saving endangered animals essay

How to help protect endangered species

As you read this, countless species are on the brink of extinction. We live in an era where global biodiversity faces threats that are caused in large part by human actions.

But there are things we can do to help. Individuals committed to conservation can take collective action to protect endangered species from extinction. Here we explore some practical strategies that you can implement in your daily life to protect endangered wildlife.

16 things you can do to help endangered species

Conservation efforts don’t just have to be spearheaded by large organizations—individuals can make a difference, too. The choices we make in our day-to-day lives can have a positive impact on threatened species. 

Buy products from sustainable sources

Choosing cruelty-free alternatives helps reduce the demand for goods that contribute to the endangerment of species. Avoid buying products made from animal skins, scales, ivory, or other endangered animal products. 

Though it can seem like a personal choice that only affects you, you directly contribute to wildlife conservation by actively purchasing from sustainable sources. 

If enough people make these choices, businesses will be encouraged to adopt ethical practices and invest in more sustainable alternatives. 

Advocate for conservation

Using your voice to bring attention to the plight of endangered species educates others and builds support for conservation causes.

This can be as simple as talking to your friends and sharing resources or links on social media, along with attending events, signing petitions, and writing to elected officials.

Not sure where to start? We have a list of active petitions that you can sign to help ensure your voice is heard—from helping to save North Atlantic right whales from extinction to forming a national biodiversity strategy. 

Avoid plastic use and littering, and recycle properly

Ensuring that you properly dispose of waste and recyclables can play a huge part in protecting the environment and animal populations. Recycling plays a pivotal role in breaking the cycle of plastic pollution by diverting materials from landfills and ensuring that plastics don’t end up endangering wildlife through ingestion or entanglement.

Beyond proper recycling, try to use alternatives to plastic products (especially single-use plastics). Products like metal straws instead of plastic ones, beeswax wraps instead of cling film, and reusable water bottles can all make a difference. 

Learn more about wildlife and educate others 

Empower yourself through knowledge. By learning more about wildlife and endangered species —and then sharing that knowledge with others—you can create a ripple effect of awareness.

IFAW is all about educating, sharing knowledge, and promoting collective action. Our blog is a great place to start if you want to learn more about conservation and endangered species. Learn more about endangered wildlife in Africa , Europe , Asia , Australia , North America , and South America , or take a look at our list of the world’s most endangered mammals or birds .

Support conservation organizations 

Supporting conservation organizations is a great way to protect endangered species. Donations provide crucial funding for research, habitat protection, wildlife rescue, and species recovery programs.

If you’re not in a position to provide financial support, there are other ways you can support conservation efforts. Identify organizations dedicated to causes you to care about, follow them on social media, and reshare their posts. This helps to amplify their reach and spread awareness. You can also look for volunteering opportunities at conservation organisations and wildlife centres in your local community.

Through these actions, you can support the collective effort to safeguard endangered species. 

Support policy initiatives that help animals

One of the most effective ways to protect endangered species is through policies prioritizing animal welfare and conservation. Many animals are already protected by law, and the more we can introduce legislation to protect threatened species, the better.

You can stay informed about relevant legislation and advocate for stronger protections for endangered species. Or try engaging with your local elected officials by expressing concerns and providing input on wildlife-related policies. You can also join or support organizations lobbying for effective conservation policies. 

Protect wildlife habitats

Individuals play a crucial role in protecting endangered species by safeguarding their habitats. Simple actions can make a significant impact, for example: 

• Letting your lawn grow provides a haven for important pollinating insects and small animals. 
• Planting native trees (and not cutting down existing ones) helps restore natural ecosystems. 
• Setting up water sources in your yard or garden aids local wildlife, especially during dry periods. 
• Planting native flowers supports pollinators, which is essential for the reproductive success of many species. 

You should also refrain from disturbing wildlife in your community. If you see a wild animal that appears orphaned or distressed, contact your local wildlife rehabilitation center for help. 

Participate in park, roadside, or beach cleanups

Participating in park, roadside, or beach cleanups is a direct action that can help you contribute to the protection of endangered species. Have a look to see if there are any community- or council-led cleanups in your area. 

Removing litter and waste preserves natural ecosystems, prevents harm to wildlife, and raises public awareness about the impact of pollution on endangered species and their habitats.

Host a community fundraising event

Organizing events like charity walks, auctions, or educational seminars can raise funds for conservation efforts. These events not only generate financial support but also help spread the word about the importance of biodiversity and conservation. 

Your event’s funds can be given directly to conservation organizations to support their efforts to conserve biodiversity.

Volunteer with an animal shelter or sanctuary that rehabilitates wildlife

Volunteering at a shelter is a hands-on way to directly contribute to protecting endangered species. 

Find an organization near you dedicated to wildlife rescue and rehabilitation and inquire if they’re open to volunteers. By dedicating your time and skills to these organizations, you can help with the care of animals while also learning more about the cause. 

Use alternatives to pesticides

If you have a garden, avoid using pesticides on your plants and vegetables. Opting for natural and eco-friendly pest control methods helps maintain a balanced ecosystem without harming non-target species. Planting native vegetation that attracts natural predators can also reduce the need for chemical interventions.

For more information, you can speak with workers at your local garden center to find a solution that will protect your harvest without harming native wildlife around your home. 

Travel sustainably and support wildlife-friendly tourism

The next time you take a trip, avoid booking a package holiday and instead think a bit more deeply about ways you can travel sustainably to help reduce the negative impact of tourism on ecosystems.

This can include wildlife tourism, like safaris or whale watching, but make sure you look into tour operators that prioritize conservation and animal well-being.

Here are some ideas to make your trips more sustainable:

• Opt for eco-friendly accommodations and tour operators that prioritize conservation practices.
• Choose destinations with responsible wildlife tourism guidelines, ensuring minimal disturbance to natural habitats. 
• Participate in educational programs and eco-tours that raise awareness about endangered species and their conservation needs. 
• Respect local wildlife regulations, keeping a safe distance from animals in their natural habitats. 

Follow vessel speed rules on the ocean

If you’re a boat owner or driver, it’s essential to always follow vessel speed rules. This isn’t just for your safety—it also protects marine life below the surface. 

Strict ocean speed limits help protect whales and dolphins, whose navigation and communication can be disrupted by loud ocean traffic . Faster speeds are also linked to vessel strikes, which can be fatal for animals in the ocean. 

Support habitat connectivity 

Urbanization of natural habitats may be inevitable in some places, but it can cause habitat fragmentation for already vulnerable wildlife populations. For example, fences that mark land boundaries can become obstacles to animals looking to move around their habitats. 

You may not realize that individuals can take action to help prevent fragmentation or even reconnect habitats. For example, you can plant hedges or native trees in your yard instead of building fences. 

Make your home wildlife-friendly

Making your home as wildlife-friendly as possible is especially important if you live in a rural or suburban area. You can do many small things that will have a big impact on local wildlife. For example, you can:

• Keep your cats inside, especially at night.
• Secure garbage in bins with locking lids.
• Stick decals on windows to deter bird collisions.
• Place bird baths outside, and replace the water often to avoid disease transmission.
• Add native plants to your garden, along with plenty of wildflowers for pollinators.

Visit a national park

Next time you have a day or a long weekend off, take the time to visit a national park, wildlife refuge, or protected area. These places provide safe habitats for thousands of endangered species. While you get the chance to experience and enjoy nature, you’re also financially supporting the park, helping them continue their good work. 

Plus, the more people who visit these parks, the more likely governments are to fund them. 

Help IFAW protect endangered species

Protecting endangered species is necessary for the ongoing health of our planet’s ecosystems.

Organizations like IFAW need help from people like you who are committed to helping endangered animals. Embracing sustainable practices, helping us advocate for policy change, and supporting our conservation efforts are ways you can help endangered species worldwide.

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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.

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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 .

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Why save endangered animals?

01/12/1974 by Jane Warley

From Amur Leopards , Black Rhinos and Bornean Orangutans to Hawksbill Turtles , Vaquitas and bluefin tuna, there are many endangered animals that are at risk of extinction. What that means is that we are at risk of losing these animals completely.

We put considerable time, effort and money into saving endangered animals, but why? Extinction is a natural process that would happen with or without humans. But, while that is the case, research shows that extinctions are happening quicker now than ever before. And, loss of habitat is by far the biggest cause. This is a problem that we need to address, and here are a few reasons why.

1. For the enjoyment of future generations

One of the strongest arguments for saving endangered animals is simply that we want to. We get a lot of pleasure out of seeing and interacting with animals. Species that go extinct now are no longer around for us or future generations to see and enjoy. They can only learn about them in books and on the internet.  And, that is heartbreaking.

2. For the environment and other animals

Everything in nature is connected. If you remove one animal or plant it upsets the balance of nature, can change the ecosystem completely and may cause other animals to suffer.  For example, bees may seem small and insignificant, but they have a huge role to play in our ecosystem – they are pollinators. This means they are responsible for the reproduction plants. Without bees, many plant species would go extinct, which would upset the entire foodchain. Read more about bees here .

3. For medicinal purposes

Many of our medicines have come from or been inspired by nature. The loss of plants and animals to extinction takes with it the potential for new cures and drugs that we have yet to discover.

What can you do to help endangered animals?

There are many things we can do to help endangered animals, here are a few suggestions.

