Some wonder whether loss of species diversity has costs. Here's an example such a cost. The loss of frogs to the global spread of a killer fungus causes streams to produce less biomass.
Athens, Ga. – Streams that once sang with the croaks, chirps and ribbits of dozens of frog species have gone silent. They’re victims of a fungus that’s decimating amphibian populations worldwide.
Such catastrophic declines have been documented for more than a decade, but until recently scientists knew little about how the loss of frogs alters the larger ecosystem. A University of Georgia study that is the first to comprehensively examine an ecosystem before and after an amphibian population decline has found that tadpoles play a key role keeping the algae at the base of the food chain productive.
“Many things that live in the stream depend on algae as a base food resource,” said lead author Scott Connelly, a doctoral student who will graduate in December from the UGA Odum School of Ecology. “And we found that the system was more productive when the tadpoles were there.”
The results, which appear in the early online edition of the journal Ecosystems, demonstrate how the grazing activities of tadpoles help keep a stream healthy. The researchers found that while the amount of algae in the stream was more than 250 percent greater after the amphibian population decline, the algae were less productive at turning sunlight and nutrients into food for other members of the ecosystem. Without tadpoles swimming along the streambed and stirring up the bottom, the amount of sediment in the stream increased by nearly 150 percent, blocking out sunlight that algae need to grow.
Which species losses due to human activity will cut into the amount of biomass produced by ecosystems? We are going to find out.
We are in the early stages of a massive human-caused mass extinction. Some biologists at UC Santa Barbara ask an important question: since most of the threatened species can't be saved is there some way to identify which species are the worst to lose? Their answer: loss species with no evolutionary close relatives in their ecosystem will cause the biggest impact and most deserve saving.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of both plants and animals, with nearly 50 percent of all species disappearing, scientists say.
Because of the current crisis, biologists at UC Santa Barbara are working day and night to determine which species must be saved. Their international study of grassland ecosystems, with flowering plants, is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"The current extinction event is due to human activity, paving the planet, creating pollution, many of the things that we are doing today," said co-author Bradley J. Cardinale, assistant professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology (EEMB) at UC Santa Barbara. "The Earth might well lose half of its species in our lifetime. We want to know which ones deserve the highest priority for conservation."
Think of this as development of rules for triage. Technology combined with the human instinct for reproduction is going to wipe out a large fraction of other species. For those few of us who believe that such species loss is a really bad thing what types of species conservation should we support? It is an important question.
Recent studies show that ecological systems with fewer species generally produce less biomass than those with more species. Less plant biomass means that less carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere and less oxygen is produced. So, as the biomass of plants plummets around the globe, the composition of gasses in the atmosphere that support life could be profoundly affected. Additionally, there are fewer plants for herbivorous animals to eat. Entire food chains can be disrupted, which can impact the production of crops and fisheries.
The loss of species that are not closely related to other species in the ecosystem reduces productivity more than the loss of species with close relatives. And the more genetically distinct a species is, the more impact it has on the amount of biomass in an ecosystem.
"Losing a very unique species may be worse than losing one with a close relative in the community," said Oakley. "The more evolutionary history that is represented in a plant community, the more productive it is."
Cadotte explained that the buttercup is a very unique species, evolutionarily. Losing the buttercup, where it occurs in grasslands, would have a much bigger impact on the system than losing a daisy or a sunflower, for example. The latter species are closely related. Each could therefore help fill the niche of the other, if one were to be lost. The daisy and sunflower also have a more similar genetic make-up.
"These 40 studies are showing the same thing for all plants around the world," said Cardinale. "It is not a willy-nilly conclusion. This study is very robust. It includes studies of plants that are found throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. We can have a high degree of confidence in the results. And the results show that genetic diversity predicts whether or not species matter."
Cheap DNA sequencing will tell us more about species relatedness. But even if we can find out which species are most important to save will we even be able to protect enough ecosystems to keep the important species around? I'm skeptical. 9 billion people are going to cause massive habitat destruction.
In a population survey of West African chimpanzees living in Côte d'Ivoire, researchers estimate that this endangered subspecies has dropped in numbers by a whopping 90 percent since the last survey was conducted 18 years ago. The few remaining chimpanzees are now highly fragmented, with only one viable population living in Taï National Park, according to a report in the October 14th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.
