in New York.

The Spinoff

Society about 11 hours ago

The spinoff essay: following the swiss wolf, who walked 2,000 kilometres for love.

• Share Story

When we insert ourselves into the lives of animals, we become complicit in their fates.

The Spinoff Essay showcases the best essayists in Aotearoa, on topics big and small. Made possible by the generous support of our members.

B efore I went to Hungary, I met a man who told me about the wolf. 

“It migrated all the way from Switzerland to Hungary,” he said. “And last week it was shot by a hunter. People want him to go to prison.”

As I prepared for the trip I learnt more about M237, the wolf who’d travelled a record-breaking 2,000 km before being felled by a bullet near the small town of Hidasnémeti. But my real focus was on another mammal: my diabetic cat, Jager. At 17, her life was constrained to an armchair with a heating pad she reached with the assistance of pet steps. As my departure loomed, so did Jager’s. I rang a vet who offered a home euthanasia service and sought her advice. 

“When it’s time for her to go, you’ll know,” she said. 

But I didn’t know. I didn’t know if Jager would make it through the next four weeks without me. Our younger cat, Bruce, would be fine at home. I wrote instructions for his pet sitter and stockpiled his favourite treats. And then I took Jager to the best cattery in Dunedin, boarded a plane, and crossed my fingers. 

Jager and M237 both began their lives wild, but while Jager assumed the role of house cat, M237 became an explorer. One of six cubs, he was born in 2021 as tulips bloomed and boats cruised the Swiss Riviera. At around two weeks of age, his blue eyes opened and he gave his first high-pitched howl. Soon afterwards, he ventured from his den on stubby legs, round-eyed and fluffy as a Pomeranian. 

By March the following year, his legs were long, his eyes pale gold – and he was about to have his first encounter with humans. While skiers slid down the Swiss Alps, M237 was trapped and sedated by members of a Swiss wolf protection group. His blood was drawn, his teeth examined, and his body measured. And then he was fitted with the yellow GPS collar that helped make him a star. 

No wolves wander New Zealand: our native mammals are bats, seals, sea lions, dolphins and whales. We no longer have wolves in our zoos, but they still filled my suburban Christchurch childhood. They were there in the stories of Peter and the Wolf, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and Little Red Riding Hood. They roamed my imagination as metaphors for fear. Fear of being harmed. Fear of losing what’s precious. 

Leaving New Zealand, my fears were personal, cat-sized. Arriving in Hungary in June 2023, my fears grew. Russian forces had taken control of the adjacent Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant and 8.2 million Ukrainians had fled their country. I didn’t want to be on the continent if fighting escalated. But Europe’s a big place, I told myself. And if the worst happened, my husband Tim and I could flee to the safety of our island at the bottom of the South Pacific. 

My worries vaporised when we arrived in stinking hot, beautiful Budapest. We visited galleries, saw a ballet, and sampled raspberry ganache beneath gilded frescoes. 

We caught a train south to the city of Pécs, far from the Ukrainian border, where I was being hosted for a writing residency. Coloured tiles sparkled on rooftops, live music tinkled down laneways, and pigeons cooed outside our windows as we tossed and turned beneath our individual duvets, struggling to adjust to the heat. But my social media feeds were filled with images of snow. I sent an email to Jager’s cattery. 

“Is her heating pad on?” I asked. “Did you get a chance to move her into the room with the sun?”

Reassured she’d settled in and was receiving her medication, I turned my attention back to M237. I started to wonder if I should visit northern Hungary after all; if I should visit Hidasnémeti. And I wasn’t the only person who wanted to acknowledge M237: there were 53,099 signatures on a petition calling for the hunter to be punished. 

“Let us not be a country without consequences,” it read. “ A man who knowingly kills a great animal should not get away with impunity. Feel the weight of what you do.”

I met Károly Méhes, the coordinator of the residency programme. We sipped coffee on an ancient street in 35-degree heat, and I told him about my plans to go north. Then he surprised me by telling me Pécs has its own history with wolves. 

“Like in the fairy tale, a wolf tore apart a grandmother and a grandchild,” he said. 

The attack happened in December 1995, just after Christmas, while children were sledding on the Mecsek Mountains by the Pécs Zoo. At that time, the zoo was poorly run and prone to scandal. There was a period when a lion drowned, a tiger disappeared from the inventory, and the zoo’s director let hunters shoot a bear. In these chaotic conditions, it’s suspected the wolf was accidentally released. A passing driver saw a boy bleeding as he fled through the snow, and drove him to the TV tower to get help. The grandmother died on her way to hospital. The wolf was shot. 

I decided to follow in the footsteps of the wolf, the grandmother and the boy, hiking up to the zoo and the tower. Noting that without his navigational services I’d still be lost in Singapore Airport, Tim came along too. 

The Hungarian forest was different to the bush back home. The trees were thinner and further apart, and didn’t have the damp, fresh scent I’m used to. Sunlight streamed through the canopy, and we passed a cottage in a clearing bordered by a low stone fence. These were the woods I’d read about in fairy tales. 

“If one of us – perhaps you – could get bitten by a wolf, it would be great for my story,” I said, as we trudged through the trees. Something rustled in the undergrowth and Tim sprang back. 

We reached the top of a track and found ourselves at the zoo. From the outside, we could see zebras, bison, and hordes of small children – but no wolves. There are no longer wolves at Pécs Zoo. They were shipped off after the second wolf escaped. 

By 2015, Pécs Zoo had a new director. Three wolves were acquired from Italy, but spooked by the move, one of them jumped the fence. People were advised to avoid the forest – but instead, they flocked to it. 

“I think we all knew the nature of the animal, that it does not attack people, in fact it avoids it,” one wolf-watcher wrote. “He looked kindly at us and we looked at him.”

This wolf may have been harmless to humans, but he too was shot – by the zoo’s new director. 

Today the zoo has yet another director, and the fencing still looks a little flimsy. We hiked past and dipped back into the woods as we continued to the tower. We spotted black and yellow moths, emerald green beetles and orange-stemmed mushrooms with puffy white hats. We didn’t see the badgers, foxes or dormice we knew lived in the forest. And with no wolves in Pécs, our biggest fear was getting lost. But when we returned to our apartment, there was a message from one of my brothers. 

“It could be worth keeping an eye on the Zaporizhzhia power plant the Russians are said to have mined,” it read. “I’d advise you to have some sort of contingency plan and to act upon it promptly if something blows up.”

We’d already planned our trip to Hidasnémeti. I wanted to visit the river where M237 was shot. Making the most of travelling to the Zemplén region, Tim eschewed Hidasnémeti’s sole accommodation option – the former Border Guard Barracks – and booked us into the Palace Hotel in Lillafüred, a nearby resort town. 

I spent the night before we left measuring Lillafüred’s distance from the fighting in Ukraine. We’d be staying an hour’s drive from the border – close enough to have me searching for tips on surviving a nuclear blast. What I read wasn’t reassuring. In the event of a power plant explosion, an invisible radioactive cloud could drift anywhere on the continent.

Like radioactive clouds, wolves aren’t concerned with the demarcation of human territory. The previous summer, M237 left his family and the canton of Graubünden in search of a mate. He reached an altitude of 3,500m as he travelled the Alps, his collar pinging his location to the enthusiasts tracking his path. 

He crossed the Italian border, wandering beneath limestone summits before entering Austria. In February 2023, he slipped into Hungary. He passed just west of Budapest, and swam across the Danube before continuing towards the Zemplén Mountains. 

The Swiss wolf protection group posted a Facebook update, tagging themselves as “feeling awesome”. Having M237 join Hungary’s small wolf population was a rare environmental success story. And there was something else about his journey that touched our hearts. Don’t we all feel we’ve been on epic quests in search of love?

M 237 was right to head to Zemplén for romance. Nestled in lush forest, the Palace Hotel felt enchanted. Swallows circled the spires, poetry was inscribed on stone tablets, and hanging gardens followed the path of a waterfall. In the Romanesque castle at the meeting of three valleys, I felt more relaxed than I’d been in years. 

Not far from Lillafüred was the zoo where the Pécs wolves now lived. But though I longed to set eyes on a wolf, I didn’t want to visit a zoo – my entry fee endorsing the keeping of animals in captivity. Putting myself in a wolf’s paws, I would rather roam free. Instead, I visited the zoo’s website, my fingers hovering over the button that would enable me to “adopt” a wolf for a fee. But when we insert ourselves into the lives of animals, we become complicit in their fates. I shut the window. 

The next morning, we caught a tram through the city of Miskolc and a train to Hidasnémeti’s small, Soviet-era station. From there we headed to the river, where I imagined M237 padding through the undergrowth to drink the cool water. 

We passed a headstone maker’s workshop and saw bright cottage gardens alive with cats. Having learnt that wolves avoid people, I didn’t think I’d feel nervous for my safety if there was a wolf in my neighbourhood. But I would feel nervous for my pets. 

Along with tracking M237, I’d been tracking Dávid Sütő, Large Carnivore Programme Leader at the World Wildlife Foundation. I wanted to ask him about wolves – in particular, M237, who Dávid called “the Swiss wolf”. 

“I mainly deal with human-wildlife conflicts,” Dávid said, when we connected over Zoom. “Surrounding large carnivores there can be challenges, because they were missing from almost the whole continent for at least 50 years. We have to relearn how to live with them.”

Humans almost drove large predators to extinction a century ago, but the presence of wolves helps balance the ecosystem. 

“We call them the guards of the forest. You need apex predators to keep invasive species like racoons at bay.”

Because wolves tend to prey on sick animals, they can also reduce the spread of disease. But not everyone’s happy that the wolves are returning to the forests. 

“Knowing that wolves are present can cause fear in people, but wolves are not as dangerous as we think. In Northern Hungary, you’re much more likely to get hurt driving a car than you are to be mauled by a wolf.”

“What about the Pécs attack?” I asked. 

“That was the only wolf attack in the country in the last hundred years, and it wasn’t a wild wolf,” Dávid said. “The wild specimens that have lived in nature have not attacked anyone, and it is crucial to try to keep it this way.”

Before we ended the call, I asked Dávid what had drawn him to his role. 

“I’ve always dealt with mammals,” he said. “Because we are mammals too, we have some kind of kinship with them. It’s easier to get in their understanding.”

O n our last morning in The Palace Hotel, I woke with the sun. I stretched lazily on white sheets, wondering how on earth I’d got so lucky. And then I checked my phone. There was an email from the cattery. 

“I have some sad news,” the message read. “Your lovely Jager passed away.”

My fears of radioactive clouds suddenly seemed ludicrous. The worst had happened, and it was the lonely death of someone who’d trusted me. I regretted not organising that visit from the vet. I regretted going on the trip at all. 

We began our comically awful trip back to Pécs. As we were pelted with rain, thrown off a tram, issued with a fine, and confined to a stifling train carriage with drunken revellers, I thought about what we owe to animals. What I owed Jager, and what we all owed M237. 

Like cats, wolves can get diabetes, but a sick animal won’t last long in the wild. Jager had been on insulin for the final two years of her life. Bruce, who I found on the side of the road as a kitten, had already had several hair-raising trips to the vet. 

Cats aren’t considered domesticated: they have a symbiotic relationship with us. When I’d invited the cats into my home, I’d made a contract with them. I’d give them food, shelter, medical care and love, and I’d also have to make decisions on their behalf – decisions they wouldn’t always understand, or enjoy. But my cats could also choose to leave at any time. 

What kind of contract had we made with the animals of Pécs Zoo? Could they have reasonably expected a standard of care they didn’t get? And what did we owe M237? Not medicine, or a heating pad, or a lap to die on. But not a bullet. 

“When The Swiss Wolf was shot, there was an outrage,” Dávid had said. “In Hungary, the carnivores are strictly protected. And where he was shot, we have had wolves since the 1990s. So, the hunter could have expected that they were aiming at a wolf.”

And of course, the wolf was wearing a big, yellow GPS collar. But Dávid said it can be hard to investigate these types of cases.

“In a forest there are no witnesses. It’s ‘shoot, shovel, and shut up.’”

Europe has a long cultural history of humans and other apex predators sharing a landscape, but the survival of wolves in Hungary now depends on our ability to let the animals be. Wolves face enough danger without us: injury, starvation, and the possibility of being killed by a car, train, or group of rival wolves. M237 was willing to risk it all to find a mate.

“If the Swiss wolf had met a pack with a young female, they might have formed their own pack,” Dávid said.

When he was shot, M237 was 5km from a national park and the wolves of Zemplén. Had he picked up the scent of a potential mate? And had she picked up his? 

D eath followed us back to Pécs. Catching up on New Zealand news, I saw that a critically endangered matuku-hūrepo had to be euthanised after being illegally shot. And in Europe, Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina had died after being wounded in a Russian missile attack, just as she prepared to begin a residency in Paris. 