• Protect wildlife habitats. Habitat loss is one of the biggest causes of extinction. Do your bit to preserve wildlife habitats. Volunteer to maintain a local nature reserve, campaign against deforestation or create a space for nature in your garden.
• Educate others. People are more likely to want to save animals if they know about them. Spend time doing some research and spread the word.
• Stay away from pesticides and herbicides. Animals are venerable to pollutants that can build up in the environment and can die if they consume high levels.
• Shop ethically. Avoid buying products made from endangered animals, such as rhino horns .
• Be an ethical tourist.  We all love spending time with animals, but the rise of animal experiences abroad is endangering the lives of many animals. Often they are treated cruelly and kept t in unsatisfactory conditions. Pick your experiences wisely, find out more here .

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News from the Columbia Climate School

Why Endangered Species Matter

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was established in 1973 to protect “imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend” and help them recover.

The Trump administration has put forth a number of proposals that would weaken the ESA. These include measures to allow for the consideration of economic impacts when enforcing the ESA, ending the practice of automatically giving threatened species the same protection as endangered species, and making it easier to remove species from the endangered list.

In a way, this is nothing new because the ESA has been under attack for decades from construction, development, logging, water management, fossil fuel extraction and other industries that contend the act stifles economic development. But between 2016 and 2018 alone, there were almost 150 attempts to undercut the ESA; and last year, from July 8 to 22, Republicans in Congress or the Trump administration introduced 24 such measures and spending bill riders.

These bills included efforts to remove the gray wolf’s protected status in Wyoming and the western Great Lakes; a plan to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle that lives on oil-rich land; and a strategy to roll back protection of the sage-grouse, which also inhabits oil-rich land in the West and whose numbers have declined 90 percent since the West was first settled. The Trump Administration recently opened up nine million acres of sage-grouse habitat to drilling and mining.

Endangered species, if not protected, could eventually become extinct—and extinction has a myriad of implications for our food, water, environment and even health.

Extinction rates are accelerating

Ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct over the course of five mass extinctions, which, in the past, were largely a result of natural causes such as volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts. Today, the rate of extinction is occurring 1,000 to 10,000 times faster because of human activity. The main modern causes of extinction are the loss and degradation of habitat (mainly deforestation), over exploitation (hunting, overfishing), invasive species, climate change, and nitrogen pollution.

There are also other threats to species such as the pervasive plastic pollution in the ocean—a recent study found that 100 percent of sea turtles had plastic or microplastic in their systems.

Emerging diseases affecting more and more wildlife species such as bats, frogs and salamanders are the result of an increase in travel and trade, which allows pests and pathogens to hitch rides to new locations, and warming temperatures that enable more pests to survive and spread. Wildlife trafficking also continues to be a big problem because for some species, the fewer members there are, the more valuable they become to poachers and hunters.

How many species are endangered?

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species , over 26,500 species are in danger of extinction. This includes 40 percent of amphibians, 34 percent of conifers, 33 percent of reef-building corals , 25 percent of mammals and 14 percent of birds. In the U.S., over 1,600 species are listed as threatened or endangered.

A 2018 report by the Endangered Species Coalition found that ten species in particular are “imperiled” by the Trump administration’s proposals: California condor, giraffe, Hellbender salamander, Humboldt marten, leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles, red wolf, rusty patched bumble bee,

San Bernardino kangaroo rat, West Indian manatee, and Western yellow-billed cuckoo.

The web of life

While it may seem unimportant if we lose one salamander or rat species, it matters because all species are connected through their interactions in a web of life. A balanced and biodiverse ecosystem is one in which each species plays an important role and relies on the services provided by other species to survive. Healthy ecosystems are more productive and resistant to disruptions.

A recent study found that extreme environmental change could trigger an “extinction domino effect.” One of the study’s authors said, “Because all species are connected in the web of life, our paper demonstrates that even the most tolerant species ultimately succumb to extinction when the less-tolerant species on which they depend disappear.” So saving one species means saving its habitat and the other species that live there too.

“When you lose one species, it affects the ecosystem and everything around it gets a little bit more fragile while it adapts to change,” said Kelsey Wooddell , assistant director of the Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability. “Even if it’s not a keystone species [a species that others in an ecosystem depend on], its loss will weaken the functionality of the entire ecosystem, which just makes it easier for that ecosystem to stop working.”

What are the consequences of extinction?

Altering ecosystems through cascading effects

If a species has a unique function in its ecosystem, its loss can prompt cascading effects through the food chain (a “trophic cascade”), impacting other species and the ecosystem itself.

An often-cited example is the impact of the wolves in Yellowstone Park, which were hunted to near extinction by 1930. Without them, the elk and deer they had preyed upon thrived, and their grazing decimated streamside willows and aspens, which had provided habitat for songbirds. This left the stream banks susceptible to erosion, and a decline in songbirds allowed mosquitoes and other insects the birds would have eaten to multiply. When the wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995, they once again preyed on the elk; plant life returned to the stream banks and along with it, birds, beavers, fish and other animals. (Note: David Bernhardt, acting secretary of the Department of the Interior, just announced a proposal to strip gray wolves of their endangered status in the Lower 48 states.)

Kelp forests are another classic example. They play an important role in coastal ecosystems because they provide habitat for other species, protect the coastline from storm surges and absorb carbon dioxide.

Yet kelp forests are rapidly getting mowed down by exploding numbers of purple sea urchin. California sea otters eat the purple sea urchins that feed on giant kelp. These otters used to number in the hundreds of thousands to millions, but their population has been reduced to about 3,000 as a result of unchecked hunting in the 19th century and pollution. Moreover, in 2013 the sunflower starfish, which also eats purple sea urchins, began dying because of a virus that was likely exacerbated by warmer waters. Without the sea otter and the sunflower starfish predators, the purple sea urchin began feasting on the kelp forests, which declined 93 percent between 2013 and 2018. (A new study   found that kelp forests are now also threatened by ocean heat waves.) The explosion of sea urchins not only damaged the kelp ecosystem, it also had serious impacts on Northern California’s red urchins that are valued for sushi. Fish that need the kelp forests for spawning, such as sculpin, rock cod and red snapper may become vulnerable in the future as well.

As another example, Wooddell explained that on Guam, after the invasive brown tree snake was accidentally introduced to the island in the 1950s, 10 of the island’s 12 endemic bird species went extinct. “Typically birds eat seeds and spread seeds elsewhere on the island but that is no longer a functioning ecosystem,” she said. “So the forest and the trees have decreased a lot. And Guam is covered in spiders because the birds are not there to eat them.”

Losing apex species has multiple effects

Eliminating the large predators at the top of the food chain, the “apex species,” may be humans’ most serious impact on nature, according to one study . These large species are more vulnerable because they live longer, reproduce more slowly, have small populations, and need more food and a greater habitat area. Scientists say their loss has played a role in pandemics, fires, the decline of valued species and the rise of invasive ones, the reduction of ecosystem services, and decreased carbon sequestration.

Elephants are an apex species that may go extinct in our lifetime, as a result of tourism, habitat loss and poaching for ivory. This could dramatically change ecosystems in Africa and Asia. Through consumption and digestion, elephants disperse more seeds farther than any other animals; this fosters the growth of plants and trees that birds, bats and other animals depend upon for food and shelter.

Elephants also dig water holes that all animals share, and they fertilize the soil with their rich dung, which provides food for other animals.

The loss of apex species can also affect wildfires. After rinderpest, an infectious virus, wiped out many plant-eating wildebeest and buffalo in East Africa in the late 1800s, plants flourished. During the dry season, this over-abundance of vegetation spurred an increase in wildfires. In the 1960s, after rinderpest was eliminated through vaccinations, the wildebeest and buffalo returned. The ecosystem went from shrubbery to grasslands again, decreasing the amount of combustible vegetation, and the wildfires decreased.

Jeopardizing pollination

Seventy-five percent of the world’s food crops are partially or completely pollinated by insects and other animals, and practically all flowering plants in the tropical rainforest are pollinated by animals. The loss of pollinators could result in a decrease in seed and fruit production, leading ultimately to the extinction of many important plants.

Flying foxes, also known as fruit bats, are the only pollinators of some rainforest plants. They have been over-hunted in tropical forests with several species going extinct. One study noted that 289 plant species, including eucalyptus and agave, rely on flying foxes to reproduce; in turn, these plants were responsible for producing 448 valuable products.

Bees pollinate over 250,000 species of plants, including most of the 87 crops that humans rely on for food, such as almonds, apples and cucumbers.

But in recent years, large populations of bees have been wiped out by the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” wherein adult honeybees disappear from their hive, likely in response to numerous stressors.

Over the last 20 years in the U.S., monarch butterflies, which pollinate many wildflowers, have decreased 90 percent. The rusty-patched bumble bee, another important pollinator and the first bee species to be put on the endangered list, now only occupies one percent of its former range.

Insect populations overall are declining due to climate change, habitat degradation, herbicides and pesticides. A 2014 review of insect studies found that most monitored species had decreased by about 45 percent. And a German study  found 75 percent fewer flying insects after just 27 years. As insect populations are reduced, the small animals, fish and birds that rely on them for food are being affected, and eventually the predators of fish and birds will feel the impacts as well. One entomologist who had studied insects in the rainforest in the 1970s returned in 2010 to find an up to 60-fold reduction. His study reported “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.”

Endangering the food chain

Plankton, tiny plant and animal organisms that live in the ocean or fresh water, make up the foundation of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton are critical to the health of oceans and the planet because they consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen during photosynthesis.

In 2010, researchers found that phytoplankton had decreased 40 percent globally since 1950, and attributed the decline to rising sea surface temperatures. The scientists speculated that the warming surface waters did not mix well with the cooler, deeper waters rich in nutrients that phytoplankton need. In addition, zooplankton are very sensitive to slight changes in the amount of oxygen in the ocean, and may be unable to adapt as areas of low oxygen expand due to climate change.

