Action urged as a fifth of reptiles face extinction threat
As China prepares to host COP15, global study finds crocodiles and turtles among most at-risk
More than a fifth of the world’s reptile species are threatened with extinction, according to an assessment of more than 10,000 species, which shows crocodiles and turtles are among the most at-risk.
The international researchers said the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) to be hosted by China later this year would be key for the world to agree on how to protect biodiversity, especially for animals that require urgent conservation efforts to prevent extinction.
“It’s critical that there’s agreement on truly effective measures that will be taken by the world’s governments and means to measure their effectiveness if we’re to be able to turn around this biodiversity crisis,” said Bruce Young, co-leader of the study and chief zoologist and senior conservation scientist at the US-based organisation NatureServe.
“That’s a hope that China can play a constructive role in those negotiations. But it’s very complicated and the preliminary meetings so far this year show there’s quite a bit of disagreement among countries in the specific wording of the post-2020 framework.”
The second part of COP 15 will take place in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming. The parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are expected to adopt a post-2020 global biodiversity framework that aims to reverse loss in this decade.
In the previous agreement signed in 2010, governments around the world agreed on 20 targets to reduce biodiversity loss and protect habitats by 2020, but none was fully achieved.
In the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on Wednesday, the team from 24 countries analysed the conservation needs of nearly 10,200 reptile species compared with mammals, birds and amphibians.
At least 21 per cent of the species were deemed vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered under the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened
Species criteria. Species are assessed based on geographic range, population size, population decline or increase and extinction probability analysis.
The team warned that about 16 billion years of evolution would be lost if all the threatened species became extinct.
One of the authors, Blair Hedges, director of the centre for biodiversity at Temple University in Philadelphia, pointed to the example of the Galapagos marine iguana, the only living lizard that has adapted to marine life, often diving into the ocean to eat algae.
“It developed this unique lifestyle over about 5 million years, illustrating how much evolution can be lost if just a single species disappears,” he said.
He said reptiles were important to the ecosystem because they kept insects in check and filled a crucial intermediate role in the food chain between insects and the reptiles’ predators. They also helped humans control pests such as insects and rodents.
In China, the Yangtze giant softshell turtle, Chinese alligator and king cobra are among the threatened reptiles, according to another study author, Xie Yan of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
While there were only three Yangtze giant softshell turtles left in the wild, the number of Chinese alligators had grown after years of rewilding work to more than 1,000 from around 130 in 1999, Xie said. Both animals were rated critically endangered. “China has greatly improved the living conditions of reptiles by building nature reserves, revising the Wildlife Protection Law, adding species to the protected wildlife list, and banning the trade and consumption of wild animals,” she said.
Young said human consumption – leading to agriculture, logging, urban development and invasive species – was the ultimate cause of threatened extinction.
“Whether it’s by direct consumption – a major threat especially in Asia – or consumption of beef, which leads to deforestation to make way for pastures, or consumption of rare minerals that leads to mining that destroys habitats, there are knock-on effects to reptiles.”