And I was increasingly worried about Bruce. I contacted our pet sitter, trying not to sound hysterical. 

“Is Bruce doing OK?”

“He seems to be all good and is eating,” came the reply. 

But two mornings later when I woke and checked my phone, the pet sitter had left several missed calls. I called back and over a bad line heard “euthanasia”. Tim and I scrambled to add credit to our phones. We rang the vet and learnt Bruce had been badly bitten. The wound was infected, his flesh was necrotic, and he had sepsis. If he made it through the night, he’d face an operation he might not survive. 

I felt sick. Being home wouldn’t have prevented the bite – but because I know Bruce, because I’m in his understanding, I would have realised something was wrong sooner. We were almost due to return home, and bringing our flights forward would cost $5,000. All I could do for Bruce was send positive thoughts from the other side of the world, hoping I was tuning into the right wavelength. 

At around 1am, we got an email.  

“We went ahead with tissue debridement this morning – cutting away the necrotic pieces of skin, of which there was a lot. There was a significant amount of dead tissue on both sides where he was bitten – most likely by a dog.”

You’re much more likely to be injured by a dog than a wolf, even in Northern Hungary. And in Dunedin, there’s a dog in our neighbourhood that often roams wild. I wanted its owners to see Bruce. Feel his pain. 

At last, we returned to Dunedin to face a reckoning of our own. We collected Jager’s body and dug her grave. We picked Bruce up from the vet, knowing he’d be forever changed. And I felt the weight of what I’d done.

Ancient 'hobbits' were even smaller than previously thought, scientists say

Scientists studying ancient cousins of humans have big news: A hobbit-like species was even smaller than previously thought.

Fossils of Homo floresiensis (dubbed "hobbits" for their resemblance to the fictional Middle-earth dwellers in the "Lord of the Rings" books) were first discovered in 2003. Those fossils showed they lived 50,000 to 100,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores, east of Bali. Flores is about the size of Puerto Rico.

Now, even older fossils from 700,000 years ago show that an early human species was likely about 2½ inches smaller than their later ancestors. Both are believed to have evolved from an older, taller species called Homo erectus.

The archaic humans, a now-extinct cousin to modern humans, were slightly shorter than the average human 4-year-old. The later hobbits were believed to be about 3 feet 6 inches tall. The older fossils show their predecessors could have been as short as 3 feet 3 inches.

"With this discovery, we found they were even smaller than we thought, so it was quite shocking to me," said Yousuke Kaifu, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tokyo and first author of the paper , published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The original research, from a team of Indonesian and Australian archeologists, was first published in 2004 and stunned the world . It was led by renowned Australian archeologist Michael John Morwood .

Those first fossils were found in Liang Bua cave . The much older fossils Kaifu and others have studied came from another site on the island called Mata Menge and help confirm research first published in 2016 showing the older hobbits could have been even shorter than the later ones.

This week's paper is based on fragments of an upper arm bone and teeth from the same areas of Mata Menge, which Kaifu's Japanese-Australian team has been studying carefully ever since.

"It took a long time to have data that was convincing," he said.

'Strange evolution' created hobbits

Kaifu and others believe this particular species of human evolved from Homo erectus, another extinct human species that lived about 2 million years ago. Homo erectus means "upright human" because the species walked upright.

"We know Homo erectus was on the island of Java 1.1 million years ago. Somehow they crossed the ocean and reached these islands and became isolated – and then they experienced a strange evolution," Kaifu said.

Sometime between 1.1 million years ago and 600,000 years ago, the Homo erectus people on the island of Flores evolved into hobbits. Then they maintained their body size and survived for at least 500,000 years.

The nearest island is about 6 miles across treacherous seas, so how they got there isn't known.

As to where they went, no one knows. They seem to have vanished from the island about 50,000 years ago . That might or might not , have been around the time modern-day humans first arrived.

One thing that isn't mysterious: why the early cousins of humans shrunk as they inhabited the island of Flores.

It's well-documented that animals on islands lacking predators can very quickly evolve much smaller forms, a process called phyletic dwarfism. It has been known to happen with deer, cattle, elephants, hippopotami and other species. It can also happen quickly.

In one example that started in 1871, feral cattle on Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean shrank to about three-quarters of their original body size in slightly more than a century.

In the case of the hobbits, Kaifu believes they quickly evolved to be smaller because there was nothing on the island that would have specifically hunted them.

"Without predators, there's no advantage to being large because you don't have to fight anything off," he said. "To maintain a larger body size you have to eat a lot; it takes more time to grow and produce offspring. So smaller body size is more productive."

Though the hobbits didn't face predators, they still had to deal with the island's Komodo dragons and giant stork-like birds that stood almost 6 feet tall. "These were a big stress for them – they must have been intelligent," Kaifu said.

Small-brained as they were, the hobbits used stone tools and appear to have hunted some of the other dwarf animals on the island, including a mini elephant species called dwarf stegodons about the size of modern buffalo. The hobbits may also have used fire .

The hobbits aren't the only now-extinct tiny cousins to humans. In 2019, archeologists announced the discovery of another diminutive human species whose fossils were found in Callao Cave on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Called Homo luzonensis , the species lived on the island 50,000 to 76,000 years ago.

Essay on Extinct Animals

Students are often asked to write an essay on Extinct Animals in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Extinct Animals

What are extinct animals.

Extinct animals are species that don’t exist anymore. They vanished forever due to various reasons like habitat loss, hunting, or climate change.

Examples of Extinct Animals

Famous extinct animals include the Dodo, a bird from Mauritius, and the Tasmanian Tiger, a carnivorous marsupial from Australia.

Why Animals Become Extinct

Animals become extinct mainly due to human activities. Deforestation, pollution, and overhunting are major causes.

Importance of Preventing Extinction

Preventing extinction is crucial for biodiversity. Each species plays a role in the ecosystem, and their loss can disrupt the balance.

250 Words Essay on Extinct Animals

Introduction, the causes of extinction.

The primary causes of animal extinction include habitat loss, climate change, overexploitation, and invasive species. The relentless expansion of human civilization often leads to habitat destruction, leaving animals without homes or food sources. Climate change disrupts the delicate balance of ecosystems, making survival difficult for many species. Overhunting and overfishing have also led to the extinction of numerous species. Lastly, invasive species, introduced either intentionally or accidentally, can outcompete native species for resources, leading to their extinction.

Impact on Biodiversity

The extinction of animals greatly affects biodiversity. Each species plays a unique role within its ecosystem, and its loss can disrupt the balance, leading to cascading effects on other species. For instance, the extinction of a predator can lead to overpopulation of its prey, which may then overconsume vegetation and disrupt the ecosystem.

Conservation Efforts

Conservation efforts are crucial to prevent further extinctions. These include habitat protection, regulation of hunting and fishing, and breeding programs for endangered species. Additionally, raising public awareness about the importance of biodiversity and the consequences of extinction can drive societal changes necessary for conservation.

In conclusion, the extinction of animals is a pressing issue that requires immediate attention. Through understanding its causes and impacts, and implementing effective conservation strategies, we can hope to preserve the remaining biodiversity for future generations.

500 Words Essay on Extinct Animals

The natural world is a vast, interconnected web of life, with each species playing a unique role in the balance of the ecosystem. However, in recent centuries, human activities have greatly accelerated the rate of animal extinction, leading to a loss of biodiversity. This essay will delve into the topic of extinct animals, exploring the causes and consequences of extinction, and the importance of conservation efforts.

The Consequences of Extinction

The extinction of animals has far-reaching implications. Firstly, it disrupts the balance of ecosystems. Each species plays a unique role in its ecosystem, and the loss of a single species can trigger a cascade of changes that affect other species. Secondly, extinction can lead to the loss of genetic diversity, which is crucial for the resilience of ecosystems in the face of environmental changes. Thirdly, the extinction of animals can have economic implications, affecting industries such as tourism and agriculture that rely on biodiversity.

Extinct Animals: A Case Study

The dodo bird, native to Mauritius, serves as a poignant example of human-induced extinction. Unaccustomed to predators, these birds were easy prey for humans and invasive species introduced by sailors in the 17th century. Their extinction within less than a century of their discovery highlights the devastating impact of human activities on biodiversity.

The Importance of Conservation

In conclusion, the extinction of animals is a pressing issue that has been largely driven by human activities. The loss of species has profound implications for ecosystems and human societies. Therefore, it is imperative that we intensify our conservation efforts to protect biodiversity. The fate of many species lies in our hands, and it is our responsibility to ensure that they do not go the way of the dodo.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• IELTS Scores
• Life Skills Test
• Find a Test Centre
• Alternatives to IELTS
• General Training
• Academic Word List
• Topic Vocabulary
• Collocation
• Phrasal Verbs
• Writing eBooks
• Reading eBook
• All eBooks & Courses
• Sample Essays

Extinction of Animals Essay

This  extinction of animals essay question appeared recently in the IELTS test.

It is about how animals become extinct and whether humans should take steps to prevent this from happening.

It is a natural process that animal species become extinct, as the dinosaurs did in the past. There is no reason for people to prevent this from happening.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Choosing a Side

With agree / disagree type essays you can discuss both sides of the issue but you can come down firmly on one side and focus on only this in your response.

This can be an easier way to answer such questions and is certainly recommended if you are just needing the lower band scores, such as 7 and especially 6.

This is an example of an essay where the writer disagrees with the opinion and has given three reasons for this, set out in three body paragraphs.

For the higher band scores there is a risk the examiner thinks for a fully addressed answer , both sides of the issue should have been considered. So if you need a band 8 or 9, look at both sides of the issue as in this model answer.

Take a look at the model answer for this animal extinction essay and the comments below.

Extinction of Animals Essay Sample

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Write at least 250 words.

Model Answer

It is commonly known that many species have gone extinct throughout history, including the dinosaurs. Some argue that preventing extinction is not necessary, as it is a natural process. However, I believe that humans have a moral obligation to protect endangered species and prevent their extinction.

Firstly, human activities such as deforestation, overfishing, and pollution have caused a rapid decline in animal populations, leading many species to be at risk of extinction. As a result, humans have a responsibility to conserve the environment and prevent further harm to wildlife. It is unfair for humans to cause the extinction of a species due to their actions, particularly when they have the ability to prevent it.

Another reason is that many species play a crucial role in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem. For example, bees are essential pollinators that are responsible for pollinating 80% of flowering plants, and thus if bees were to become extinct, it would have a devastating impact on our food supply and ecosystem. Similarly, the loss of predators can cause a ripple effect, leading to overpopulation of other species and causing imbalances in the food chain.

Lastly, preventing extinction is not only a matter of responsibility but also a matter of morality. Species have intrinsic value, and it is not our place to determine which species should exist and which should not. Humans must respect the inherent value of all life forms and do what they can to protect them.

In conclusion, while extinction may be a natural process, it is not a justification for humans to sit idly by and watch as countless species go extinct. By taking action to conserve the environment, humans can ensure that future generations can enjoy the same diversity of life that we have today.

(294 Words)

This extinction of animals essay would achieve a high IELTS band score.

It's organised well so would score highly for coherence and cohesion . It has a clear introduction that introduces the topics and then gives the writers opinion (the thesis statement).

Each body paragraph clearly sets out and explains a key idea, then the conclusion summarises the writers view and gives some final thoughts. The linking between sentences is also very good.

It has a clear opinion and that opinion is reflected in the response. The ideas are fully supported and explained. The question is fully addressed and the essay does not go off-topic. It would therefore score highly for task response . 

The essay also had a good range of high-level and accurate lexis and grammar , so it would also score well for those criteria.

<<< Back

Next >>>

More Agree / Disagree Essays:

Paying Taxes Essay: Should people keep all the money they earn?

Paying Taxes Essay: Read model essays to help you improve your IELTS Writing Score for Task 2. In this essay you have to decide whether you agree or disagree with the opinion that everyone should be able to keep their money rather than paying money to the government.

Multinational Organisations and Culture Essay

Multinational Organisations and Culture Essay: Improve you score for IELTS Essay writing by studying model essays. This Essay is about the extent to which working for a multinational organisation help you to understand other cultures.

IELTS Vegetarianism Essay: Should we all be vegetarian to be healthy?

Vegetarianism Essay for IELTS: In this vegetarianism essay, the candidate disagrees with the statement, and is thus arguing that everyone does not need to be a vegetarian.

Ban Smoking in Public Places Essay: Should the government ban it?

Ban smoking in public places essay: The sample answer shows you how you can present the opposing argument first, that is not your opinion, and then present your opinion in the following paragraph.

Essay for IELTS: Are some advertising methods unethical?

This is an agree / disagree type question. Your options are: 1. Agree 100% 2. Disagree 100% 3. Partly agree. In the answer below, the writer agrees 100% with the opinion. There is an analysis of the answer.

Examinations Essay: Formal Examinations or Continual Assessment?