The quantity and quality of plankton also affects the nutrition of other creatures further up the food chain. In the Mediterranean Sea, the biomass of sardines and anchovies declined by one-third in just ten years. One scientist speculated that this is because the sardines’ and anchovies’ normal plankton had disappeared, so they had to resort to eating a less nutritious species of plankton with fewer calories. Changes in plankton quality could be a result of water temperature, pollution or lack of nutrients, but scientists are not exactly sure why the plankton makeup in some places is changing. If it is due to global warming and pollution, some say the situation could worsen.

However, Sonya Dyhrman, a professor in Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences who studies phytoplankton with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is more sanguine about the future. “Microbes like phytoplankton can adapt, can acclimate, and can evolve, so I worry less about lineages of phytoplankton going extinct and more about how phytoplankton community composition will change in the future ocean,” said Dyhrman.

A different community composition of phytoplankton could change the food web structure, but Dyhrman is not really worried about the total collapse of fisheries. She is concerned, however, that “there could be changes in ocean ecosystems and we don’t really know what those changes will be. What will the architecture of that ecosystem look like in the future? The problem is, the ocean is already changing and we don’t understand the architecture of the ecosystem right now well enough to predict what will happen in the future.“

Losing nature’s therapeutic riches

More than a quarter of prescription medications contain chemicals that were discovered through plants or animals. Penicillin was derived from a fungus. Scientists are studying the venom of some tarantulas to see if one of its compounds could help cure diseases such as Parkinson’s. One molecule from a rare marine bacterium could be the basis of a new way to treat to melanoma.

Scientists have so far identified about 1.7 million different types of organisms, but between 10 and 50 million species are thought to exist on Earth.

Who knows what substances or capabilities some of these species might possess that could help treat diseases and make human lives easier?

Destroying livelihoods

According to a study for the U.N., the continued loss of species could cost the world 18 percent of global economic output by 2050.

Already, a number of industries have been economically impacted by species loss. The collapse of bee populations has hurt many in the $50 billion-a-year global honey industry. Atlantic cod in the waters off of Newfoundland formed the basis of the local economy since the 15 th century — until overfishing the cod destroyed the livelihoods of local fishermen.

What you can do about extinction

Extinction is hard to see. We may not realize how much of the natural world has been lost because the “baseline” shifts with every generation. Past generations would regard what we see as natural today as terribly damaged, and what we see as damaged today, our children will view as natural.

Wooddell believes the most important thing one can do is to put pressure on Congress and elected leaders to create land management, pollution and other sustainable policies that will protect biodiversity and the environment. However, because it’s unlikely that these kinds of top-down policies will be instituted in the current political climate, she recommends mobilizing grassroots community groups to create “bottom-up” policies.

Here are some other things you can do to protect endangered species and prevent extinction:

• Eat less meat. Soybean production is one of the main causes of deforestation, and most soybean meal is used for animal feed.
• Buy organic food because organic farmers use only non-synthetic or natural pesticides on their crops. Synthetic pesticides may be toxic for other organisms.
• Choose sustainable seafood. The Marine Stewardship Council provides a list of certified sustainable fish for responsible eating.
• Compost food waste . In New York City, the compost is used for urban farming and gardening, which provide habitat for pollinators.
• Buy wood and paper products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council , to ensure they’re harvested from responsibly managed forests.

• Don’t buy products made from endangered or threatened species, such as tortoise shell, ivory, coral, some animal skins, and “traditional” medicines.
• Be aware of the source of palm oil used in countless food and cosmetic products. Many tropical forests are being razed for palm oil plantations. If a product contains palm oil, make sure it’s from a deforestation-free plantation .
• Reduce your use of plastic .
• If you have a garden, plant native shrubs and flowers that attract butterflies and other pollinators. Milkweed is particularly helpful for monarch butterflies.
• Set up a beehive.
• Diversify your diet. Eating these 50 foods will promote biodiversity and a healthier plant.
• Support and get involved with organizations that are helping endangered animals.
• Join the Center for Biological Diversity and use their Take-Action Toolboxes.

Correction: This post was updated on April 3, 2019 to remove a sentence about cownose rays devastating scallop populations off of North Carolina. It turns out that other studies have challenged those findings. 

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Congratulations to our Columbia Climate School MA in Climate & Society Class of 2024! Learn about our May 10 Class Day  celebration. #ColumbiaClimate2024

A new UN report ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-extinction-united-nations.html ) finds that one million species are at risk of extinction; this is threatening ecosystems around the world that human beings need to survive.

The Trump administration has put forth new rules that will significantly weaken the Endangered Species Act. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html?module=inline

Wouldn’t there be an evolutionary development that occurs when one species is gone? What happened when something like the Dodo went extinct? Did other creatures in its ecosystems adapt to perform the Dodo’s services? When I think about extinction, I always wonder what would have happened if the dinosaurs had not become extinct.

I am late to the discussion about keystone species but since I have learned about the roles of these key animals to specific environments around the world I have tried and failed to see homo sapiens as a keystone species but rather I see us more like the ungulates, which when left unchecked by a corresponding predator, such as the wolf in the Yellow Stone Park scenario, would decimate any environment we occupy. We are overpopulating, over consuming, over producing items that are harmful to the entire world (such as plastics) and what will keep us in check? Who will be our wolves? Cancer? Illnesses? Violence? If humans disappeared from the earth, just suddenly vanished, I think the earth and all her flora and fauna would recover quickly. Our intelligence should curb our avarice, but I fear we are too shortsighted and too quick to rationalize away the science which spells out the looming disaster brought on my our ignorance and greed.

Dear Deborah, Your analysis is very disturbing; and unfortunately, true. Nice post, keep it up.

well said. I think this is spot on and with the human species looking to colonize Mars and the Moon…what more damage will we do?

Endangered species are important. In my opinion, their absence can cause a break in the food chain or break synergies with other species, and thus a negative impact on them. One species and can change so much. Like a domino effect. We should take care of every species.

I have been searching for a reasonable explanation of preservation of endangered species, and the search continues still. Apart from few redundant examples like bees or birds/animals taking part in pollinating processes or overgrowth/extinction, I can’t see any direct explanation on the outcomes of the extinctions of any species, viz. Tigers, Elephants, Rhinos, Deers etc. on the ecosystems or direct influence on humankind. Whereas, deforestation, excessive usage of fossil fuels, phytoplankton extinctions leading to global warming effects are easily understood, no such wide range of explanations and outcomes do exist on the extinction of species and their wide range of influences. Still looking for a reasonable explanation….

can effect the food chain and thus effect humans less tigers mean more prey and then they will take up resources and could become extinct and so on

I love animals!

same, i hope we can work together to stop some animals from going extinct.

Endangered Animals Matter Because If They Disappear, It Could Destroy Entire Ecosystems, STEA ( Save The Endangered Animals )

Yes, absolutely!

the thought of someone killing a poor turtle to make a stupid mirror just makes me want to cry! how could people be so cruel!?!?!?

That’s the sad world we live in.

I LOVE ANIMALS WE LOVE ANIMALS.HELP ANIMALS!

That is a wild amount of money that bees are responsible for pollinating crops.

I can’t believe that how many animals have gone extinct

I know right, it is so sad

I agree, without animals there would be no cures for horrible and possibly deadly diseases. Who knew that most of our endangered species helped with cures.

Why do they endanger species this makes me mad

We should save them, not hunt them. I hate the trump administration

I agree entirely.

I wish all animals would live without the fear of extinction.

I wish there was a way we could stop the cause of extinction and make a way to where more people would actually care.

How do i cite this?

how do i cite this

This is so wonderful. It has lots of info. I absolutely love this site!

This is such a great article with a great display of information!

yo i think we should get alot of people to explore the water and to save animals to pick up trash too.

bruh can they delete the trash out of the ocean using robots or elon musk can do somthing

At this point I don’t think anyone can take on a task that big

I don’t want any more animals to go extinct

Hi there! I just read the article on https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/03/26/endangered-species-matter and I found it informative. I appreciate how the author broke down complex ideas in a way that was easy to understand. It’s great to see content that is both engaging and educational. Thanks for sharing this resource!

Good resource, and lots of imformation

I went to Alley Springs and saw the scenery and now I run a business where I sell eco-friendly things and do manual labor to help trees. All the money is put to help forests and animals. -Evalyn Demery

Thats a good idea!

I think an easier way to clean out our ocean is to just volunteer and stop having robots or people that act like they do but don’t really care doing it

Great Article!!

HELP ANIMALS

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Protecting Endangered Species

Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN sustainable development policy

Despite continued conservation efforts, the status of many endangered species remains unchanged. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) are the primary treaties tasked with protection of endangered species. But moving forward, species conservation efforts should expand to include lesser known species that serve important ecosystem services. ( Download PDF ) ( See all policy briefs ) ( Subscribe to ENB )

The Persian leopard (Panthera pardus tulliana), the largest subspecies of leopards, used to roam widely across Central Asia and the Caucasus. They are large spotted cats—about five feet in length—with slender hindquarters and long, thick tails. Both male and female leopards lead solitary lives, though they come together during winter mating. They are very territorial, patrolling wide home ranges to scent-mark trees, shrubs, and rocks. The leopard inhabits a wide variety of habitats: from mountain crags up to 3,000 meters in elevation, to grasslands and cold desert ecosystems, with a preference for cliff and rocky areas, as well as juniper and pistachio woodlands that give them cover for hunting.

