Bilal Habib is closely tracking the flight of a bird. Six times a day he gets its location, within a few hundred feet, through a GPS monitoring device attached to its body. One of the last members of its species, this Great Indian Bustard is part of the latest effort to save its kind from […]
Tag: extinction
The Tea Party Hits a New Low With Attack on Endangered Species
While conservationists and wildlife enthusiasts celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) last week, Tea Party members were busy working on a bill to gut the act, which will put the most vulnerable plants and animals at even more risk. The ESA was enacted in 1973 in an effort to protect the […]
Japanese Whaling: Bad For Cetaceans and Humans Alike
A new analysis shows that Japan’s annual hunt of small whales, dolphins and porpoises is unsustainable and could even drive some species toward extinction while at the same time presenting a real risk to human health. Every year, Japanese whaling ships catch and often times brutally butcher up to 17,000 small whales, dolphins and porpoises […]
Over 700 species added to the threatened categories on the IUCN Red List (photos)
In another sign of the global biodiversity crisis, the IUCN Red List has added 715 species to its threatened categories of Vulnerable, Endangered, and Critically Endangered in this year’s update. Some of these species were evaluated by the IUCN Red List for the first time while others saw their conditions deteriorate, such as the the […]
Syrian bald ibis may be down to a single bird
The eastern population of northern bald ibises (Geronticus eremita) has likely fallen to a single breeding bird, reports conservationists monitoring the dwindling flock. The population had believed to be obliterated starting from 1989 until a small group was discovered in 2002 in Syria. However, it now appears that this last group is vanishing one-by-one despite […]
Loss of big fruit-eating birds impacting trees in endangered rainforests
The extinction of large, fruit-eating birds in fragments of Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest has caused palm trees to produce smaller seeds over the past century, impacting forest ecology, finds a study published in the journal Science. The researchers — led by Mauro Galetti from Brazil’s Universidade Estadual Paulista — looked at Euterpe edulis palm seeds in […]
13 year search for Taiwan’s top predator comes up empty-handed
After 13 years of searching for the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyura), once hopeful scientists say they believe the cat is likely extinct. For more than a decade scientists set up over 1,500 camera traps and scent traps in the mountains of Taiwan where they believed the cat may still be hiding out, only […]
Could the Tasmanian tiger be hiding out in New Guinea?
Many people still believe the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) survives in the wilds of Tasmania, even though the species was declared extinct over eighty years ago. Sightings and reports of the elusive carnivorous marsupial, which was the top predator on the island, pop-up almost as frequently as those of Bigfoot in North America, but to […]