Examinations Essay: This IELTS model essay deals with the issue of whether it is better to have formal examinations to assess student’s performance or continual assessment during term time such as course work and projects.

Internet vs Newspaper Essay: Which will be the best source of news?

A recent topic to write about in the IELTS exam was an Internet vs Newspaper Essay. The question was: Although more and more people read news on the internet, newspapers will remain the most important source of news. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

IELTS Sample Essay: Is alternative medicine ineffective & dangerous?

IELTS sample essay about alternative and conventional medicine - this shows you how to present a well-balanced argument. When you are asked whether you agree (or disagree), you can look at both sides of the argument if you want.

Sample IELTS Writing: Is spending on the Arts a waste of money?

Sample IELTS Writing: A common topic in IELTS is whether you think it is a good idea for government money to be spent on the arts. i.e. the visual arts, literary and the performing arts, or whether it should be spent elsewhere, usually on other public services.

Return of Historical Objects and Artefacts Essay

This essay discusses the topic of returning historical objects and artefacts to their country of origin. It's an agree/disagree type IELTS question.

Technology Development Essay: Are earlier developments the best?

This technology development essay shows you a complex IELTS essay question that is easily misunderstood. There are tips on how to approach IELTS essay questions

Scientific Research Essay: Who should be responsible for its funding?

Scientific research essay model answer for Task 2 of the test. For this essay, you need to discuss whether the funding and controlling of scientific research should be the responsibility of the government or private organizations.

Dying Languages Essay: Is a world with fewer languages a good thing?

Dying languages essays have appeared in IELTS on several occasions, an issue related to the spread of globalisation. Check out a sample question and model answer.

Truthfulness in Relationships Essay: How important is it?

This truthfulness in relationships essay for IELTS is an agree / disagree type essay. You need to decide if it's the most important factor.

Human Cloning Essay: Should we be scared of cloning humans?

Human cloning essay - this is on the topic of cloning humans to use their body parts. You are asked if you agree with human cloning to use their body parts, and what reservations (concerns) you have.

Employing Older People Essay: Is the modern workplace suitable?

Employing Older People Essay. Examine model essays for IELTS Task 2 to improve your score. This essay tackles the issue of whether it it better for employers to hire younger staff rather than those who are older.

Free University Education Essay: Should it be paid for or free?

Free university education Model IELTS essay. Learn how to write high-scoring IELTS essays. The issue of free university education is an essay topic that comes up in the IELTS test. This essay therefore provides you with some of the key arguments about this topic.

Airline Tax Essay: Would taxing air travel reduce pollution?

Airline Tax Essay for IELTS. Practice an agree and disagree essay on the topic of taxing airlines to reduce low-cost air traffic. You are asked to decide if you agree or disagree with taxing airlines in order to reduce the problems caused.

IELTS Internet Essay: Is the internet damaging social interaction?

Internet Essay for IELTS on the topic of the Internet and social interaction. Included is a model answer. The IELTS test usually focuses on topical issues. You have to discuss if you think that the Internet is damaging social interaction.

Role of Schools Essay: How should schools help children develop?

This role of schools essay for IELTS is an agree disagree type essay where you have to discuss how schools should help children to develop.

Any comments or questions about this page or about IELTS? Post them here. Your email will not be published or shared.

Band 7+ eBooks

"I think these eBooks are FANTASTIC!!! I know that's not academic language, but it's the truth!"

Linda, from Italy, Scored Band 7.5

Bargain eBook Deal! 30% Discount

All 4 Writing eBooks for just  $25.86 Find out more >>

IELTS Modules:

Other resources:.

• All Lessons
• Band Score Calculator
• Writing Feedback
• Speaking Feedback
• Teacher Resources
• Free Downloads
• Recent Essay Exam Questions
• Books for IELTS Prep
• Useful Links

Recent Articles

IELTS Line Graph: Governments Expenditure on Research

Jul 23, 24 01:27 PM

House History Essay

Jul 16, 24 04:06 PM

Paraphrasing Activity for IELTS Reading

Jul 13, 24 07:48 AM

Important pages

IELTS Writing IELTS Speaking IELTS Listening   IELTS Reading All Lessons Vocabulary Academic Task 1 Academic Task 2 Practice Tests

Connect with us

Before you go...

30% discount - just $25.86 for all 4 writing ebooks.

Copyright © 2022- IELTSbuddy All Rights Reserved

IELTS is a registered trademark of University of Cambridge, the British Council, and IDP Education Australia. This site and its owners are not affiliated, approved or endorsed by the University of Cambridge ESOL, the British Council, and IDP Education Australia.

96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for extinction essay topics? One of the most severe ecological problems is worth exploring.

🏆 A+ Extinction Essay Examples

📌 best extinction essay topics, 🔝 top ideas for an essay about extinction, 👍 endangered species essay topics & title ideas, ❓ research questions about extinction.

Extinction is the termination of a certain living form, usually a species, or a language. The death of the last individual of the species (or the last speaker) is considered to be the moment of extinction. This phenomenon of animal extinction s considered to be the world’s largest threat to wildlife. In the last 50 years, the wildlife population sizes have dropped by 60%. That’s why animal extinction is one of the major ecological issues.

Whether you need to write a research paper or an argumentative essay on extinction, this article will be helpful. It contains top endangered species essay topics, titles, extinction essay examples, etc. Write an A+ essay about extinction with us!

• Preventing Animal Extinction in the UAE In essence, the UAE has been at the forefront of protecting endangered species from extinction and promoting an increment in their population, by putting up breeding programmes which help in multiplication of such animals.
• Wildlife Management and Extinction Prevention in Australia This paper investigates the threats to wildlife in Australia and strategies for managing and preventing their extinction. In summary, this paper examines the threats to wildlife in Australia and outlines strategies for managing and preventing […]
• Dodo Bird and Why It Went Extinct One of the extinct species of bird is the dodo bird. Its extinction has made it hard for scholars to classify the bird when it comes to taxonomy of birds.
• Their Benefits Aside, Human Diets Are Polluting the Environment and Sending Animals to Extinction The fact that the environment and the entire ecosystem have been left unstable in the recent times is in no doubt.
• Animal Extinction: Causes and Effects Due to the increased rates of globalization and the rapid development of industries, the effect that the humankind has been producing on the environment has been amplified.
• Premature Extinction of Species For thousands of years of geological time, the extinction of some species has been balanced by the emergence of the new ones.
• Extinction of minority languages On the other hand, the extinction of minor languages leads to the extinction of certain cultural groups and their individualities, turning the world into a global grey crowd.
• Human Evolution and Animal Extinction The recent scholarly findings prove that invasions of Homo sapiens to the Austronesian and American continents were the major factors that conditioned the extinction of numerous animal species.
• Animal Extinction and What Is Being Done To Help The affected species, the causes of the change, as well as the possible criterion of arresting the situation, forms the subject of their discussion.
• “Extinction Rebellion” News Article by Eells The Extinction Rebellion movement was created in 2018, and, according to the organizers, now it has spread to dozens of countries where there are groups ready to participate in protests.
• Diversity and Extinction of Cyclura Lewisi One of the biggest risks to the population of this species is wild animals. The Grand Cayman blue iguana population is gradually expanding and is predicted to continue to rise as a result of continuing […]
• Extinction of Dinosaurs in North America and Texas It is necessary to identify the reason for the extinction of dinosaurs on the territory of the continent, namely, the state of Texas.
• Seabird Extinction from Invasive Rodent Species This paper will review seabirds’ role in ecosystems, the invasive rodent species and their impact on seabirds, and methods of protecting seabirds from non-native rodents.
• Mathematical Biology: Explaining Population Extinction Species in settings with soft carrying capacities such as those with non-negative value K create a restricted expectation of a variation, given a full past history, is non-positive when the species surpasses the carrying volume.
• The Importance of Saving a Species From Extinction It leads to a lack of surviving members of some species to reproduce in order create a new generation of the extinct species.
• Language Extinction in East Africa Most of the languages in the world fall under the endangered languages category with UNESCO approximating the percentage of endangered languages to be around 60%-80%.
• Extinction of Music Education Plato quoted: “The decisive importance of education in poetry and music: rhythm and harmony sink deep into the recesses of the soul and take the strongest hold there.
• The Cause of Human Extinction: Nature’s Ferocity or People’s Irresponsibility? The following sections will provide statistical data and projections as well as non-scientific scenarios for the end of the world and the extinction of the human race.
• Is Cannibalism the Reason for Neanderthal’s Extinction? They also found that cuts and fractures on the deer bones that were very similar to the ones that were found in the Neanderthal body.
• Chinese Dialects and Extinction Threats The problem of the reduction and extinction of the local dialects is one of the most sensitive and unresolved issues in China.
• Mass Extinction Theories It can thus be speculated that the species that could not withstand the effects of global warming had to become extinct due to the adverse changes in climate.
• Saving Sharks from the Extinction Thus, it is significant for the marshals to guard and secure the naval areas to uncover the abuse and intervene to discontinue the vicious killing of sharks.
• Comparison of Two Archaeological Papers on the Extinction of Animals Due to the Activities of Human Societies. In this study, the varying trends on the abundance of certain species were used to describe changes observed in the hunting practices and the animal species that were hunted.
• Human Activities and their Impact on Species Extinction in Arctic Unfortunately, what should be taken into consideration is the fact that as human interference continues to escalate within the region such as overfishing, oil drilling, population expansion and the effects of global warming this has […]
• Hazard from Space: Mass Extinction Theory The massive impact of extraterrestrial objects did not cause mass extinction of dinosaurs. Dinosaur basis of mass extinction theory do not give plausible explanation for extraterrestrial bodies since they occurred only once during the period […]
• Population Explosion and the Possible Extinction of Humans
• The Continuous Pollution on Earth Post Human Extinction in The World Without Us, a Book by Alan Weisman
• The Endangerment And Mass Extinction of The Tiger: Can We Stop It
• The Wildlife Biodiversity and its Continuous Extinction
• The Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction And The Earth’s Triassic Period
• Mass Extinction of Biodiversity From The Enhanced Greenhouse Effect
• Profit Maximization and the Extinction of Animal Species
• What Are the Consequences of the Removal/Extinction of an Organism from the Food Web
• The Biological Description of the Dodo and Its Extinction
• The Circumstances that Led to the Extinction of Dinosaurs
• We Must Save The Great White Shark From Extinction
• Problem of the Extinction of Many Rare Species
• The Destruction of Natural Habitats and the Extinction of Plants and Animals
• Why Extinction Does Happen It Is Not Indefinite
• Cascades of Failure and Extinction in Evolving Complex Systems
• The Permian Triassic Extinction Event And It’s Effects On Life On Earth
• Upper Estimates of the Mean Extinction Time of a Population with a Constant Carrying Capacity
• What Could Have Caused The Extinction of Dinosaurs
• The Role of Fungus in the Extinction of Dinosaurs
• Saving the Whales: Lessons from the Extinction of the Eastern Arctic Bowhead
• The Extinction, Endangerment, And Captivity of Endangered
• The Effects of Language Extinction on Cultural Identity in Third World Countries
• Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs by Stephen Jay Gould
• The Ghost of Extinction: Preservation Values and Minimum Viable Population in Wildlife Models
• Recovery After Mass Extinction: Evolutionary Assembly in Large-Scale Biosphere Dynamics
• The Devonian Extinction and the Long Process of Evolution in the Past 300 Million Years
• The Process of De-Extinction And Its Ecological And Moral Consequences
• The Need to Save the Animals from Extinction Using Genetic Engineering
• The Brink Of The Extinction Of America’s Civility And Inclusion
• The Current Extinction Rate Throughout The World: We Must Act Now
• Conservation Biology: Extinction, Habitat Loss, Invasive Species, Overexploitation
• Why Evolution And Extinction Is Essential To Humanity
• The Guam Rail Should Be Saved from Possible Extinction Essay
• The Extinction Event and Life in the Post-Apocalyptic Greenhouse
• Causes of Animal and Plant Extinction, and Its Effects on Humans
• Ultimate Extinction of the Promiscuous Bisexual Galton-Watson Metapopulation
• Saving the Cheetahs of the Serengeti from Extinction
• The Influx of New Languages and Its Dangers to the Extinction of the English Language
• The First Great Whale Extinction: The End of the Bowhead Whale in the Eastern Arctic
• Causes of Canine Extinction and Disappearing Species
• The Themes of Isolation, Extinction and Man’s Limitations in the Poetry of Robert Frost
• The Viability of the Catastrophism Theory in Dinosaur Extinction
• Why The Asian Small-Clawed Otter Is At The Brink Of Extinction
• Species Extinction To Environmental Deterioration
• The Extinction Of Neanderthals And Early Modern Humans
• Did Humans Cause the Mass Extinction of Megafauna During the Late Pleistocene?
• What Are the Consequences of the Extinction of an Organism for the Food Web?
• What Do We Mean by Extinction?
• What Was the Worst Extinction in History?
• What Are the Five Major Extinctions in Earth’s History?
• Are We Overdue for a Mass Extinction?
• What Are the Potential Benefits and Consequences of De-extinction?
• What Could Have Caused the Extinction of Dinosaurs?
• What Events Apparently Triggered the Mass Extinction?
• Why Evolution and Extinction Are Essential to Humanity?
• Why the Asian Small-Clawed Otter Is at the Brink of Extinction?
• Will Global Warming Lead to the Mass Extinction of the Worlds Species?
• What Causes Extinction of Animals?
• What Are the Three Types of Extinction?
• What Is the Cause of Extinction and What Are Its Effects?
• What Causes More Extinction?
• Which Is the Main Cause of the Extinction of Several Species?
• How Are Humans Causing Animal Extinction?
• How Will Extinction Affect Humans?
• What Causes Extinction and What Are Its Impacts?
• Why Is Extinction a Problem?
• How Does Extinction Affect Biodiversity?
• How Does Extinction Affect Evolution?
• What Usually Happens After a Mass Extinction?
• What Is the Advantage of Extinction?
• Cruelty to Animals Titles
• Endangered Species Questions
• Invasive Species Titles
• Animal Rights Research Ideas
• Wildlife Ideas
• Zoo Research Ideas
• Cultural Identity Research Topics
• Animal Ethics Research Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 28). 96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/

"96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 28 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples'. 28 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "96 Extinction Essay Topics & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/extinction-essay-topics/.