During the past century, human-wildlife conflict, indiscriminate killing of their prey, habitat loss, and bounties incentivizing their killing have reduced their historic range by 72-84% (Jacobson et al., 2016). Today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species—the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of species and subspecies, which uses a set of defined criteria to evaluate their extinction risk (Rodrigues et al., 2006)—the Persian leopard is endangered.

The story of the Persian leopard is the story of many species pushed by human action to the brink of extinction. Strong conservation measures can still reverse the course for some species. For many others, it is too late.

During the past century, human-wildlife conflict, indiscriminate killing of their prey, habitat loss, and bounties incentivizing their killing have reduced the leopard’s historic range by 72-84% JACOBSON ET AL., 2016

The foundations of global species conservation measures date back to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment . Principle 2 of the Stockholm Declaration says “the natural resources of the earth, including the air, water, land, flora and fauna and especially representative samples of natural ecosystems, must be safeguarded for the benefit of present and future generations.” Principle 4 reads “Man has a special responsibility to safeguard and wisely manage the heritage of wildlife and its habitat, which are now gravely imperilled by a combination of adverse factors.”

Among the 109 recommendations found in the Stockholm Action Plan , Recommendation 99 calls for the preparation and adoption of an international treaty to regulate international trade in certain species of wild plants and animals. This treaty, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), had been drafted as a result of a resolution adopted in 1963 at a meeting of members of IUCN. As a result of the push provided by the Stockholm Conference, the Convention was finally adopted at a meeting of representatives of 80 countries in Washington, D.C. on 3 March 1973.

There are a few other relevant recommendations. Recommendation 29 draws attention to species of wildlife that may serve as indicators for future wide environmental disturbances. Recommendation 30 emphasizes drawing attention to the situation of animals endangered by their trade value. The Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan also legitimized the role of IUCN and especially the Red List, which had been established in 1964. In fact, IUCN was one of the few environmental organizations formally involved in the preparations of the Stockholm Conference and in the drafting and implementation of the three conventions that followed it: the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972), CITES, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (1971).

What are Endangered Species: The Role of the IUCN Red List

Since its establishment, the IUCN Red List has been the key tool to assess the status of species and catalyze action for conservation and policy change. Through the List’s rigorous assessment processes, experts linked to the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s specialist groups collect information on a species’ range, population size, habitat and ecology, use and/or trade, threats, and conservation actions that inform necessary conservation decisions.

The assessments published in the IUCN Red List are used by governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and multilateral environmental agreements. The assessments drive conservation action and funding, albeit still in insufficient ways to always ensure saving species. In fact, Betts et al. (2020) noted that without successful communication between species experts, academics, policymakers, funders, and practitioners, IUCN Red List assessments may not lead to development and implementation of conservation action plans.

The IUCN Red List has nine categories to indicate how close a species is to becoming extinct. The closest to extinction is the “critically endangered” category, with a species example being the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), a subspecies found only in Iran that has dwindled to fewer than 50 animals remaining in the wild. The least critical category is defined as “least concern.” For example, the global brown bear (Ursus arctos) population is considered to be of “least concern” because it is large and spread over three continents, even though there are some local populations that are under threat. The categories in the middle, i.e., “vulnerable” and “endangered,” are for species considered under threat.

In other words, if a species is either critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable, it is in popular terms “endangered.”

This mismatch between the technical terms of the IUCN Red List and common language can lead to confusion. In 2016, a re-assessment of the snow leopard prompted an outcry from some members of the conservation community due the species’ being reclassified from endangered to vulnerable (McCarthy et al., 2016). Their anger was echoed by members of the public, in part because they did not understand “being vulnerable” under IUCN Red List criteria still means at high risk of extinction.

The way a species is assessed under the IUCN Red List can also determine whether such species deserve protection under two international treaties aimed at species conservation: CITES and the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). Listing an endangered species under either of these two conventions can catalyze further action and, possibly, save a species from extinction (Zahler & Rosen, 2013).

Without successful communication between species experts, academics, policy makers, funders, and practitioners, IUCN Red List assessment may not lead to development and implementation of conservation action plans. BETTS ET AL. (2020)

Regulating the Protection of Endangered Species

CITES and CMS are the key conventions tasked with regulating protection of endangered species.

CITES regulates international trade and therefore looks at the impact of trade on species conservation. Annually, international wildlife trade is estimated to be worth billions of dollars and to include hundreds of millions of plant and animal specimens. The trade is diverse, ranging from live animals and plants to an array of products derived from them, including food, exotic leather goods, wooden musical instruments, timber, tourist curios, and medicines. Since trade in wild animals and plants crosses borders between countries, the effort to regulate it requires international cooperation to safeguard certain species from over-exploitation. Today, CITES accords varying degrees of protection to more than 37,000 species of animals and plants, whether they are traded as live specimens, fur coats, or dried herbs (CITES, n.d.)

In the language of CITES, species listed under Appendix I are considered threatened with extinction and afforded the highest level of protection, including restrictions on commercial trade. Examples of the 931 species currently listed under Appendix 1 include gorillas (Gorilla sp.), tigers (Panthera tigris), and snow leopards (Panthera uncia). Appendix II includes species that, while currently not threatened with extinction, may become so without trade controls. It also includes species that resemble other listed species and must be regulated to effectively control the trade in those other listed species. Currently 34,419 species are listed under Appendix II, including saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), wolf (Canis lupus), argali sheep (Ovis ammon), and kiang (Equus kiang). Appendix III includes a list of wildlife and plant species identified by particular CITES parties as being in need of international trade controls.

The purpose of CMS is conservation of migratory species, their habitats, and migration routes. “Migratory” is broadly defined as species that straddle international borders (Lewis & Trouwborst, 2019). Migratory species threatened with extinction are listed in Appendix I of the Convention. Appendix I listing is a mechanism to promote conservation measures called, in CMS terminology, “Concerted Action” among the range states of the listed species. CMS parties commit to ensure strict protections under national laws and conserving their habitats, mitigating obstacles to migration, among other threats. Migratory species viewed as benefiting from international cooperation are listed in Appendix II of the Convention (CMS, n.d.). To date, seven specialized regional agreements and 19 memoranda of understanding have been concluded for Appendix II species under the CMS.

Representative Frameworks for the Conservation of Endangered Species

The development of models tailored to conservation needs throughout migratory ranges is a unique feature of the CMS. Along these lines, there are two important initiatives benefiting endangered species in Africa and Central Asia under the CMS umbrella.

One is the Central Asian Mammals Initiative (CAMI) and its associated Programme of Work. Established in 2014, CAMI aims to strengthen the conservation of Central Asian migratory mammals through a common framework to coordinate conservation activities in the region and coherently address major threats to migratory species. By developing an initiative for Central Asian mammals, CMS is catalyzing collaboration between all stakeholders, with the aim of harmonizing and strengthening the implementation of the Convention (Rosen & Roettger, 2014). One of the most recent projects under CAMI is the proposed development of a regional strategy for the conservation of the Persian leopard.

The Joint CITES-CMS African Carnivores Initiative (ACI), established in 2017, stems from the recognition of the importance of synergies and coordination of measures toward species that are protected under both Conventions. Supported by IUCN Species Survival Commission ’s specialist groups, the Secretariats are tasked to drive effective conservation of African lion, leopard, cheetah, and wild dog, and help avoid duplicate activities and associated costs, and generate funding.

By developing an initiative for Central Asian mammals, CMS is catalyzing collaboration between all stakeholders, with the aim of harmonizing and strengthening the implementation of the Convention ROSEN & ROETTGER, 2014

There are also two other important frameworks, each focused on the conservation of single species. One is the Global Tiger Initiative Council (GTIC), and the other is the Global Snow Leopard Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP).

GTIC was originally set up as the Global Tiger Initiative (GTI), a global alliance of governments, international organizations, NGOs, and the private sector, with the goal to save tigers from extinction. Established by the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Smithsonian Institution, Save the Tiger Fund, and International Tiger Coalition (representing more than 40 NGOs), the initiative is led by the 13 tiger range countries. The St. Petersburg Declaration , adopted in 2010 at the Tiger Summit in Russia, defines the priorities.

GSLEP, propelled by GTI and established in 2013, is driven by 12 snow leopard range states, NGOs, and international organizations, which sit on a steering committee. The foundation of the GSLEP is 12 individual National Snow Leopard and Ecosystems Priorities (NSLEPs). Under GSLEP, specific activities are grouped under broad themes that correspond to the commitments of the Bishkek Declaration adopted at the 2013 Global Snow Leopard Conservation Forum (Zakharenka et al., 2016).

Some of these initiatives have successfully catalyzed attention, resources, and conservation action. They have received a high level of political attention, especially GTI in Russia and GSLEP in Kyrgyzstan, as respective hosts of the Tiger Summit and Snow Leopard Forum. However, some conservationists argue, especially in relation to tigers, that results have fallen short, and lack of transparency and accountability is compromising progress in tiger conservation efforts. Slappendel (2021) writes that “tiger-range countries are responsible for making tiger conservation efforts and holding themselves accountable for their methods and results. There’s no authority above them, so they can do whatever they want.

While the reach and influence of CAMI and ACI are more limited compared to GTI and GSLEP, they have also generated important resources for conservation and could likely have a stronger policy-driving role in the future.

Generally, these four frameworks serve as important examples for directing donor resources.

The Role of UN Agencies and Donors

The GEF, established in 1992, is the largest multilateral fund focused on enabling developing countries to invest in nature. It supports the implementation of major international environmental conventions including on biodiversity, climate change, chemicals, and desertification. Endangered species prioritized under CITES and CMS, such as GTI and GSLEP, are also prioritized for GEF funding.

