Mediterranean Mammals on the Decline: One in Six Face Extinction
Used under license from Shutterstock.com
Six degrees of separation may not be such a good thing for the animals of the Mediterranean.
One out of every six Mediterranean mammals is threatened with extinction at the regional level. Out of 320 mammal species assessed for the IUCN Red List, 49 were threatened. This includes 20 species that are not found anywhere else in the world. To break this down even more, three percent are critically endangered, five percent are endangered and eight percent are vulnerable.
According to IUCN expert Annabelle Cuttelod, “the number one threat is habitat destruction, which affects 90 percent of the threatened species”. Urbanization, agriculture and climate change are the main culprits in the destruction of their habitats.
But it gets even worse.
Twenty-seven percent of the mammal species have declining populations, thirty-one percent are stable, and the status of thirty-nine percent is still unknown. Only three percent of the animals have a rise in population numbers. This is the first time ever that the IUCN has been able to assess all of the animals of the Mediterranean; however, the study does not include whales or dolphins.
The range of these threatened or endangered species extends from northwestern Africa and the Levant to the mountains of Turkey, and even includes the land that now comprises Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Carnivores and large herbivores are some of the most threatened in this region, eight species of which have already gone extinct in the Mediterranean, including the Mesopotamian fallow deer and common hippopotamus.
Helen Temple, co-author of the IUCN report, states that “we need to encourage people to accept large predators, improve protected areas management and better enforce laws regarding hunting practices”.
Used under license from Shutterstock.com
The IUCN, or International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, is the oldest and largest global environmental network. They work to help find solutions to environmental threats and development challenges by managing projects across the globe, supporting research, and attempting to bring governments and people together to develop policies, laws and best practice. They have also developed the Red List, which holds the world’s most comprehensive information on the status of plant and animal species. Categories included in the list are as follows: Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, Data Deficient, and Not Evaluated. These are reviewed every five to ten years to monitor changes in trends and to decide whether or not a species status should be changed.
If everything is really interconnected by the six degrees of separation theory, the future may be very bleak for more than the Iberian Lynx.
By Heidi Marshall
Popularity: -0% [?]
Tags: climate change, endangered species, extinction, global warming
And would life really be less incredible without them? Yes, if you’re totally focused on defining nature by it’s inevitable failures (including Humans) rather than it’s transient successes (some species, like humans and cane toads), it would. But if you’re happy to accept that life is life regardless of what it looks like, then the miracle of nature will not be completely obscured by the inevitibility of extinction (which is just death after all) and you will always be able to stare in objective wonder at life’s magnificient resilience. In the words of Charles Darwin:
“We need not marvel at extinction; if we must marvel, let it be at our own presumption in imagining for a moment that we understand the many complex contingencies on which the existence of each species depends.” – Charles Darwin, On The Origin Of Species.