November 1, 2023

20 min read

Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?

The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis

By Robert Kunzig

Snail Darter Percina tanasi. Listed as Endangered: 1975. Status: Delisted in 2022.

© Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

A Bald Eagle disappeared into the trees on the far bank of the Tennessee River just as the two researchers at the bow of our modest motorboat began hauling in the trawl net. Eagles have rebounded so well that it's unusual not to see one here these days, Warren Stiles of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told me as the net got closer. On an almost cloudless spring morning in the 50th year of the Endangered Species Act, only a third of a mile downstream from the Tennessee Valley Authority's big Nickajack Dam, we were searching for one of the ESA's more notorious beneficiaries: the Snail Darter. A few months earlier Stiles and the FWS had decided that, like the Bald Eagle, the little fish no longer belonged on the ESA's endangered species list. We were hoping to catch the first nonendangered specimen.

Dave Matthews, a TVA biologist, helped Stiles empty the trawl. Bits of wood and rock spilled onto the deck, along with a Common Logperch maybe six inches long. So did an even smaller fish; a hair over two inches, it had alternating vertical bands of dark and light brown, each flecked with the other color, a pattern that would have made it hard to see against the gravelly river bottom. It was a Snail Darter in its second year, Matthews said, not yet full-grown.

Everybody loves a Bald Eagle. There is much less consensus about the Snail Darter. Yet it epitomizes the main controversy still swirling around the ESA, signed into law on December 28, 1973, by President Richard Nixon: Can we save all the obscure species of this world, and should we even try, if they get in the way of human imperatives? The TVA didn't think so in the 1970s, when the plight of the Snail Darter—an early entry on the endangered species list—temporarily stopped the agency from completing a huge dam. When the U.S. attorney general argued the TVA's case before the Supreme Court with the aim of sidestepping the law, he waved a jar that held a dead, preserved Snail Darter in front of the nine judges in black robes, seeking to convey its insignificance.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Now I was looking at a living specimen. It darted around the bottom of a white bucket, bonking its nose against the side and delicately fluttering the translucent fins that swept back toward its tail.

“It's kind of cute,” I said.

Matthews laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “I like this guy!” he said. “Most people are like, ‘Really? That's it?’ ” He took a picture of the fish and clipped a sliver off its tail fin for DNA analysis but left it otherwise unharmed. Then he had me pour it back into the river. The next trawl, a few miles downstream, brought up seven more specimens.

In the late 1970s the Snail Darter seemed confined to a single stretch of a single tributary of the Tennessee River, the Little Tennessee, and to be doomed by the TVA's ill-considered Tellico Dam, which was being built on the tributary. The first step on its twisting path to recovery came in 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, surprisingly, that the ESA gave the darter priority even over an almost finished dam. “It was when the government stood up and said, ‘Every species matters, and we meant it when we said we're going to protect every species under the Endangered Species Act,’” says Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus. Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Delisted in 2007. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Today the Snail Darter can be found along 400 miles of the river's main stem and multiple tributaries. ESA enforcement has saved dozens of other species from extinction. Bald Eagles, American Alligators and Peregrine Falcons are just a few of the roughly 60 species that had recovered enough to be “delisted” by late 2023.

And yet the U.S., like the planet as a whole, faces a growing biodiversity crisis. Less than 6 percent of the animals and plants ever placed on the list have been delisted; many of the rest have made scant progress toward recovery. What's more, the list is far from complete: roughly a third of all vertebrates and vascular plants in the U.S. are vulnerable to extinction, says Bruce Stein, chief scientist at the National Wildlife Federation. Populations are falling even for species that aren't yet in danger. “There are a third fewer birds flying around now than in the 1970s,” Stein says. We're much less likely to see a White-throated Sparrow or a Red-winged Blackbird, for example, even though neither species is yet endangered.

The U.S. is far emptier of wildlife sights and sounds than it was 50 years ago, primarily because habitat—forests, grasslands, rivers—has been relentlessly appropriated for human purposes. The ESA was never designed to stop that trend, any more than it is equipped to deal with the next massive threat to wildlife: climate change. Nevertheless, its many proponents say, it is a powerful, foresightful law that we could implement more wisely and effectively, perhaps especially to foster stewardship among private landowners. And modest new measures, such as the Recovering America's Wildlife Act—a bill with bipartisan support—could further protect flora and fauna.

That is, if special interests don't flout the law. After the 1978 Supreme Court decision, Congress passed a special exemption to the ESA allowing the TVA to complete the Tellico Dam. The Snail Darter managed to survive because the TVA transplanted some of the fish from the Little Tennessee, because remnant populations turned up elsewhere in the Tennessee Valley, and because local rivers and streams slowly became less polluted following the 1972 Clean Water Act, which helped fish rebound.

Under pressure from people enforcing the ESA, the TVA also changed the way it managed its dams throughout the valley. It started aerating the depths of its reservoirs, in some places by injecting oxygen. It began releasing water from the dams more regularly to maintain a minimum flow that sweeps silt off the river bottom, exposing the clean gravel that Snail Darters need to lay their eggs and feed on snails. The river system “is acting more like a real river,” Matthews says. Basically, the TVA started considering the needs of wildlife, which is really what the ESA requires. “The Endangered Species Act works,” Matthews says. “With just a little bit of help, [wildlife] can recover.”

The trouble is that many animals and plants aren't getting that help—because government resources are too limited, because private landowners are alienated by the ESA instead of engaged with it, and because as a nation the U.S. has never fully committed to the ESA's essence. Instead, for half a century, the law has been one more thing that polarizes people's thinking.

I t may seem impossible today to imagine the political consensus that prevailed on environmental matters in 1973. The U.S. Senate approved the ESA unanimously, and the House passed it by a vote of 390 to 12. “Some people have referred to it as almost a statement of religion coming out of the Congress,” says Gary Frazer, who as assistant director for ecological services at the FWS has been overseeing the act's implementation for nearly 25 years.

Gopher Tortoise Gopherus polyphemus . Listed as Threatened: 1987. Status: Still threatened. Credit: ©Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

But loss of faith began five years later with the Snail Darter case. Congresspeople who had been thinking of eagles, bears and Whooping Cranes when they passed the ESA, and had not fully appreciated the reach of the sweeping language they had approved, were disabused by the Supreme Court. It found that the legislation had created, “wisely or not ... an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species,” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said after the Snail Darter case concluded. Even a recently discovered tiny fish had to be saved, “whatever the cost,” he wrote in the decision.

Was that wise? For both environmentalists such as Curry and many nonenvironmentalists, the answer has always been absolutely. The ESA “is the basic Bill of Rights for species other than ourselves,” says National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, who is building a “photo ark” of every animal visible to the naked eye as a record against extinction. (He has taken studio portraits of 15,000 species so far.) But to critics, the Snail Darter decision always defied common sense. They thought it was “crazy,” says Michael Bean, a leading ESA expert, now retired from the Environmental Defense Fund. “That dichotomy of view has remained with us for the past 45 years.”

According to veteran Washington, D.C., environmental attorney Lowell E. Baier, author of a new history called The Codex of the Endangered Species Act, both the act itself and its early implementation reflected a top-down, federal “command-and-control mentality” that still breeds resentment. FWS field agents in the early days often saw themselves as combat biologists enforcing the act's prohibitions. After the Northern Spotted Owl's listing got tangled up in a bitter 1990s conflict over logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, the FWS became more flexible in working out arrangements. “But the dark mythology of the first 20 years continues in the minds of much of America,” Baier says.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( map ); Source: David Matthews, Tennessee Valley Authority ( reference )

The law can impose real burdens on landowners. Before doing anything that might “harass” or “harm” an endangered species, including modifying its habitat, they need to get a permit from the FWS and present a “habitat conservation plan.” Prosecutions aren't common, because evidence can be elusive, but what Bean calls “the cloud of uncertainty” surrounding what landowners can and cannot do can be distressing.

Requirements the ESA places on federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management—or on the TVA—can have large economic impacts. Section 7 of the act prohibits agencies from taking, permitting or funding any action that is likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of a listed species. If jeopardy seems possible, the agency must consult with the FWS first (or the National Marine Fisheries Service for marine species) and seek alternative plans.

“When people talk about how the ESA stops projects, they've been talking about section 7,” says conservation biologist Jacob Malcom. The Northern Spotted Owl is a strong example: an economic analysis suggests the logging restrictions eliminated thousands of timber-industry jobs, fueling conservative arguments that the ESA harms humans and economic growth.

In recent decades, however, that view has been based “on anecdote, not evidence,” Malcom claims. At Defenders of Wildlife, where he worked until 2022 (he's now at the U.S. Department of the Interior), he and his colleagues analyzed 88,290 consultations between the FWS and other agencies from 2008 to 2015. “Zero projects were stopped,” Malcom says. His group also found that federal agencies were only rarely taking the active measures to recover a species that section 7 requires—like what the TVA did for the Snail Darter. For many listed species, the FWS does not even have recovery plans.

Endangered species also might not recover because “most species are not receiving protection until they have reached dangerously low population sizes,” according to a 2022 study by Erich K. Eberhard of Columbia University and his colleagues. Most listings occur only after the FWS has been petitioned or sued by an environmental group—often the Center for Biological Diversity, which claims credit for 742 listings. Years may go by between petition and listing, during which time the species' population dwindles. Noah Greenwald, the center's endangered species director, thinks the FWS avoids listings to avoid controversy—that it has internalized opposition to the ESA.

He and other experts also say that work regarding endangered species is drastically underfunded. As more species are listed, the funding per species declines. “Congress hasn't come to grips with the biodiversity crisis,” says Baier, who lobbies lawmakers regularly. “When you talk to them about biodiversity, their eyes glaze over.” Just this year federal lawmakers enacted a special provision exempting the Mountain Valley Pipeline from the ESA and other challenges, much as Congress had exempted the Tellico Dam. Environmentalists say the gas pipeline, running from West Virginia to Virginia, threatens the Candy Darter, a colorful small fish. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided a rare bit of good news: it granted the FWS $62.5 million to hire more biologists to prepare recovery plans.

The ESA is often likened to an emergency room for species: overcrowded and understaffed, it has somehow managed to keep patients alive, but it doesn't do much more. The law contains no mandate to restore ecosystems to health even though it recognizes such work as essential for thriving wildlife. “Its goal is to make things better, but its tools are designed to keep things from getting worse,” Bean says. Its ability to do even that will be severely tested in coming decades by threats it was never designed to confront.

T he ESA requires a species to be listed as “threatened” if it might be in danger of extinction in the “foreseeable future.” The foreseeable future will be warmer. Rising average temperatures are a problem, but higher heat extremes are a bigger threat, according to a 2020 study.

Scientists have named climate change as the main cause of only a few extinctions worldwide. But experts expect that number to surge. Climate change has been “a factor in almost every species we've listed in at least the past 15 years,” Frazer says. Yet scientists struggle to forecast whether individual species can “persist in place or shift in space”—as Stein and his co-authors put it in a recent paper—or will be unable to adapt at all and will go extinct. On June 30 the FWS issued a new rule that will make it easier to move species outside their historical range—a practice it once forbade except in extreme circumstances.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( graphic ); Brown Bird Design ( illustrations ); Sources: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Environmental Conservation Online System; U.S. Federal Endangered and Threatened Species by Calendar Year https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-listings-by-year-totals ( annual data through 2022 ); Listed Species Summary (Boxscore) https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/boxscore ( cumulative data up to September 18, 2023, and annual data for coral ); Delisted Species https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-delisted ( delisted data through 2022 )

Eventually, though, “climate change is going to swamp the ESA,” says J. B. Ruhl, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been writing about the problem for decades. “As more and more species are threatened, I don't know what the agency does with that.” To offer a practical answer, in a 2008 paper he urged the FWS to aggressively identify the species most at risk and not waste resources on ones that seem sure to expire.