In 2010, the GEF indicated it would provide up to USD 50 million in grants to save the tiger through contributions to be invested by developing countries using their GEF allocations in biodiversity, supplemented by investments from its REDD+ Program (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, and the role of conservation, sustainable use of forests, and enhancement of carbon stocks) (GEF, 2010). Since 1991, the GEF has invested nearly USD 100 million toward snow leopard projects implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The GSLEP Forum in 2013 catalyzed nine further GEF-financed, UNDP-implemented projects, representing an investment of about USD 45 million to support snow leopard range countries. These nine projects also leveraged over USD 200 million in co-financing from national and international partners (UNDP, 2016).

UNDP has emerged as one of the key implementing UN agencies when it comes to endangered species and conservation projects more broadly. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has also spearheaded initiatives for the conservation of endangered species, such as Vanishing Treasures . This EUR 9 million project, funded by the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, seeks to better understand the vulnerability to climate change of the snow leopard, tiger, and gorilla and the ecosystems being affected.

Why Do Many Species Continue to be Endangered?

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warned in its Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history—and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating” (IPBES, 2019).

Despite continued conservation efforts, the status of many endangered species remains unchanged—including tigers, lions, and cheetahs. The question is: Why? With our growing knowledge of the fragility of the planet’s ecosystems, why are we pushing entire species out of existence?

The limited amount of funding benefiting species research and conservation is one reason. Often these funds are short term, whereas to really see progress and results, a longer funding commitment is necessary. Some projects are also too narrowly focused on protection and enforcement, without seeking ways local communities can be part of the solution. Likewise, some projects do not address root causes of decline.

But there are also issues of capacity. In many countries that provide habitat for endangered species, there is limited technical capacity to protect such species. Local and national conservation organizations also would benefit from greater capacity building.

At the national level, species conservation may not be prioritized. This is often reflected in ministries tasked with both environment and agriculture or economic and mining issues—with the latter issues prioritized over conservation. Species conservation also does not operate in a vacuum, but must be considered alongside mechanisms to address threats to their survival, which may be exacerbated by conflicting development goals. For example, a development project aimed at improving access to water, through building dams and irrigation channels, may hurt access by salmon species to spawning grounds or damage riparian habitat. Finally, conservation organizations—with their own agendas and issues of competition for funding that leads to lack of cooperation—sometimes fail to create better synergies for conservation.

There are also many other endangered species that are not as well known or do not have the appeal of more popular endangered species, such as snow leopards or tigers. Some of these species have disappeared from large swaths of their range, including the striped hyaena (Hyaena hyaena), which can no longer be found in parts of Central Asia and Caucasus regions. The lesser-known Saint Lucia racer (Erythrolamprus ornatus), listed as Critically Endangered, numbers fewer than 20 individuals and is considered one of the rarest snakes in the world. Similarly, the Daguo Mulian tree (Magnolia grandis) is listed as critically endangered due to habitat loss for agricultural expansion and logging.

Moving Forward

Protecting iconic endangered species is still important for promoting policies and measures that can benefit entire ecosystems and many other endangered species. Nevertheless, species conservation efforts must expand to include many more species that are lesser known and serve important ecosystem services. Such efforts should also create incentives for local communities to conserve them, including through sustainable use when that is recognized as the only or the most effective measure. Finally, greater financial resources have to be allocated. Many hope the post-2020 global biodiversity framework will help guide the most pressing actions to keep entire species from being erased from our shared world.

Works Consulted

Betts, J., Young, R. P., Hilton-Taylor, C., Hoffmann, M., Rodríguez, J. P., Stuart, S. N., & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2020). A framework for evaluating the impact of the IUCN Red List of threatened species. Conservation Biology: The Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 34(3), 632–643. doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13454

Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. (n.d.). What is CITES? cites.org/eng/disc/what.php

Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. (n.d.). CMS. cms.int/en/legalinstrument/cms

Global Environment Facility. (2010). Global Environment Facility to support $50 million in grants to save the tiger. thegef.org/newsroom/news/global-environmentfacility-support-50-million-grants-save-tiger

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673

Jacobson, A.P., Gerngross, P., Lemeris, Jr., J.R., Schoonover, R.F., Anco, C., Breitenmoser-Würsten, C., Durant, S.M., Farhadinia, M.S., Henschel, P., Kamler, J.F., Laguardia, A., Rostro-García, S., Stein, A.B., & Dollar, L. (2016). Leopard (Panthera pardus) status, distribution, and the research efforts across its range. PeerJ 4:e1974. doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1974

Lewis, M., & Trouwborst, A. (2019). Large carnivores and the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS)—definitions, sustainable use, added value, and other emerging issues. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7. frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fevo.2019.00491

McCarthy, T., Mallon, D., Jackson, R., Zahler, P., & McCarthy, K. (2017). Panthera uncia. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2017. Panthera uncia (Snow Leopard) (iucnredlist.org)

Rodrigues, A.S.L., Pilgrim, J.D., Lamoreux, J.F., Hoffmann, M., & Brooks, T.M. (2006). The value of the IUCN Red List for conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 21(2), 71-76. doi.org/10.1016/j. tree.2005.10.010

Rosen, T., & Roettger, C. (2014). Central Asian Mammals Initiative: Saving the last migrations. CMS. cms.int/sites/default/files/publication/Central_Asian_Mammals_Initiative.pdf

Slappendel, C. (2021). What’s stopping some countries from keeping up with tiger conservation promises? Commentary. Mongabay news.mongabay.com/2021/11/whats-stopping-some-countries-from-keeping-up-with-tiger-conservationpromises-commentary/

UNDP. (2016). Silent Roar - UNDP and GEF in the snow leopard landscape. undp.org/publications/silent-roar-undpand-gef-snow-leopard-landscape

Zahler, P., & Rosen, T. (2013). Endangered mammals. Encyclopedia of Biodiversity. Elsevier.

Zakharenka, A., Sharma, K., Kochorov, C., Rutherford, B., Varma, K., Seth, A., Kushlin, A., Lumpkin, S., Seidensticker, J., Laporte, B., Tichomirow, B., Jackson, R. M., Mishra, C., Abdiev, B., Modaqiq, A. W., Wangchuk, S., Zhongtian, Z., Khanduri, S. K., Duisekeyev, B., … Yunusov, N. (2016). The Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program. Snow Leopards, 559–573. doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-802213-9.00045-6

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Government of Norway, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

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Government of Canada, Global Affairs Canada

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Pakistan's development model has still not recognised the limits of the natural environment and the damage it would cause, if violated, to the sustainability of development and to the health and well-being of its population. Pakistan’s environment journey began with Stockholm Declaration in 1972. A delegation led by Nusrat Bhutto represented the country at the Stockholm meeting, resulting in the establishment of the Urban Affairs Division (UAD), the precursor of today’s Ministry of Climate Change. In setting the country’s environmental agenda, we were inspired by the Stockholm Principles, but in reality, we have mostly ignored them for the last five decades.

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Environment: Endangered Species Essay

Globally, over 14,000 animal species face a risk of extinction. The reasons for the near extinction include poaching, habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, pollution, diseases, climate change, and low birth rates (IUCN, 2021). Some of the most endangered species include the Javan rhino, African elephants, black rhino, snow leopards, orangutans, the vaquita, Amur leopards, and the eastern lowland gorillas. With the appropriate conservation measure, endangered animals may increase over time.

Captive breeding and reintroduction are among the most effective conservation approaches. They involve capturing, breeding, and rearing endangered animals in wildlife reserves, zoos, or aquariums to help increase their numbers. After a significant number is raised, the animals can then be released back to their natural habitats. For example, in 1982, only 22 California condors existed in the wild; however, captive breeding increased the number to 425 in 2014 (Association of Zoos & Aquarium, n.d). Thus, when threats are reduced, the rare species can improve in numbers.

Habitat protection is critical in ensuring the safety of endangered animals. Protected areas where endangered species can be placed include nature reserves, national parks, and wildlife refuges. There are various marine reserves and protected areas that prohibit fishing, thus safeguarding the marine species. In this case, New Zealand has several marine reserves that protect sea turtles, aquatic mammals, and some fish species such as manta rays and white pointer sharks (Ministry for Primary Industries, n.d). Additionally, some laws and regulations safeguard wildlife at state, national, and global levels to prevent animal extinction. In this case, CITES or the Washington convention significantly regulates the global trade of wild animals. This treaty restricts and controls any trade involving endangered species to ensure they do not become extinct

In conclusion, human activity and climate change continually threaten some wild animals’ survival. Nonetheless, appropriate conservation methods such as captive breeding and habitat protection can ensure the continuous reproduction of these species. The enactment of state, national and global laws that safeguard wild animals also promotes the survival of these species. Human beings have a responsibility to ensure the protection of wild animals and their habitats.

Global warming is one of the biggest threats to animal and plant survival. The accumulation of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, deforestation, and increased agricultural activities are major contributors to this phenomenon. The increased earth temperature associated with global warming has led to climate change resulting in several natural calamities. However, the threat of global warming can be reduced by using renewable energy, recycling, planting more trees, and lowering the emission of greenhouse gases.

Global warming has significant adverse impacts on human beings and the environment. The extreme heat associated with climate change increases complications from underlying respiratory and heart diseases such as renal failure and asthma and may cause other heat-related disorders. Global warming also increases the risk of storms and drought, affecting food supply, which may cause death to both humans and animals (Global Climate Change, 2021). It has also been linked to ocean acidification, increased ocean temperature, and rising sea levels. Such occurrences have led to the death of a significant number of marine life.

