Wild animals are in a race against time
As some cheetah populations face being wiped out in 2017, Joe Shute looks at the range of species that are under threat
When a cheetah sprints, there is nothing on Earth that can touch it. Yet man is now beating this beast. A report last week by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) revealed that the cheetah is racing towards extinction. Today there are just 7,100 in the wild, a figure that has halved since 1975. Over the next 15 years, that may be further reduced by 53 per cent.
Dr Sarah Durant, lead author of the ZSL report, fears there are countries where whole cheetah populations will be wiped out in 2017. “Some are hanging by a thread,” she says. Today, the cheetah occupies just 9 per cent of its historical range, confined predominantly to southern Africa.
While the cheetah should survive the next 12 months, other species will not be so lucky. A major study released by the ZSL and WWF (World Wildlife Fund) in October revealed the global number of wild animals is set to fall two-thirds by 2020. Animal populations plummeted by 58 per cent between 1970 and 2012, with losses set to reach 67 per cent over the next three years.
Destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution are all to blame. A “red list” of endangered species compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) features 82,954 animals and plants, with almost a third threatened with being wiped out completely.
The world’s last three northern white rhinos remain under 24-hour armed guard in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. The two females and a male were transferred from a Czech zoo in 2009 with another male, which died in 2014. As recently as 1960, there were more than 2,000 northern white rhinos. But poaching has put paid to that. The only male left has already had his horn removed to make him less valuable to poachers, and is weakening by the day.
The world’s smallest porpoise, the vaquita, may also vanish this year. Only 60 individuals are left in the Gulf of California – a 92 per cent drop since 1997. China’s Yangtze river dolphin is already feared gone. There’s also bad news for great apes. Four out of six species are now critically endangered: the eastern gorilla, western gorilla, Bornean orang-utan and Sumatran orang-utan.
But 2016 brought better news for giant pandas, as the animal was downgraded from “endangered” to “vulnerable”, thanks to a population rebound in China, after decades of work by conservationists. Latest estimates suggest the overall population is now 2,060, though that number could fall again, as climate change scientists predict over a third of the animal’s bamboo habitat will be wiped out in 80 years.
Britain is far from immune to the world’s wildlife crisis. The annual State of Nature report, compiled by 53 wildlife organisations, reported 1,199 species on the red list, compared with 755 three years ago. Newly added creatures include the Kentish snake millipede, mole cricket, necklace ground beetle and yellow pogonus, a small sand beetle found in salty marshes. Their disappearance could have a calamitous effect. The decline of sand eels, for example, has led to a crash in puffin populations, now also at risk of extinction in Britain.
Since 2003, some 8,000 British species have declined by 53 per cent; among them hedgehogs, natterjack toads, great crested newts, water voles, turtle doves and nightingales. The hen harrier is down to a handful of birds, while fewer than 100 Scottish wildcats now exist outside captivity.
But there is hope. Jeff Ollerton, a biodiversity professor at the University of Northampton, says: “Most of our extinct species still occur on the continent and could be reintroduced if appropriate habitats were found.”
Creating enclosed spaces for nature, he admits, is not enough. Rather humans need to develop better ways of co-existing with animals.