Yet when I asked Frazer which urgent issues were commanding his attention right now, his first thought wasn't climate; it was renewable energy. “Renewable energy is going to leave a big footprint on the planet and on our country,” he says, some of it threatening plants and animals if not implemented well. “The Inflation Reduction Act is going to lead to an explosion of more wind and solar across the landscape.

Long before President Joe Biden signed that landmark law, conflicts were proliferating: Desert Tortoise versus solar farms in the Mojave Desert, Golden Eagles versus wind farms in Wyoming, Tiehm's Buckwheat (a little desert flower) versus lithium mining in Nevada. The mine case is a close parallel to that of Snail Darters versus the Tellico Dam. The flower, listed as endangered just last year, grows on only a few acres of mountainside in western Nevada, right where a mining company wants to extract lithium. The Center for Biological Diversity has led the fight to save it. Elsewhere in Nevada people have used the ESA to stop, for the moment, a proposed geothermal plant that might threaten the two-inch Dixie Valley Toad, discovered in 2017 and also declared endangered last year.

Does an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species make sense in such places? In a recent essay entitled “A Time for Triage,” Columbia law professor Michael Gerrard argues that “the environmental community has trade-off denial. We don't recognize that it's too late to preserve everything we consider precious.” In his view, given the urgency of building the infrastructure to fight climate change, we need to be willing to let a species go after we've done our best to save it. Environmental lawyers adept at challenging fossil-fuel projects, using the ESA and other statutes, should consider holding their fire against renewable installations. “Just because you have bullets doesn't mean you shoot them in every direction,” Gerrard says. “You pick your targets.” In the long run, he and others argue, climate change poses a bigger threat to wildlife than wind turbines and solar farms do.

For now habitat loss remains the overwhelming threat. What's truly needed to preserve the U.S.'s wondrous biodiversity, both Stein and Ruhl say, is a national network of conserved ecosystems. That won't be built with our present politics. But two more practical initiatives might help.

The first is the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, which narrowly missed passage in 2022 and has been reintroduced this year. It builds on the success of the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act, which funds state wildlife agencies through a federal excise tax on guns and ammunition. That law was adopted to address a decline in game species that had hunters alarmed. The state refuges and other programs it funded are why deer, ducks and Wild Turkeys are no longer scarce.

The recovery act would provide $1.3 billion a year to states and nearly $100 million to Native American tribes to conserve nongame species. It has bipartisan support, in part, Stein says, because it would help arrest the decline of a species before the ESA's “regulatory hammer” falls. Although it would be a large boost to state wildlife budgets, the funding would be a rounding error in federal spending. But last year Congress couldn't agree on how to pay for the measure. Passage “would be a really big deal for nature,” Curry says.

Oyster Mussel. Epioblasma capsaeformis.  Listed as Endangered: 1997. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The second initiative that could promote species conservation is already underway: bringing landowners into the fold. Most wildlife habitat east of the Rocky Mountains is on private land. That's also where habitat loss is happening fastest. Some experts say conservation isn't likely to succeed unless the FWS works more collaboratively with landowners, adding carrots to the ESA's regulatory stick. Bean has long promoted the idea, including when he worked at the Interior Department from 2009 to early 2017. The approach started, he says, with the Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

When the ESA was passed, there were fewer than 10,000 Red-cockaded Woodpeckers left of the millions that had once lived in the Southeast. Humans had cut down the old pine trees, chiefly Longleaf Pine, that the birds excavate cavities in for roosting and nesting. An appropriate tree has to be large, at least 60 to 80 years old, and there aren't many like that left. The longleaf forest, which once carpeted up to 90 million acres from Virginia to Texas, has been reduced to less than three million acres of fragments.

In the 1980s the ESA wasn't helping because it provided little incentive to preserve forest on private land. In fact, Bean says, it did the opposite: landowners would sometimes clear-cut potential woodpecker habitat just to avoid the law's constraints. The woodpecker population continued to drop until the 1990s. That's when Bean and his Environmental Defense Fund colleagues persuaded the FWS to adopt “safe-harbor agreements” as a simple solution. An agreement promised landowners that if they let pines grow older or took other woodpecker-friendly measures, they wouldn't be punished; they remained free to decide later to cut the forest back to the baseline condition it had been in when the agreement was signed.

That modest carrot was inducement enough to quiet the chainsaws in some places. “The downward trends have been reversed,” Bean says. “In places like South Carolina, where they have literally hundreds of thousands of acres of privately owned forest enrolled, Red-cockaded Woodpecker numbers have shot up dramatically.”

The woodpecker is still endangered. It still needs help. Because there aren't enough old pines, land managers are inserting lined, artificial cavities into younger trees and sometimes moving birds into them to expand the population. They are also using prescribed fires or power tools to keep the longleaf understory open and grassy, the way fires set by lightning or Indigenous people once kept it and the way the woodpeckers like it. Most of this work is taking place, and most Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are still living, on state or federal land such as military bases. But a lot more longleaf must be restored to get the birds delisted, which means collaborating with private landowners, who own 80 percent of the habitat.

Leo Miranda-Castro, who retired last December as director of the FWS's southeast region, says the collaborative approach took hold at regional headquarters in Atlanta in 2010. The Center for Biological Diversity had dropped a “mega petition” demanding that the FWS consider 404 new species for listing. The volume would have been “overwhelming,” Miranda-Castro says. “That's when we decided, ‘Hey, we cannot do this in the traditional way.’ The fear of listing so many species was a catalyst” to look for cases where conservation work might make a listing unnecessary.

An agreement affecting the Gopher Tortoise shows what is possible. Like the woodpeckers, it is adapted to open-canopied longleaf forests, where it basks in the sun, feeds on herbaceous plants and digs deep burrows in the sandy soil. The tortoise is a keystone species: more than 300 other animals, including snakes, foxes and skunks, shelter in its burrows. But its numbers have been declining for decades.

Urbanization is the main threat to the tortoises, but timberland can be managed in a way that leaves room for them. Eager to keep the species off the list, timber companies, which own 20 million acres in its range, agreed to figure out how to do that—above all by returning fire to the landscape and keeping the canopy open. One timber company, Resource Management Service, said it would restore Longleaf Pine on about 3,700 acres in the Florida panhandle, perhaps expanding to 200,000 acres eventually. It even offered to bring other endangered species onto its land, which delighted Miranda-Castro: “I had never heard about that happening before.” Last fall the FWS announced that the tortoise didn't need to be listed in most of its range.

Miranda-Castro now directs Conservation Without Conflict, an organization that seeks to foster conversation and negotiation in settings where the ESA has more often generated litigation. “For the first 50 years the stick has been used the most,” Miranda-Castro says. “For the next 50 years we're going to be using the carrots way more.” On his own farm outside Fort Moore, Ga., he grows Longleaf Pine—and Gopher Tortoises are benefiting.

Whooping Crane. Grus americana.  Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The Center for Biological Diversity doubts that carrots alone will save the reptile. It points out that the FWS's own models show small subpopulations vanishing over the next few decades and the total population falling by nearly a third. In August 2023 it filed suit against the FWS, demanding the Gopher Tortoise be listed.

The FWS itself resorted to the stick this year when it listed the Lesser Prairie-Chicken, a bird whose grassland home in the Southern Plains has long been encroached on by agriculture and the energy industry. The Senate promptly voted to overturn that listing, but President Biden promised to veto that measure if it passes the House.

B ehind the debates over strategy lurks the vexing question: Can we save all species? The answer is no. Extinctions will keep happening. In 2021 the FWS proposed to delist 23 more species—not because they had recovered but because they hadn't been seen in decades and were presumed gone. There is a difference, though, between acknowledging the reality of extinction and deliberately deciding to let a species go. Some people are willing to do the latter; others are not. Bean thinks a person's view has a lot to do with how much they've been exposed to wildlife, especially as a child.

Zygmunt Plater, a professor emeritus at Boston College Law School, was the attorney in the 1978 Snail Darter case, fighting for hundreds of farmers whose land would be submerged by the Tellico Dam. At one point in the proceedings Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., asked him, “What purpose is served, if any, by these little darters? Are they used for food?” Plater thinks creatures such as the darter alert us to the threat our actions pose to them and to ourselves. They prompt us to consider alternatives.

The ESA aims to save species, but for that to happen, ecosystems have to be preserved. Protecting the Northern Spotted Owl has saved at least a small fraction of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. Concern about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and the Gopher Tortoise is aiding the preservation of longleaf forests in the Southeast. The Snail Darter wasn't enough to stop the Tellico Dam, which drowned historic Cherokee sites and 300 farms, mostly for real estate development. But after the controversy, the presence of a couple of endangered mussels did help dissuade the TVA from completing yet another dam, on the Duck River in central Tennessee. That river is now recognized as one of the most biodiverse in North America.

The ESA forced states to take stock of the wildlife they harbored, says Jim Williams, who as a young biologist with the FWS was responsible for listing both the Snail Darter and mussels in the Duck River. Williams grew up in Alabama, where I live. “We didn't know what the hell we had,” he says. “People started looking around and found all sorts of new species.” Many were mussels and little fish. In a 2002 survey, Stein found that Alabama ranked fifth among U.S. states in species diversity. It also ranks second-highest for extinctions; of the 23 extinct species the FWS recently proposed for delisting, eight were mussels, and seven of those were found in Alabama.

One morning this past spring, at a cabin on the banks of Shoal Creek in northern Alabama, I attended a kind of jamboree of local freshwater biologists. At the center of the action, in the shade of a second-floor deck, sat Sartore. He had come to board more species onto his photo ark, and the biologists—most of them from the TVA—were only too glad to help, fanning out to collect critters to be decanted into Sartore's narrow, flood-lit aquarium. He sat hunched before it, a black cloth draped over his head and camera, snapping away like a fashion photographer, occasionally directing whoever was available to prod whatever animal was in the tank into a more artful pose.

As I watched, he photographed a striated darter that didn't yet have a name, a Yellow Bass, an Orangefin Shiner and a giant crayfish discovered in 2011 in the very creek we were at. Sartore's goal is to help people who never meet such creatures feel the weight of extinction—and to have a worthy remembrance of the animals if they do vanish from Earth.

With TVA biologist Todd Amacker, I walked down to the creek and sat on the bank. Amacker is a mussel specialist, following in Williams's footsteps. As his colleagues waded in the shoals with nets, he gave me a quick primer on mussel reproduction. Their peculiar antics made me care even more about their survival.

There are hundreds of freshwater mussel species, Amacker explained, and almost every one tricks a particular species of fish into raising its larvae. The Wavy-rayed Lampmussel, for example, extrudes part of its flesh in the shape of a minnow to lure black bass—and then squirts larvae into the bass's open mouth so they can latch on to its gills and fatten on its blood. Another mussel dangles its larvae at the end of a yard-long fishing line of mucus. The Duck River Darter Snapper—a member of a genus that has already lost most of its species to extinction—lures and then clamps its shell shut on the head of a hapless fish, inoculating it with larvae. “You can't make this up,” Amacker said. Each relationship has evolved over the ages in a particular place.

The small band of biologists who are trying to cultivate the endangered mussels in labs must figure out which fish a particular mussel needs. It's the type of tedious trial-and-error work conservation biologists call “heroic,” the kind that helped to save California Condors and Whooping Cranes. Except these mussels are eyeless, brainless, little brown creatures that few people have ever heard of.

For most mussels, conditions are better now than half a century ago, Amacker said. But some are so rare it's hard to imagine they can be saved. I asked Amacker whether it was worth the effort or whether we just need to accept that we must let some species go. The catch in his voice almost made me regret the question.

“I'm not going to tell you it's not worth the effort,” he said. “It's more that there's no hope for them.” He paused, then collected himself. “Who are we to be the ones responsible for letting a species die?” he went on. “They've been around so long. That's not my answer as a biologist; that's my answer as a human. Who are we to make it happen?”

Robert Kunzig is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala., and a former senior editor at National Geographic, Discover and Scientific American .

 / 

Conservation

In defense of biodiversity: why protecting species from extinction matters.

By Carl Safina • February 12, 2018

A number of biologists have recently made the argument that extinction is part of evolution and that saving species need not be a conservation priority. But this revisionist thinking shows a lack of understanding of evolution and an ignorance of the natural world. 