Rather than human actions, global warming may result from natural forces. Human activities such as deforestation, industrial processes, and agricultural activities have long been attributed to climate change. However, there are claims that complex gravitational interactions, particularly alterations in the earth’s orbit, torque, and axial tilt, may also influence climate change resulting in increased temperature (Neaves, 2017). Gradual shifts in the earth’s orbit combined with its axial tilt places the south and north poles more directly to the sun resulting in temperature extremes.

In conclusion, global warming has adverse effects on humans and nature. It exposes humans to heat-related diseases and increases complications of respiratory illnesses such as asthma. Climate change depletes vegetation causing food shortage and death to humans and animals. Similarly, it causes ocean warming and acidification, which destroys marine life. Although some natural forces such as shifts in the earth’s orbit and axis may trigger temperature changes, human activities are the greatest contributors to global warming.

Association of Zoos & Aquarium (n.d). Reintroduction programs . Web.

Ministry for Primary Industries. (n.d). Protecting marine life . Web.

Neaves, T., T. (2017). The climate is changing, but not just because of humans. Here’s why that matters . NBC News . Web.

International Union for Conservation of Nature. (2021). African elephant species now endangered and critically endangered – IUCN Red List . Web.

Global Climate Change. (2021). The effects of climate change . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, November 16). Environment: Endangered Species. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environment-endangered-species/

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IvyPanda . (2022) 'Environment: Endangered Species'. 16 November.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Environment: Endangered Species." November 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environment-endangered-species/.

1. IvyPanda . "Environment: Endangered Species." November 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environment-endangered-species/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Environment: Endangered Species." November 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environment-endangered-species/.

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Campaign to Save Endangered Species

Become a family of environmental leaders with these ideas on the process of designing a social action campaign to educate your community about the plight of endangered species and actions they can take to help ensure Earth is a healthy place for all living things.

Conservation

Photograph by NurPhoto / Getty Images

A social action campaign is a positive, organized, and active effort to educate others about an issue and ask them to take action. Effective campaigns not only inform but evoke the passion campaigners have for something they want to change. Social action campaigns have led to action in a variety of fields, including wildlife conservation. One example is the yellow-shouldered Amazon parrot ( Amazona barbadensis ), whose population rose on the island of Bonaire after a social action campaign, reforestation efforts, and efforts to educate the public, were initiated.

Design a Campaign Poster

Work together as a family to create a social action campaign poster to raise awareness about the plight of an endangered species that encourages the viewer to take a specific action. Start by selecting an endangered species to build your campaign poster around. As a family, research examples of campaign posters for inspiration. Decide on a catchy phrase for your poster to grab your audience’s attention and quickly make your point. Then create a rough sketch on scrap paper of the poster’s design to ensure that the text and image of your species is placed the way you want it. Make notes about what colors you want to use and the style of lettering. After completing your poster, plan to place it where it can be displayed for maximum reach.

Research, Research, Research

Great, effective campaigns are built on facts. As a family, vote on an endangered species to research. Then work together to find five to ten facts about that species. Your facts might cover the species’ physical characteristics, habitat, food, the threats it faces to survival, and any existing efforts underway to protect that species and its habitat.

Research Existing Campaigns

Select an endangered species your family would like to help. Then research groups and individuals who are working to protect those species. Make notes as you go. What actions do these individuals or organizations take to protect that species? What can you do in your area to help? How can you help them raise awareness and encourage others to take action?

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October 19, 2023

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We Need to Protect Endangered Animals

This essay will emphasize the importance of protecting endangered animals. It will discuss the causes of animal endangerment, such as habitat destruction, climate change, poaching, and pollution. The piece will highlight the ecological importance of biodiversity and the role of conservation efforts, including legal protections, habitat preservation, and awareness campaigns, in protecting endangered species. PapersOwl showcases more free essays that are examples of Animals.

How it works

   The issue of Endangered Animals is important because Healthy ecosystems depend on animal species as their foundations and ‘’The American tourism industry is dependent on plant and animal species and their ecosystems for their multi-billion dollar, job-intensive industry’’(Endangered Species Coalition). This issue is debatable because while some believe that once the animals that are endangered go extinct will affect the human population negatively, others believe that it does not matter at all if endangered animals die off for good.,My opinion on the issue is that endangered animals are indeed worth saving and protecting.

I strongly believe this because when we protect endangered animals, we also protect our ecosystems that underlie our economies and welfare.

‘‘It is important to realize that endangered animals have many of the same feelings we do and share the same neural structures that are important in processing emotions. Animals experience contagious joy and the deepest of grief, they get hurt and suffer, and they take care of one another. They have a point of view on what happens to them, their families, and their friends. Nonetheless, endangered animal lives are not protected in deference to human interests’’(Marc Bekoff Ph.D.). Experts who have studied this issue have found that the ‘‘key to the survival of our endangered species is ensuring that they are reintroduced to protected areas where they can safely roam and strengthen in number. And to monitor the animals on a daily basis to assess how the animals are doing’’(Wildlife ACT).

Many experts have weighed in on the subject including Jan Vertefeuille (Senior Director, Advocacy, Wildlife Conservation), who said “When poaching of elephants and rhinos hit crisis levels in Africa a few years ago, we needed to get the issue in front of world leaders who could mobilize resources to tackle the crisis. By reframing the issue to one of global security and organized crime, we took an issue that had been relegated to underfunded and poorly equipped park rangers and put it on the agenda of the UN and the White House.” This quote connects to the fact that when animals who were continually hunted to the point of becoming endangered needed protection. One way to get help for them is to do what Jan Vertefeuille did and make the UN and the White House aware of the problem.

A further example that endangered animals are indeed worth saving and protecting is that Healthy ecosystems rely upon plant and animal species as their support. When a species becomes endangered, it is a clear indicator that the ecosystem is slowly breaking apart. Each species that is lost, triggers the loss of another within its ecosystem.‘‘We as Humans depend on healthy ecosystems to purify our environment, without healthy forests, grasslands, rivers, oceans and other ecosystems, we will not have clean air, water, or land. If we allow our environment to become contaminated, we risk our own health.’’(Endangered Species Coalition)

Some people believe that we don’t need to protect endangered animals because the ‘‘impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency. Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. 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.’’(R. Alexander Pyron) This is faulty reasoning because in order for our ecosystems to stay healthy, it needs to continue to rely upon plant and animal species as their support.

Another common reason people believe that we don’t need to save endangered species is because ‘‘the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency. Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit’’ (R. Alexander Pyron). In this case, they are wrong because they are not considering that we base our cities, towns, urban, suburban and rural communities on foundations that involve and and require a multitude of diverse animals to help balance the phenomena of the physical world collectively, known as nature itself .

The reasons to believe that we don’t need to protect endangered animals have been discounted again and again by Professors of Biology ,Wildlife Rehabilitators, Animal Welfare Advocates, Zoologists, and Conservation Scientists. In my opinion, The evidence in support of that endangered animals are indeed worth saving and protecting is stronger than the refutations of naysayers. 

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Protecting wildlife

The world’s wildlife is being lost up to 10,000 times faster than the natural extinction rate.

Animals and plants aren’t just valuable for their own sake – they’re also part of a wider natural environment that may provide food, shelter, water, and other functions, for other wildlife and people.

With so much wildlife at risk, the question people often ask us is how do we decide which animals and plants to focus our conservation efforts and funds on? Well, it’s not always an easy decision… but we do have criteria to guide us.

For example: 1) is it a species that’s a vital part of a food chain? Or 2) a species that helps demonstrate broader conservation needs? Or 3) is it an important cultural icon that will garner support for wildlife conservation as a whole? These are just some of the considerations.

"Our planet is so special and diverse there are still new species being discovered all the time. Meanwhile we’ve reported the terrifying news that vertebrate species populations have declined on average by over 50% since 1970.  Whether your interest in wildlife is for its own intrinsic value or for its contribution to a functioning ecosystem that supports so many species as well as human livelihoods and well-being too, there is no denying that we, people, have an obligation to ensure we not only stop our damaging ways, but look to increase wildlife populations and strengthen the habitats they rely on."

Over the past five decades, our field work has helped bring several iconic animals back from the brink of extinction – including white and greater one-horned rhinos, certain populations of African elephants, mountain gorillas, giant pandas and tigers.

We’ve also achieved important policy changes – for instance: helping bring about the global moratorium on commercial whaling; improving controls for trade in threatened species such as tigers; and regulating trade in over used trees, like mahogany, and fish such as sturgeons (caught for caviar).

Our work hasn’t just given a more certain future for specific wildlife, but has helped thousands more species by contributing to the conservation of all the diversity of life within their environments.

Our wildlife conservation efforts are also directly helping people, through improved livelihoods, food security, access to fresh water, incomes, and by strengthening communities, socially and politically.

The work we do is playing a part in at least five of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, and contributing to poverty reduction in several parts of the world.

Global wild tiger numbers increase for first time in conservation history

Thanks to the collective efforts by governments and organisations, and the brilliant help of our passionate supporters and colleagues around the world, we were thrilled to see that wild tiger numbers have risen – for the first time in conservation history. Just over a century ago, there were thought to be around 100,000 wild tigers. In the past century, we lost nearly 95% of our wild tigers. By 2010 there were as few as 3,200 left in the wild (to put that in perspective, there are more tigers than this in captivity in the US alone). But due to enthusiastic and determined global efforts, and skilled conservation work on the ground in Asia, wild tiger numbers have now risen to an estimate of around 3,900. We’re stepping up our efforts to help wild tiger populations grow further – and you can help us.