A few years ago, I helped lead a ship-based expedition along south Alaska during which several scientists and noted artists documented and made art from the voluminous plastic trash that washes ashore even there. At Katmai National Park, we packed off several tons of trash from as distant as South Asia. But what made Katmai most memorable was: huge brown bears. Mothers and cubs were out on the flats digging clams. Others were snoozing on dunes. Others were patrolling.

During a rest, several of us were sitting on an enormous drift-log, watching one mother who’d been clamming with three cubs. As the tide flooded the flat, we watched in disbelief as she brought her cubs up to where we were sitting — and stepped up on the log we were on. There was no aggression, no tension; she was relaxed. We gave her some room as she paused on the log, and then she took her cubs past us into a sedge meadow. Because she was so calm, I felt no fear. I felt the gift.

In this protected refuge, bears could afford a generous view of humans. Whoever protected this land certainly had my gratitude.

In the early 20th century, a botanist named Robert F. Griggs discovered Katmai’s volcanic “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.” In love with the area, he spearheaded efforts to preserve the region’s wonders and wildlife. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson established Katmai National Monument (now Katmai National Park and Preserve ), protecting 1,700 square miles, thus ensuring a home for bear cubs born a century later, and making possible my indelible experience that day. As a legacy for Griggs’ proclivity to share his love of living things, George Washington University later established the Robert F. Griggs Chair in Biology.

That chair is now occupied by a young professor whose recent writing probably has Griggs spinning in his grave. He is R. Alexander Pyron . A few months ago,  The Washington Post published a “ Perspective” piece by Pyron that is an extreme example of a growing minority opinion in the conservation community, one that might be summarized as, “Humans are profoundly altering the planet, so let’s just make peace with the degradation of the natural world.” 

No biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron’s essay – with lines such as, “The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings” and “[T]he impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency” – left the impression that it was written in a conservative think tank, perhaps by one of the anti-regulatory zealots now filling posts throughout the Trump administration. Pyron’s sentiments weren’t merely oddly out of keeping with the legacy of the man whose name graces his job title. Much of what Pyron wrote is scientifically inaccurate. And where he stepped out of his field into ethics, what he wrote was conceptually confused.

Pyron has since posted, on his website and Facebook page, 1,100 words of frantic backpedaling that land somewhere between apology and retraction, including mea culpas that he “sensationalized” parts of his own argument and “cavalierly glossed over several complex issues.” But Pyron’s original essay and his muddled apology do not change the fact that the beliefs he expressed reflect a disturbing trend that has taken hold among segments of the conservation community. And his article comes at a time when conservation is being assailed from other quarters, with a half-century of federal protections of land being rolled back, the Endangered Species Act now more endangered than ever, and the relationship between extinction and evolution being subjected to confused, book-length mistreatment.

Pyron’s original opinion piece, so clear and unequivocal in its assertions, is a good place to unpack and disentangle accelerating misconceptions about the “desirability” of extinction that are starting to pop up like hallucinogenic mushrooms.

In recent years, some biologists and writers have been distancing themselves from conservation’s bedrock idea that in an increasingly human-dominated world we must find ways to protect and perpetuate natural beauty, wild places, and the living endowment of the planet. In their stead, we are offered visions of human-dominated landscapes in which the stresses of destruction and fragmentation spur evolution. 

White rhinoceros ( Ceratotherium simum ). Source: Herman Pijpers/ Flickr

Conservation International ditched its exuberant tropical forest graphic for  a new corporate logo  whose circle and line were designed to suggest a human head and outstretched arms. A few years ago, Peter Kareiva, then chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy,  said , “conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness,” for  “a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.” Human annihilation of the passenger pigeon, he wrote, caused “no catastrophic or even measurable effects,” characterizing the total extinction of the hemisphere’s most abundant bird — whose population went from billions to zero inside a century (certainly a “measurable effect” in itself) — as an example of nature’s “resilience.”

British ecologist Chris Thomas’s recent book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, argues that the destruction of nature creates opportunities for evolution of new lifeforms that counterbalance any losses we create, an idea that is certainly optimistic considering the burgeoning lists of endangered species. Are we really ready to consider that disappearing rhinos are somehow counterbalanced by a new subspecies of daisy in a railroad track? Maybe it would be simpler if Thomas and his comrades just said, “We don’t care about nature.’’

Enter Pyron, who — at least in his initial essay — basically said he doesn’t. He’s entitled to his apathy, but no biologist is entitled to butcher the scientific fundamentals on which they hang their opinions.

Pyron began with a resonant story about his nocturnal rediscovery of a South American frog that had been thought recently extinct. He and colleagues collected several that, he reassured us, “are now breeding safely in captivity.” As we breathed a sigh of relief, Pyron added, “But they will go extinct one day, and the world will be none the poorer for it.” 

The conviction that today’s slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable spurred the founding of the conservation movement.

I happen to be writing this in the Peruvian Amazon, having just returned from a night walk to a light-trap where I helped a biologist collect moths. No one yet knows how many species live here. Moths are important pollinators. Knowing them helps detangle a little bit of how this rainforest works. So it’s a good night to mention that the number of species in an area carries the technical term “species richness.” More is richer, and fewer is, indeed, poorer. Pyron’s view lies outside scientific consensus and societal values. 

Pyron wasn’t concerned about his frogs going extinct, because, “Eventually, they will be replaced by a dozen or a hundred new species that evolve later.” But the timescale would be millennia at best — meaningless in human terms — and perhaps never; hundreds of amphibians worldwide are suffering declines and extinctions, raising the possibility that major lineages and whole groups of species will vanish. Pyron seemed to have no concerns about that possibility, writing, “Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years.”

But that’s misleading. “Periodically” implies regularity. There’s no regularity to mass extinctions. Not in their timing, nor in their causes. The mass extinctions are not related. Three causes of mass extinctions — prolonged worldwide atmosphere-altering volcanic eruptions; a dinosaur-snuffing asteroid hit; and the spreading agriculture, settlement, and sheer human appetite driving extinctions today — are unrelated.

Rio Pescado stubfoot toad ( Atelopus balios ). Source: De Investigación y Conservación de Anfibios/ Flickr

The conviction that today’s slides toward mass extinction are not inevitable, and could be lessened or avoided, spurred the founding of the conservation movement and created the discipline of conservation biology.

But Pyron seems unmoved. “Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish,” he declared. “Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an ‘endangered species,’ except for all species.”

Let us unpack. Extinction is not evolution’s driver; survival is. The engine of evolution is survival amidst competition. It’s a little like what drives innovation in business. To see this, let’s simply compare the species diversity of the Northern Hemisphere, where periodic ice sheets largely wiped the slate clean, with those of the tropics, where the evolutionary time clock continued running throughout. A couple of acres in eastern temperate North America might have a dozen tree species or fewer. In the Amazon a similar area can have 300 tree species. All of North American has 1,400 species of trees; Brazil has 8,800. All of North America has just over 900 birds; Colombia has 1,900 species. All of North America has 722 butterfly species. Where I am right now, along the Tambopata River in Peru, biologists have tallied around 1,200 butterfly species.

Competition among living species drives proliferation into diversified specialties. Specialists increasingly exploit narrowing niches. We can think of this as a marketplace of life, where little competition necessitates little specialization, thus little proliferation. An area with many types of trees, for instance, directly causes the evolution of many types of highly specialized pollinating insects, hummingbirds, and pollinating bats, who visit only the “right” trees. Many flowering plants are pollinated by just one specialized species.

Pyron muddles several kinds of extinctions, then serves up further misunderstanding of how evolution works. So let’s clarify. Mass extinctions are global; they involve the whole planet. There have been five mass extinctions and we’ve created a sixth . Past mass extinctions happened when the entire planet became more hostile. Regional wipeouts, as occurred during the ice ages, are not considered mass extinctions, even though many species can go extinct. Even without these major upheavals there are always a few species blinking out due to environmental changes or new competitors. And there are pseudo-extinctions where old forms no longer exist, but only because their descendants have changed through time. 

New species do not suddenly “arise,” nor are they really new. They evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change.

Crucially for understanding the relationship between extinction and evolution is this: New species do not suddenly “arise,” nor are they really new. New species evolve from existing species, as population gene pools change. Many “extinct” species never really died out; they just changed into what lives now. Not all the dinosaurs went extinct; theropod dinosaurs survived. They no longer exist because they evolved into what we call birds. Australopithecines no longer exist, but they did not all go extinct. Their children morphed into the genus Homo, and the tool- and fire-making Homo erectus may well have survived to become us. If they indeed are our direct ancestor — as some species was — they are gone now, but no more “extinct” than our own childhood. All species come from ancestors, in lineages that have survived.

Pyron’s contention that the “hardiest” flourish is a common misconception. A sloth needs to be slow; a faster sloth is going to wind up as dinner in a harpy eagle nest. A white bear is not “hardier” than a brown one; the same white fur that provides camouflage in a snowy place will scare away prey in green meadow. Bears with genes for white fur flourished in the Arctic, while brown bears did well amidst tundra and forests. Polar bears evolved from brown bears of the tundra; they got so specialized that they separated, then specialized further. Becoming a species is a process, not an event. “New” species are simply specialized descendants of old species.

True extinctions beget nothing. Humans have recently sped the extinction rate by about a thousand times compared to the fossil record. The fact that the extinction of dinosaurs was followed, over tens of millions of years, by a proliferation of mammals, is irrelevant to present-day decisions about rhinos, elephant populations, or monarch butterflies. Pyron’s statement, “There is no such thing as an ‘endangered species,’ except for all species,” is like saying there are no endangered children except for all children. It’s like answering “Black lives matter” with “All lives matter.” It’s a way of intentionally missing the point. 

Chestnut-sided warbler ( Setophaga pensylvanica ). Source: Francesco Veronesi/ Wikimedia

Here’s the point: All life today represents non-extinctions; each species, every living individual, is part of a lineage that has not gone extinct in a billion years.

Pyron also expressed the opinion that “the only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves …” I don’t know of another biologist who shares this opinion. Pyron’s statement makes little practical sense, because reducing the diversity and abundance of the living world will rob human generations of choices, as values change. Save the passenger pigeon? Too late for that. Whales? A few people acted in time to keep most of them. Elephants? Our descendants will either revile or revere us for what we do while we have the planet’s reins in our hands for a few minutes. We are each newly arrived and temporary tourists on this planet, yet we find ourselves custodians of the world for all people yet unborn. A little humility, and forbearance, might comport.

Thus Pyron’s most jarring assertion: “Extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it.” That statement is a stranger to thousands of years of philosophy on moral agency and reveals an ignorance of human moral thinking. Moral agency issues from an ability to consider consequences. Humans are the species most capable of such consideration. Thus many philosophers consider humans the only creatures capable of acting as moral agents. An asteroid strike, despite its consequences, has no moral significance. Protecting bears by declaring Katmai National Monument, or un-protecting Bears Ears National Monument, are acts of moral agency. Ending genetic lineages millions of years old, either actively or by the willful neglect that Pyron advocates, certainly qualifies as morally significant.

Do we really wish a world with only what we “rely on for food and shelter?” Do animals have no value if we don’t eat them?

How can we even decide which species we “directly depend’’ upon? We don’t directly depend on peacocks or housecats, leopards or leopard frogs, humpback whales or hummingbirds or chestnut-sided warblers or millions of others. Do we really wish a world with only what we “rely on for food and shelter,” as Pyron seemed to advocate? Do animals have no value if we don’t eat them? I happen not to view my dogs as food, for instance. Things we “rely on” make life possible, sure, but the things we don’t need make life worthwhile.

When Pyron wrote, “Conservation is needed for ourselves and only ourselves… If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it,” he expressed a dereliction of the love, fascination, and perspective that motivates the practice of biology.

Here is a real biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection:

I thought of the long ages of the past during which the successive generations of these things of beauty had run their course … with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness, to all appearances such a wanton waste of beauty… . This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man… . Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone. —The Malay Archipelago, 1869

At the opposite pole of Wallace’s human insight and wonder, Pyron asked us to become complicit in extinction. “The goals of species conservation have to be aligned with the acceptance that large numbers of animals will go extinct,” he asserted. “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be  threatened  with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species … The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”

African elephant ( Loxodonta africana ). Source: Flowcomm/ Flickr

Right now, in the Amazon as I type, listening to nocturnal birds and bugs and frogs in this towering emerald cathedral of life, thinking such as Pyron’s strikes me as failing to grasp both the living world and the human spirit. 

The massive destruction that Pyron seems to so cavalierly accept isn’t necessary. When I was a kid, there were no ospreys, no bald eagles, no peregrine falcons left around New York City and Long Island where I lived. DDT and other hard pesticides were erasing them from the world. A small handful of passionate people sued to get those pesticides banned, others began breeding captive falcons for later release, and one biologist brought osprey eggs to nests of toxically infertile parents to keep faltering populations on life support. These projects succeeded. All three of these species have recovered spectacularly and now again nest near my Long Island home. Extinction wasn’t a cost of progress; it was an unnecessary cost of carelessness. Humans could work around the needs of these birds, and these creatures could exist around development. But it took some thinking, some hard work, and some tinkering.

It’s not that anyone thinks humans have not greatly changed the world, or will stop changing it. Rather, as the great wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote in his 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac , “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Related Articles

The ‘internet of animals’ could transform what we know about wildlife.

By Hillary Rosner

Grim Dilemma: Should We Kill One Owl Species to Save Another?

By Jim Robbins

With CO2 Levels Rising, World’s Drylands Are Turning Green

By Fred Pearce

More From E360

As canadian river shrivels, northern communities call for a highway, as world warms, global heat deaths are grossly undercounted, biodiversity, on gulf coast, an activist rallies her community against gas exports, as world’s springs vanish, ripple effects alter ecosystems, the race to save glacial ice records before they melt away, turning brownfields to blooming meadows, with the help of fungi, to foil a deadly pest, scientists aim for a beetle-resistant ash tree, could the global boom in greenhouses help cool the planet, in north macedonia, an ancient lake faces modern threats.

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Extinction is the dying out of a species. Extinction plays an important role in the evolution of life because it opens up opportunities for new species to emerge.

Biology, Ecology, Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Conservation

Dinogorgon Skull

A dinogorgon skull protrudes from a rock with the South African scrubland in the background.

Photograph by Jonathan Blair

When a species disappears, biologists say that the species has become extinct. By making room for new species, extinction helps drive the evolution of life. Over long periods of time, the number of species becoming extinct can remain fairly constant, meaning that an average number of species go extinct each year, century, or millennium. However, during the history of life on Earth, there have been periods of mass extinction , when large percentages of the planet’s species became extinct in a relatively short amount of time. These extinctions have had widely different causes.

About 541 million years ago, a great expansion occurred in the diversity of multicellular organisms. Paleo biologists , scientists who study the fossils of plants and animals to learn how life evolved, call this event the Cambrian Explosion. Since the Cambrian Explosion, there have been five mass extinctions , each of which is named for the geological period in which it occurred, or for the periods that immediately preceded and followed it.

The first mass extinction is called the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction . It occurred about 440 million years ago, at the end of the period that paleontologists and geologists call the Ordovician, and followed by the start of the Silurian period. In this extinction event, many small organisms of the sea became extinct. The next mass extinction is called Devonian extinction , occurring 365 million years ago during the Devonian period. This extinction also saw the end of numerous sea organisms.

The largest extinction took place around 250 million years ago. Known as the Permian - Triassic extinction, or the Great Dying, this event saw the end of more than 90 percent of Earth’s species. Although life on Earth was nearly wiped out, the Great Dying made room for new organisms, including the first dinosaurs. About 210 million years ago, between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, came another mass extinction. By eliminating many large animals, this extinction event cleared the way for dinosaurs to flourish. Finally, about 65.5 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period came the fifth mass extinction. This is the famous extinction event that brought the age of the dinosaurs to an end.

In each of these cases, the mass extinction created niches or openings in the Earth’s ecosystems. Those niches allowed for new groups of organisms to thrive and diversify, which produced a range of new species. In the case of the Cretaceous extinction , the demise of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to thrive and grow larger.

Scientists refer to the current time as the Anthropocene period, meaning the period of humanity. They warn that, because of human activities such as pollution, overfishing, and the cutting down of forests, the Earth might be on the verge of—or already in—a sixth mass extinction. If that is true, what new life would rise up to fill the niche that we currently occupy?

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Production Managers

Program specialists, last updated.

October 19, 2023

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

Extinct species, explained

Extinctions happen when a species dies out from cataclysmic events, evolutionary problems, or human interference.

The truth is, scientists don’t know how many species of plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria exist on Earth. The most recent estimate put that number at 2 billion , and that will most likely change at some point.

One thing we do know: The western black rhinoceros, the Tasmanian tiger, and the woolly mammoth are among the creatures whose populations at one point dwindled to zero, and it’s possible that species extinction is happening a thousand times more quickly because of humans .

Extinction happens when environmental factors or evolutionary problems cause a species to die out. The disappearance of species from Earth is ongoing, and rates have varied over time. A quarter of mammals is at risk of extinction , according to IUCN Red List estimates.

To some extent, extinction is natural. Changes to habitats and poor reproductive trends are among the factors that can make a species’ death rate higher than its birth rate for long enough that eventually, none are left.

Humans also cause other species to become extinct by hunting, overharvesting, introducing invasive species to the wild, polluting, and changing wetlands and forests to croplands and urban areas. Even the rapid growth of the human population is causing extinction by ruining natural habitats.

Among the most famous species driven to extinction by humans is the dodo , a bird that primarily lived in the island nation of Mauritius and was popularized by its appearance in Lewis Carroll’s book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Dodos were first mentioned by Dutch sailors in the late 16th century and last seen in 1662 after having been hunted to extinction. Passenger pigeons, billions of which frequently blanketed North American skies when Europeans arrived on the continent, went extinct when the last one died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

Six mass extinctions

Fossils show that there have been five previous periods of history when an unusually high number of extinctions occurred in what are known as mass extinctions. Most of the Earth’s species went extinct roughly 266 million to 252 million years ago in the Permian extinction .

Those losses, however, also paved the way for dinosaurs to evolve into existence, as mass extinctions create a chance for new species to emerge. Dinosaurs met their end about 65 million years ago in another mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. A large crater off of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula suggests that an asteroid most likely struck there. Scientists believe that volcanic eruptions in India caused global warming that also may have contributed to the mass extinction.

Scientists are debating whether Earth is now in the midst of a sixth mass extinction . If so, it may be the fastest one ever with a rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times the baseline extinction rate of one to five species per year. Humans are largely responsible for the striking trend. Scientists believe that pollution, land clearing, and overfishing might drive half of the planet’s existing land and marine species to extinction by 2100.

Slowly increasing surface temperatures caused by heightened levels of greenhouse gases likely will cause many species to move toward the Earth’s poles and higher up into the mountains to stay in habitats with the same climates. But not all species will be able to adapt quickly enough to stave off extinction and many are expected to perish.

What can we do about it?

Using fewer fossil fuels by lowering the thermostat, driving less frequently, and recycling is one good way to slow the rate of extinctions. Eating less meat and avoiding products, like ivory, that are made from threatened species also can make a difference. At home, securing garbage in locked cans, reducing water usage, and refraining from using herbicides and pesticides can protect local wildlife.

Related Topics

• EXTINCT SPECIES
• EXTINCTION EVENTS
• PALEOZOIC ERA

You May Also Like

What killed the last woolly mammoths?

Scientists just dug up a new dinosaur—with tinier arms than a T.Rex

There are two northern white rhinos left on Earth. Can a controversial approach save them?

This dinosaur dug its own grave

How an ‘extinct’ cicada was rediscovered 100 years later

• Photography
• Environment

History & Culture

• History & Culture
• History Magazine
• Paid Content
• Destination Guide
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Fighting Extinction: Researching and Designing Solutions to Protect Endangered Species

By Sara Rust

• Oct. 19, 2017

The African wild dog. The Asian elephant. The Eastern lowland gorilla. These are just three of the many vertebrate species facing possible extinction because of human activities. Is there anything we can do to protect endangered species, and slow overall extinction rates?

In this lesson, students use Times reporting to learn about how human activity threatens the Earth’s biodiversity, and they research possible solutions that weigh environmental, economic and social concerns. As a Going Further activity, we invite students to act as citizen scientists addressing the problem in their own communities.

This lesson addresses the Next Generation High School Life Sciences Standard on Ecosystems, particularly HS-LS2-7 , which asks students to design, evaluate, and refine a solution for reducing the impacts of human activities on the environment and biodiversity.

One possible entry point to this discussion is through the vivid, often disturbing pictures in the photo essay “ A Mausoleum for Endangered Species .” You could select one image to show students, or give students access to the full text, and ask them to:

• Describe what you see. • Describe your reaction to seeing these images. • Address: What questions do these images raise for you?

Then hold a brief discussion in small groups or as a class.

Background Reading and Questions

Students can then develop a preliminary understanding of the issue of endangered and extinct species by reading the article “ Era of ‘Biological Annihilation’ Is Underway, Scientists Warn .” After reading, ask them to first write in response to, and then discuss, the following questions:

1. The author writes, “Gerardo Ceballos, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, acknowledged that the study is written in usually alarming tones for an academic research paper. ‘It wouldn’t be ethical right now not to speak in this strong language to call attention to the severity of the problem,’ he said.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• Fundamentals NEW

• Biographies
• Compare Countries
• World Atlas

Extinct Animals

Introduction.

Causes of Extinction

The most common cause of extinction is a sudden, serious change in a species’ habitat. A habitat is the surroundings in which an animal lives. Animals can rarely survive such sudden change. Their food supply may be wiped out. They may also lose shelter or other things that they need to survive.

Many things can change a species’ habitat. Floods, fires, droughts, volcanoes, and other natural events may be causes. People also change the environment in ways that drastically affect animals. People clear forests and drain wetlands. They build dams that disrupt the flow of rivers. They build cities on land that animals need to survive. They also create harmful pollution.

Some changes that cause extinction affect only a small area. Others are large enough to affect the entire world. A fire or other local event may cause the extinction of animals that live only in that region. A sudden change in the global climate might wipe out an animal species that lives in many parts of the world.

People can cause extinctions more directly as well. Some species have been hunted to extinction. The passenger pigeon is one example of this. Humans killed millions of the birds over many years. The last one died in the early 1900s.

Mass Extinctions

Sometimes many different species become extinct in a short time. This is called a mass extinction. Several major mass extinctions have occurred in the past. Each time many animal species were wiped out. Some survived, however, and over millions of years new species developed.

The worst mass extinction happened about 248 million years ago. This extinction included mainly animals without backbones that lived in water. Another mass extinction occurred about 65 million years ago. It wiped out many of the planet’s land animals, including the dinosaurs.

Dinosaur Extinction

Dinosaurs first appeared on Earth about 215 million years ago. They were the most important land animals for more than 150 million years. By 65 million years ago, however, the dinosaurs had died out.

Many scientists believe that a large asteroid, or rock from space, caused this mass extinction. When the asteroid hit Earth, the impact caused drastic changes. Thick dust and other materials blocked the sun. Temperatures dropped, and plants could not grow. The dinosaurs could not survive the cold temperatures and lack of food. But early species of birds and mammals did survive.

Large Mammal Extinction

About 10,000 years ago another mysterious animal extinction occurred. This extinction was especially dramatic in North America, where many large mammals disappeared. Among them were woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats.

Scientists do not know what caused this extinction. Some believe that growing numbers of human beings hunted and killed too many of the animals or their prey. Another theory is that the climate changed and affected the availability of food.

Endangered Species Today

In the past 200 years the world has lost many animal species. Hundreds of others are on the verge of extinction. Animals at risk of dying out are called endangered species .

Governments today are working to protect the world’s endangered species. Laws protect some animals’ habitats from being polluted or destroyed. Other laws make it illegal to hunt endangered animals. Some species respond well to these protective measures and increase in number. Others are not as successful.

It’s here: the NEW Britannica Kids website!

We’ve been busy, working hard to bring you new features and an updated design. We hope you and your family enjoy the NEW Britannica Kids. Take a minute to check out all the enhancements!

• The same safe and trusted content for explorers of all ages.
• Accessible across all of today's devices: phones, tablets, and desktops.
• Improved homework resources designed to support a variety of curriculum subjects and standards.
• A new, third level of content, designed specially to meet the advanced needs of the sophisticated scholar.
• And so much more!

Want to see it in action?

Start a free trial

To share with more than one person, separate addresses with a comma

Choose a language from the menu above to view a computer-translated version of this page. Please note: Text within images is not translated, some features may not work properly after translation, and the translation may not accurately convey the intended meaning. Britannica does not review the converted text.

After translating an article, all tools except font up/font down will be disabled. To re-enable the tools or to convert back to English, click "view original" on the Google Translate toolbar.

• Privacy Notice
• Terms of Use

Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Endangered Species — Endangered Animals: The Causes And How To Protect

Endangered Animals: The Causes and How to Protect

• Categories: Endangered Species

About this sample

Words: 541 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 541 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited:

• Baumeister, R. F., Gailliot, M., DeWall, C. N., & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: How interventions increase regulatory success, and how depletion moderates the effects of traits on behavior. Journal of Personality, 74(6), 1773–1801.
• Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939–944.
• Emerson, R. W. (1841). Self-Reliance. Essays: First Series. https://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm
• Goleman, D. (2013). Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. HarperCollins Publishers.
• Hagger, M. S., Wood, C., Stiff, C., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2010). Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(4), 495–525.
• Hofmann, W., Baumeister, R. F., Förster, G., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Everyday temptations: An experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1318–1335.
• McGonigal, K. (2012). The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Avery.
• Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244(4907), 933–938.
• Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F., & Boone, A. L. (2004). High self‐control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality, 72(2), 271–322.
• Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., & Schmeichel, B. J. (2012). Motivation, personal beliefs, and limited resources all contribute to self-control. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 943–947.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Environment

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3 pages / 1268 words

1 pages / 372 words

3 pages / 1319 words

1 pages / 368 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Endangered Species

Endangered species are those plants and animals that are at significant risk of extinction. This alarming status results from various factors, most notably human activities such as habitat destruction, pollution, overhunting, [...]