Restoring the Tiger’s Amur Heilong Home Read More

A Corridor for Wildlife and Communities Read More

Plastics: Why we must act now Read More

Wild tiger numbers rise for first time in a century Read More

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How we're protecting wildlife

Supporting people to support snow leopards

We’re working with communities in the high mountains of China, India and Nepal to help protect snow leopards and other wildlife.

Sound of Safety

We’re working with WWF India and WWF Pakistan to protect river dolphins while improving livelihoods for local fishing communities.

Illegal Wildlife Trade in Nepal

Reducing wildlife trade in Bagmati province, Nepal.

Sustainable fisheries in the Mara wetlands

The UK Government’s Darwin Initiative, funds WWF collaborative work with local partners on sustainable fisheries management in Mara wetlands, Tanzania.

Tackling human-wildlife conflict in Ruvuma

With funding from the UK Government’s Darwin Initiative, WWF is collaborating with local partners to reduce human-wildlife conflict in Ruvuma.

Conserving Otters in the Karnali

Strengthening communities’ livelihood and stewardship to conserve Otters in the Karnali.

Making palm oil sustainable

WWF Malaysia works with plantations to help the endangered Borneo elephant move freely.

 / 

Enzo Pérès-Labourdette / Yale e360

The Real Case for Saving Species: We Don’t Need Them, But They Need Us

Conservationists argue that humans need to save species in order to save ourselves. The truth is we could survive without wild species — but they can’t survive without us, and the moral argument for protecting them and the beauty they bring to the world is overwhelming.

By Carl Safina • October 21, 2019

I recently visited a museum exhibit on big cats. A sign featuring a beautiful jaguar asked, “Why should we care about wild cats?” Its answer: “Because in protecting big cats, we are protecting ourselves.”

Is that really true? That implies big cats are in trouble because “we” don’t care to protect ourselves. And if it turns out that we don’t really need jaguars in order to protect ourselves, have they lost their case for existence?

For decades, many conservationists have been trying to sell a clumsy, fumbling appeal to self-interest: the idea that human beings need wild nature, need wild animals, need the species on endangered lists. “If they go extinct, we’ll go extinct,” is a common refrain. The only problem: it’s false.

We drove the most abundant bird in the Americas — the passenger pigeon — to extinction. The most abundant large mammal — the American bison — to functional extinction. We gained: agriculture, and safety for cows, from sea to shining sea. Who misses the Eskimo curlew? Indeed, who knows they existed, their vast migrating flocks like smoke on the now-gone prairies? That experiment is done.

Billions of people want what you and I got in exchange: health and wealth and education. We now live the way most other people on the planet wish to live. Governments, institutions, and regular people have cheered the material expansion that has cost many species (and tribal peoples) everything. We have endangered species not because what is bad for them is bad for us, but because the opposite is true: what is bad for them has fueled the explosive growth and maintenance of human populations and technologies. We are losing many species along the way to humanity’s only three apparent real goals: bigger, faster, more. Propelling the human juggernaut has entailed wiping many species out of the way. People live at high densities in places devoid of wild species and natural beauty. Human beings have thrived by destroying nature. When the animals and open spaces go, we have industrial-scale farms and factories, ball fields and strip malls and quick-lubes. How could saving this or that endangered species, that is following those whose oblivion brought fast food and sneakers, be a matter of — of all things — saving ourselves? Telling people that “we” need jaguars to “protect ourselves?” That’s a hard sell. We don’t need them.

I can’t name a single wild species whose total disappearance would be materially felt by, essentially, anyone.

There is no species whose disappearance has posed much of an inconvenience for civilization, not a single wild species that people couldn’t do without, fewer whose erasure would be noticed by any but a handful of die-hard conservationists or scientists. The irrelevance of wild things to civil society is why endangered species never make it into polls of top public priorities. I can’t name one wild species whose total disappearance would be materially felt by, essentially, anyone (you can easily function without having access to elephants, but if you misplace your phone for one whole day, it’s personal chaos). But I can effortlessly list various species from tigers to mosquitoes whose annihilation has been diligently pursued. Annihilation comes easy to Homo sapiens. What’s of little interest for us is coexistence.

I have seen with my own eyes that the role of elephants as ecosystem engineers affecting all animals on the African savannas matters not at all to people converting bushland into vulnerable subsistence gardens or, more decisively, into large commercial farms raising flowers destined for vases on the tables of Europe. Think of your favorite species. Gorillas? Sperm whales? Hyacinth macaws? Karner blue butterflies? Billions of people never give them a thought.

Only a tiny minority of people actually work with wild creatures, as ecologists, conservation biologists, wildlife rehabilitators, falconers, or even fishermen (oddly and not coincidentally I’ve been all of those.) On an average day, animals and plants must put up or be pushed out. In most countries, few wild things can “provide” to humans anything more valued than their carcasses. Many major American tree species have disappeared or nearly so (American elm, American chestnut, eastern hemlock, for instance). Ash trees are now disappearing and the main pain-point for humanity is nothing more than angst for the future of baseball bats.

Jaguar ( Panthera onca ). Source: Shutterstock

Lest anyone misread me: this predicament is catastrophic.

It is of course true that the things that are bad for nature as a whole — degradation of land and soil, polluted water and air — are bad for people ultimately . A total breakdown of living systems would mean a breakdown of human economies, and indications are it likely will. But “ultimately” is very far down the line, long after we’ve lost all the big animals, wild lands, viable ocean habitats, and the world’s living beauty. The human juggernaut can continue to blow through rhinos, parrots, elephants, lions, and apes and hardly feel a breeze. The most charismatic species all stand at or near historic lows and humans are at our historic high, two facts that are sides of the same coin. Claiming that people depend on wild nature is nice, but dependence on wild nature ended, and not well, generations ago. What keeps most people going is farming felling, pumping, and mining.

Far down the line when the land is exhausted and there’s no water on an overheated planet, there may be a great reckoning. It’s easy enough to hear the rumbles now. But even the recent hurricanes and fires that have left communities seemingly beyond recovery have not shaken the deniers. In this country, government disdain for natural places and species, and official ennui about the human health effects of environmental degradation, are worst-ever. And the current rollbacks remain too weakly opposed; most people don’t feel affected. Most of wild nature could be gone long before the human species confronts an existential cliff.

What a grim world it will be by the time we’re down to what humans need. Human need is a very poor metric for evaluating the existence of living things.

The natural services humans actually need to fuel modern living come from microbes of decay, a few main insect pollinators, the ocean’s photosynthesizing plankton, and non-living things like water and the atmosphere. Eventually we may well simplify the world to the bare essentials, and it will still support billions more people. Indeed, that’s the only way it can.

What a grim world it will be by the time we’re down to what humans need. Which only shows that human need is a very poor metric for evaluating the existence of living things. Ask living creatures to justify their existence in terms of human need; they lose.

So, in what bleak terrain does this leave us? The law that has been called the gold standard of species protection, the U. S. Endangered Species Act, doesn’t begin to get interested until after a species, considered in isolation, is already in dire straits. Then it sets a floor, measuring success as mere existence. A wiser law would target an aspirational ceiling of robust, resilient populations across broad, intact scapes of viable lands and productive waters.

Yet when applied in good faith it works. It works because of something many environmentalists have forgotten, most average people never think about, and most politicians are incapable of learning: it works because it doesn’t ask a species to prove its usefulness, what they’re good for, or how much money they’re worth. The act doesn’t say that we need them. It acknowledges that we harm them. In its first words, “The Congress finds and declares that various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth.” It says that recovery plans shall “give priority to… particularly those species that are, or may be in conflict with construction or other development projects or other forms of economic activity.”

Yet many conservationists continue trying to make the flimsy case that we need endangered species. And because the argument is false, it can be a counterproductive pandering to the self-interest of people who simply won’t care. “Prove that I need some endangered snail or whale.” You can’t.

Sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ). Source: Shutterstock

Fortunately, you don’t have to. The argument was decided decades ago, by Congress on behalf of all Americans, in favor of what you and I care about. The Endangered Species Act doesn’t claim that our existence depends on the existence of wild species. It says that we, the people, don’t let species go extinct, that this is who we are. It’s not about practicality; it’s about morality. The moral compass of species stewardship or loss is already mainstream — loss is bad. Conservationists and rank-and-file nature lovers should not pick that scab by trying to show that nature can and must serve us. The law says we need to serve nature. That’s a lot to work with.

Of course, laws are only as strong as the support they have. Conservationists must not only remind themselves that the law guides policy based on moral principle; they must continue to make the wide case for that underlying moral principle. When people say, “What good are they. They’re in the way!,” conservation needs a stronger argument than an appeal to self interest. Self interest has already been considered and nature has lost. Oil palms make money; never mind orangutans. We don’t need orangutans in order to “protect ourselves.” Orangutans need us to protect them.

But how best to press the case for life on Earth?

Humans have considered ourselves the most moral of species. A moral species has moral obligations. Despite capitalism’s appeal to self-interest, religions continue to assert the primacy of right and wrong. It may be that in our social species the only thing capable of standing up to pure self-interest is moral suasion. But what religions have underplayed — and indeed some have disdained — is seeing the physical world as sacred. On this planet where astrobiologists detect no other life in the galaxy, the rarity and perhaps even uniqueness of life in the universe makes Earth a sacred place. All known meaning in the universe is generated here, because this is the only living planet.

Winning the war against the natural in pursuit of accelerated material living, we lose the beauty that makes living worthwhile.

Although wild nature is not necessary for human survival, it is necessary for human dignity. Some of the grimmest places for human existence are those where nature has been scorched. People can lose their dignity in various ways, including oppressive governments. But oppressive surroundings are sufficient.