Imagine you are an animal. You’ve been wandering the wastelands, which used to be a lush green forest, what used to be your home. Its late spring, right about time for mating season. Normally, you’d be out calling for a mate, [...]

 The job of a marine biologist is to study and conserve the ocean, and all the creatures within it. While their main focus is the water, a lot of their work is conducted on dry land, as they fight for regional laws, fisherman [...]

Red pandas are “raccoon-like” animals with fluffy fur ranging from orange, brown, black, and white. The red panda is found in Central China, Nepal, Burma, and other places in the surrounding area. They live in isolated mountain [...]

Giant pandas, or Ailuropoda, are one of the most beloved and iconic animals in the world. Their distinctive black and white fur, gentle demeanor, and unique diet of bamboo have captivated people around the globe. However, the [...]

Endangerment is a bigger issue, one of them that include the animals as well as the atmosphere where they interact with each other and live. To solve or elevate this problem every aspect related to this need to be studied. So, [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Animals Are in Danger of Extinction – Writing Task 2 Agree and Disagree Essay

Updated On Oct 06, 2023

Share on Whatsapp

Share on Email

Share on Linkedin

Table of Contents

Band 8 sample answer for animals are in danger of extinction writing task 2, useful links:.

Limited-Time Offer : Access a FREE 10-Day IELTS Study Plan!

The essay writing section of the IELTS Writing Module can be a difficult task for many IELTS aspirants. Thus, it is vital that you polish your essay writing skills before attempting the IELTS.

Find below the band 8 sample answer for writing task 2 on, “Animals are in danger of extinction.” This Agree or Disagree Essay is a part of Writing Task 2 of the IELTS and is discussed here with an outline and vocabulary that will help you to prepare.

Learn some more Ways to achieve a band score of 8 for Writing Task 2  and check out the IELTS essay for Animals Are in Danger of Extinction given below.

You should spend no more than 40 minutes on this task.

Agree or Disagree Essay

Introduction

Animals are in danger of extinction, globally and it’s a serious concern for many species. While some argue that we should only save species directly benefiting humanity, I firmly disagree with this.

Paragraph 1: Human activity stands as the primary driver of the extinction crisis.

Paragraph 2: Maintaining a balanced ecosystem demands that we take collective action.

Clearly restate points covered in the essay in a summary.

Do you have an essay on this topic?

Post yours in the comment section so that, One of our expert IELTS trainers can evaluate it and reply to your comment!

Get  Evaluated   for FREE!

Animals are in danger of extinction, globally and it’s a serious concern for many species. While some argue that we should only save species directly benefiting humanity, I firmly disagree with this. Prioritizing human needs over animal welfare in safeguarding endangered species seems counterproductive and ethically flawed.

Firstly, human activity stands as the primary driver of the extinction crisis. Moreover, overpopulation, continuous urban expansion, and the relentless exploitation of natural resources have left many species struggling due to habitat loss. People’s actions are not to condone brutality and cruelty, such as encroaching on their homes, exploiting them for sustenance, or wearing their skins as fashion.

Additionally, maintaining a balanced ecosystem demands that we take collective action. Each species plays a unique role, and distancing ourselves from some non-human organisms can have devastating consequences. Focusing solely on species proportionally more useful to us disrupts the delicate food chain, leading to imbalances in animal populations. For example, protecting a predator species on the rise might lead to the sharp decline of specific herbivores, leaving the predator starved and jeopardizing the ecosystem.

In conclusion, our priority should be saving all endangered creatures, not just those benefiting us directly. Compassion, respect for life, and understanding the intricate interconnections of the ecosystem are vital. We must unite to protect animals from extinction, preserving the rich biodiversity that sustains life on Earth. Together, we as humans can start embracing a holistic approach to conservation and safeguard the delicate balance of the planet’s intricate web of life.

Aspiring to Crack the IELTS Writing?

Get expert help today with a  FREE demo   session! Sign up, Now!

1. Extinction

Meaning:  The complete disappearance of a species from the Earth, often due to environmental changes or human activities.

Eg:  Recently, some wild orchids have been threatened with extinction

2. Safeguarding

Meaning: Protecting or ensuring the safety of something, in this context, refers to the protection of endangered species.

Eg:  He was accustomed to hearing and safeguarding the secrets of others.

3. Counterproductive 

Meaning: Having the opposite effect of what is desired or intended, making the situation worse rather than better.

Eg:  Staying up all night to study for that history test will be counterproductive – you’ll be so tired that you won’t remember any of the information you reviewed.

4. Ethically

Meaning:  Relating to principles of right and wrong, particularly in terms of moral conduct and behaviour.

Eg:  Millions of people are deciding to shop ethically and shop less.

5. Ecosystem

Meaning:  A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment, where each species plays a specific role in maintaining the balance of the environment.

Eg:  The marine ecosystem of the northern Gulf had suffered irreparable damage

• People from prison – Agree or disagree essay
• Improve the safety of roads – Agree or disagree essay
• Using the internet in schools – Agree or disagree essay

Explore IELTS Writing

Start Preparing for IELTS: Get Your 10-Day Study Plan Today!

Nehasri Ravishenbagam

Nehasri Ravishenbagam, a Senior Content Marketing Specialist and a Certified IELTS Trainer of 3 years, crafts her writings in an engaging way with proper SEO practices. She specializes in creating a variety of content for IELTS, CELPIP, TOEFL, and certain immigration-related topics. As a student of literature, she enjoys freelancing for websites and magazines to balance her profession in marketing and her passion for creativity!

Explore other Writing Task 2 Actual Tests

Janice Thompson

Post your Comments

Recent articles.

Whitney Houston

Raajdeep Saha

IELTSMaterial Master Program

1:1 Live Training with Band 9 Teachers

4.9 ( 3452 Reviews )

Our Offices

Gurgaon city scape, gurgaon bptp.

Step 1 of 3

Great going .

Get a free session from trainer

Have you taken test before?

Please select any option

Email test -->

Please enter Email ID

Mobile Band 9 trainer -->

Please enter phone number

Application

Please select any one

Already Registered?

Select a date

Please select a date

Select a time (IST Time Zone)

Please select a time

Mark Your Calendar: Free Session with Expert on

Which exam are you preparing?

Great Going!

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

Human beings and endangered species

• IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
• The United States Endangered Species Act
• Species assessment and management

What organizations determine which organisms are endangered species?

endangered species

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Texas Parks and Wildlife Department - Threatened and Endangered Species
• National Geographic - Education - Endangered Species
• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Endangered Animals in Canada
• Biology LibreTexts - Approaches for Preserving Endangered Species and Ecosystems
• endangered species - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• endangered species - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What is an endangered species?

An endangered species is any species that is at risk of extinction because of a rapid decrease in its population or a loss of its critical habitat.

What role does human activity play in causing species to become endangered?

Roughly 99 percent of threatened and endangered species are at risk because of human activities. The principal threats are habitat loss and degradation, the spread of invasive species, the growing influence of global warming, chemical pollution, unsustainable hunting, and disease.

Among the organizations connected with assessing which organisms are endangered species are the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), and the Red List of Threatened Species, created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Recent News

endangered species , any species that is at risk of extinction because of a sudden rapid decrease in its population or a loss of its critical habitat . Biodiverse regions that require protection on the grounds that they host a significant number of endangered species are called hot spots .

(Read E.O. Wilson’s Britannica essay on mass extinction.)

Previously, any species of plant or animal that was threatened with extinction could be called an endangered species. The need for separate definitions of “endangered” and “ threatened ” species resulted in the development of various categorization systems, each containing definitions and criteria by which a species can be classified according to its risk of extinction. As a rule, a range of criteria must be analyzed before a species can be placed in one category or another.

Often such categorization systems are linked directly to national legislation, such as the United States Endangered Species Act (ESA) or the Canadian Species at Risk Act (SARA). In addition, regional agreements, such as the European Union’s Habitats Directive (Council Directive 92/43/EEC), and international conservation agreements, such as the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), are connected to species- assessment systems. One of the most-recognized independent international systems of species assessment is the Red List of Threatened Species , created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Roughly 99 percent of threatened species are at risk because of human activities alone. By the early 21st century it could be said that human beings ( Homo sapiens ) are the greatest threat to biodiversity and are the major drivers of biodiversity loss . The principal threats to species in the wild are:

• Habitat loss and habitat degradation
• The spread of introduced species (that is, non-native species that negatively affect the ecosystems they become part of)
• The growing influence of global warming and chemical pollution
• Unsustainable hunting

Although some of these hazards occur naturally, most are caused by human beings and their economic and cultural activities. The most pervasive of these threats is habitat loss and degradation—that is, the large-scale conversion of land in previously undisturbed areas driven by the growing demand for commercial agriculture , logging , and infrastructure development. Because the rates of loss are highest in some of the most biologically diverse regions on Earth , a perpetual battle is waged to manage destructive activities there while limiting the impact that such restrictions may have on the well-being of local communities . The relative importance of each threat differs within and among taxa . So far, incidental mortality from ecological disturbance , temporary or limited human disturbance, and persecution have caused limited reductions in the total number of species; however, these phenomena can be serious for some susceptible groups. In addition, global warming has emerged as a widespread threat, and much research is being conducted to identify its potential effects on specific species, populations , and ecosystems .

Conflicts between human activities and conservation are at the root of many of these phenomena. Such controversies are often highly politicized and widely publicized in the global press and through social media . For example, habitat loss and species loss have resulted from the unregulated exploitation of coltan (the rare ore for tantalum used in consumer electronics products such as mobile phones and computers ) in Kahuzi-Beiga National Park , one of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s premier forest parks. The park is also home to much of the population of the threatened Eastern Lowland gorilla ( Gorilla beringei graueri ). Mining has increased gorilla mortality by reducing the animal’s food resources and leading many people displaced by the mining to kill gorillas for their meat . In addition, the mountain gorilla ( G. beringei beringei ), a close relative of the Eastern Lowland gorilla, is also at risk of extinction . However, authorities cite poaching , disease, and crossfire between warring political groups in the vicinity of Virunga National Park as the primary sources of its population decline.

Another example of a widely publicized wildlife controversy involves the relatively recent declines in amphibian populations. Known to be important global indicators of environmental health , amphibians have experienced some of the most serious population declines to date of all groups that have been assessed globally through the IUCN Red List process ( see below ). Amphibians (a group that includes salamanders , frogs , toads , and caecilians [wormlike amphibians]), being particularly sensitive to environmental changes, are severely threatened by habitat destruction, pollution, the spread of a disease called amphibian chytridiomycosis , and climate change .

Beyond these notable examples, many of the world’s birds are also at risk. The populations of some bird species (such as some albatrosses , petrels , and penguins ) are declining because of longline fishing, whereas those of others (such as certain cranes , rails , parrots , pheasants , and pigeons ) have become victims of habitat destruction. On many Pacific islands , the accidental introduction of the brown tree snake ( Boiga irregularis ) has wreaked havoc on many bird populations .

Many fishes and other forms of aquatic and marine life are also threatened. Among them are long-lived species that have life history strategies requiring many years to reach sexual maturity. As a result, they are particularly susceptible to exploitation. The meat and fins of many sharks , rays , chimaeras , and whales fetch high prices in many parts of the world, which has resulted in the unsustainable harvest of several of those species.

Moreover, freshwater habitats worldwide are progressively threatened by pollution from industry, agriculture, and human settlements. Additional threats to freshwater ecosystems include introduced invasive species (such as the sea lamprey [ Petromyzon marinus ] in the Great Lakes ), the canalization of rivers (such as in the streams that empty into the Everglades in Florida), and the overharvesting of freshwater species (as in the case of the extinct Yunnan box turtle [ Cuora yunnanensis ] in China). While an estimated 45,000 described species rely on freshwater habitats, it is important to note that humans are also seriously affected by the degradation of freshwater species and ecosystems.

Against this backdrop of threats related to urban expansion and food production, the unsustainable harvest of animal and plant products for traditional medicine and the pet trade is a growing concern in many parts of the world. These activities have implications for local ecosystems and habitats by exacerbating population declines through overharvesting. In addition, they have cross-border repercussions in terms of trade and illegal trafficking.