Zoom out from “endangered species” to the big picture. Abundant multitudes of species, wild things in wild places, anchor beauty to the face of this planet. What is true is this: Wild things create and live in the remaining beautiful places. As wild animals disappear, what is lost is the world’s beauty. Winning the war against the natural in pursuit of accelerated material living, we lose the beauty that makes living worthwhile.

That is not trivial. It is the most profound thing on Earth.

Ecology — living relationships and reliances — may be the only concept containing sufficient scope for a future worth humanly living. Ecology is most easily perceived by this shorthand: natural beauty. Each of our senses has ways of informing us what is good and bad. Our sense of smell evolved to sense things good for us as smelling pleasant and bad as smelling putrid. Our mind evolved the ability to combine all our sense into one overall detector of what is good in the world, and that best overarching sense is what we call “beauty.” As the beauty of the world drains away, we become less than human in the long run. And part of the long run is now.

Hyacinth macaw ( Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus ). Source: PaVan/Wikimedia Commons

Beauty is the single criterion that best captures all our deepest concerns and highest hopes. Beauty encompasses the continued existence of free-living things, adaptation, and human dignity. Really, beauty is simple litmus for the presence of things that matter.

If a future reckoning arrives for the human species, as seems likely, it will come because we asked life to prove its value compared to ever-more corn and shopping discounts, but could not hear the real answer. It will come because we did not see our planetary miracle as sacred.

Endangered species and wild things in the remaining wild places need us to care for them not selfishly but selflessly, for their sake, the sake of everything and everyone who is not us, for the sake of beauty and all it implies. As we make our habitual appeals to practicality, the argument we cannot afford to ignore, the one that must frequently be on our lips, is this: We live in a sacred miracle. We should act accordingly.

Meanwhile, a few things are right. Within the last few weeks, the long-endangered Kirtland’s warbler came off the endangered species list. This didn’t happen because we needed them. It happened because the Endangered Species Act determined that when species need us, we shall go to their aid. It happened, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced, because, “Kirtland’s warbler has responded well to active management over the past 50 years.” Before the Endangered Species Act, the species was down to 200 singing males. The population has increased more than tenfold, not because we needed Kirtland’s warbler, but because we understood that Kirtland’s warbler needed us. We understood our moral responsibility and commitment to keep a tiny bird in the world with us. Many would say that the warbler doesn’t matter to us. But the people who won the argument on behalf of the bird were those who argued and acted on the premise that we mattered to the warbler. Nothing else could have worked.

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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.

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How India is racing against time to save the endangered red panda

101 East reveals how India is fighting to conserve its population of one of the world’s rarest animals.

In the eastern Himalayas of India, a fight is under way to save one of the world’s rarest creatures.

Red pandas are known for their bright red fur and bushy, ringed tails and for spending most of their time sleeping in the trees of the mountainous forest range.

But they’re a rare sight.

Vulnerable to climate change, habitat loss and poaching, their numbers have plummeted.

Now, an Indian breeding and conservation programme is working hard to not only protect the species but also their habitat.

101 East reveals the battle to save India’s endangered red pandas.

Preserving Our Underwater Animal Heroes

Scientists and imaging specialists have teamed up to help save one of the world’s most endangered groups of animals: freshwater mussels. With funding provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, imaging experts will create 3D shell models of specimens from the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Once complete, the models will be freely available online to educate the public about these amazing yet little-known creatures that dwell in rivers and streams across the United States. The models will also be used to train conservation biologists to identify all 300 freshwater mussel species found in the United States. 

Revolutionizing Freshwater Mussel Conservation through 3D Modeling NCTC will create 3D prints of the shell models to enhance their Freshwater Mussel Identification Course, which they offer to conservation professionals across the country. The 3D models will also form the basis of an online course, allowing participants to virtually inspect specimens and learn to distinguish their unique characteristics. “This project is very exciting because it provides opportunities to teach field biologists and the public how to identify all of the freshwater mussel species native to the United States, especially with nearly 100 species listed as threatened and endangered,” said Matthew Patterson, Course Leader with the Service’s National Conservation Training Center. “And all of this is happening in 2023 as the Endangered Species Act is turning 50 years old.”    

Mussels are essential to the health of streams and rivers. They filter algae, excess nutrients, and heavy metals from their surroundings and stabilize streambeds by forming dense colonies. They’re also an important source of food for other animals, including fish, mammals, and birds. But years of widespread pollution, overharvesting and dam construction have imperiled freshwater mussel populations. State and federal agencies have placed a strong emphasis on evaluating populations and establishing regulations to safeguard species at risk of extinction. Before agencies can take stock of mussel diversity, staff must first know how to distinguish between species, a skill they develop by observing live specimens or training with reference shells.  

As mussel populations decline, however, reference specimens become increasingly harder to come by. For the rarest species, the only available shells are stored in museums where they are carefully curated and seldom handled, which makes them unsuitable for training. Instead of handling rare and delicate specimens, a digital 3D library would improve access to specimens by putting all U.S. species directly at our fingertips.   Building a Complete Collection   

The Florida Museum and the Smithsonian will collaborate to create a complete library of mussel biodiversity through 3D modeling. The use of photogrammetry helps visualize a specimen’s external features and color in 3D. The Florida Museum operates a fast and efficient photogrammetry rig, which transforms two-dimensional photographs of a specimen into a three-dimensional model. The rig can take up to 432 images of an individual specimen in 10 minutes or less.  

Specimens will be photographed and digitized at the Florida Museum and uploaded to an online digital repository that allows users to access free 3D models. Visit the Freshwater Mussels of America Collection of 3D Models to see several mussel specimens that have already been digitized. 

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Throughout the year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is celebrating the ESA’s importance in preventing imperiled species extinction, promoting the recovery of wildlife and conserving the habitats upon which they depend. The ESA has been highly effective and credited with saving 99% of listed species from extinction. Thus far, more than 100 species of plants and animals have been delisted based on recovery or reclassified from endangered to threatened based on improved conservation status, and hundreds more species are stable or improving thanks to the collaborative actions of Tribes, federal agencies, state and local governments, conservation organizations and private citizens.     

Note: There are many who contributed to this article including: Zachary Randall and Jerald Pinson from Florida Museum of Natural History, John Pfeiffer from Smithsonian Institution, Matthew Patterson from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center and Kenny Fletcher from Chesapeake Bay Foundation.   

Catherine Blalack, National Conservation Training Center, Headquarters   

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Teen's bid to protect biodiversity of NSW forest provides 'critical refuge' to endangered species

Two years ago, the then 14-year-old Ned McNaughton stumbled on a small forest while exploring the bush around his hometown in South East New South Wales.

It marked the start of a journey that eventually saw the parcel of land named after him.

"I was so surprised … it was just perfect jungle," he said.

"And I hadn't seen bush of that quality so close to so many houses."

At that moment, Ned didn't know that in the next two years, he would end up fighting to protect the 69-acre large parcel of land in Meringo on the New South Wales south coast from being developed. 

"I had no idea that so much would come from spending a bit of time in bushland," Ned said.

"It became such a big project, but so good, so unexpected."

Conservation after devastation 

Now 16, Ned has always been "super keen" on protecting nature.

But he said his passion was intensified after witnessing nearly 80 per cent of the south coast's Eurobodalla council area burn during the Black Summer Bushfires of 2019–20. 

"As I spent more time in the bush, I'm always finding areas that would have been perfect habitat and it's all completely burnt, just kilometres and kilometres all burnt," he said.

"It's just tragic."

In early 2023, Ned noticed the land in Meringo was going to be sold to be subdivided and developed, and began campaigning to his local community. 

"Some lovely people heard about it, some very generous people, and they helped out," he said. 

Local environmentalist Julie Mills, who worked as a wildlife carer during the bushfires, was among those who answered Ned's call for help.  

Julie and her husband Mark came across Ned's mission to protect the Meringo land in 2023, and decided to purchase the land. 

"It was almost as if the bush was talking to us to be saved," she said. 

"We love living with bush in and around us and we have to do our bit to sustain that."

The land was officially purchased in March, and was donated to the Biodiversity Legacy Trust Group to be managed.  The group protects smaller parcels of land that don't meet the size qualifications of other forest protection organisations.

Julie said they agreed the land should officially be named Ned's Forest when they registered it with the group in March. 

"We thought, why not name it after Ned, given how close he is to the land and the creatures that live in there," she said. 

Special block of land 'critical refuge' for wildlife

Professor David Lindenmayer, a forestry and environmental management expert from Australian National University, toured the property with Ned in 2023. 

"He [Ned] was very special in the field, and within 10 minutes, you could quite clearly see this was a very special block of forest," Professor Lindenmayer said. 

Professor Lindenmayer said small carnivorous marsupials called phascogales and a population of the endangered southern greater glider were living onsite. 

"To be able to find a little pocket of gliders like that is really quite extraordinary," he said.

"But for someone to be able to virtually lead us to exactly where they were meant to be, that was really something else." 

He said Ned's Forest was also home to centuries old hollow trees, that were "crucial refuges" for animals. 

"When you have a diversity of these very big trees, of different species, that's when you really know you are looking at a quickly important piece of habitat," Professor Lindenmayer said. 

Inspiring a generation 

Ned said he visited the forest weekly and recently guided more than 20 local high school students on a night tour of the forest. 

"It's pretty cool to see people actually enjoying it,"  he said. 

"I don't have any qualifications or anything, but just by speaking, I got quite lucky and something happened.

"I'm so proud to have my name on something that's been so positive and good."

Professor Lindenmayer said Ned's efforts to inspire others was inspiring. 

"My generation has really made a mess of the planet and it's going to fall to the new generations to do a lot better than what we have done," he said. 

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