Maybe in 50 years the human population of Africa will stop growing. Then again, maybe not. But long before that happens lots of primate species, cat species, and other species in Africa are going to be toast. Time to start doing massive DNA sample collection so that perhaps a couple of centuries from now these species can be reintroduced into the wild.
This alarming decline in a country that had been considered one of the final strongholds for West African chimps suggests that their status should be raised to critically endangered, said Geneviève Campbell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The booming human population in Côte d'Ivoire is probably responsible for the chimpanzees' demise.
"The human population in Cote d'Ivoire has increased nearly 50 percent over the last 18 years," said Christophe Boesch, also of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "Since most threats to chimpanzee populations are derived from human activities such as hunting and deforestation, this has contributed to the dramatic decline in chimpanzee populations. Furthermore, the situation has deteriorated even more with the start of the civil war in 2002, since all surveillance ceased in the protected areas."
Back in the late 80s the chimps in Ivory Coast were half the remaining chimps. Maybe they still are if the chimps in the rest of Africa are fairing just as poorly.
In the 1960s, the population of chimpanzees in Côte d'Ivoire was estimated at about 100,000 individuals. At the end of the 1980s, when the first and last nationwide chimpanzee survey was carried out, the total population of chimpanzees was estimated at 8,000 to 12,000 individuals. While that already represented a drastic decrease from the expected numbers, it nonetheless meant that Côte d'Ivoire harbored about half of the world's remaining West African chimpanzee populations.
In the new study, Campbell and Boesch's team conducted another nationwide survey, revealing a 90 percent drop in the chimpanzee nest encounter rate since the time of the last survey. That catastrophic decline in chimpanzees is especially strong in forest areas with low protection status, where the researchers saw no sign of the chimps. Even in protected areas like Marahoué National Park, chimpanzees have clearly suffered since surveillance and external funding support were disrupted by civil unrest in 2002.
Ivory Coast women are producing more than 4 babies per woman. While it ha a population of 20.1 million today you can pay a visit to the US Census Bureau's web site's international database and do a query for population projections for 2050 and find that they expect a population of over 37 million. Even with the current population there's probably enough people in Ivory Coast to wipe out all the chimps. I doubt the chimps stand a chance with 37 million. So bye bye wild chimps. You can visit them in some zoos.
To my commenters who do not believe massive species extinctions are in store: Where are those chimps hiding?
This looks like a sign of human over population to me.
Barcelona, Spain, 6 October, 2008 (IUCN) – The most comprehensive assessment of the world’s mammals has confirmed an extinction crisis, with almost one in four at risk of disappearing forever, according to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, revealed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.
Some claim to believe that every additional human life is an asset to us all. But if all the people in countries with rapidly growing populations had fewer babies I think we'd be better off.
I expect this problem to get worse because the human population looks set to increase by at least a couple billion more people.
The new study to assess the world’s mammals shows at least 1,141 of the 5,487 mammals on Earth are known to be threatened with extinction. At least 76 mammals have become extinct since 1500. But the results also show conservation can bring species back from the brink of extinction, with five percent of currently threatened mammals showing signs of recovery in the wild.
“Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live,” says Julia Marton-Lefèvre, IUCN Director General. “We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives.”
The real situation could be much worse as 836 mammals are listed as Data Deficient. With better information more species may well prove to be in danger of extinction.
“The reality is that the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent,” says Jan Schipper, of Conservation International and lead author in a forthcoming article in Science. “This indicates that conservation action backed by research is a clear priority for the future, not only to improve the data so that we can evaluate threats to these poorly known species, but to investigate means to recover threatened species and populations.”
Asian industrialization adds to the demand for timber and food crops. This results in more habitat loss. World demand growth for energy pulls more land into biomass crop production and further reduces habitat for wild animals. Plus, population growth pushes humans into more areas which previously were wild. The human footprint has become too large.
Less visibly, the Our oceans were once far more full of fish and other marine creatures. Now they show more signs of plastic waste and fewer signs of fish. While privately owned fisheries might help some for the oceans I do not see how private ownership of land is going to save many land species.
The world is overpopulated by humans. Isn't 6 billion enough? Human encroachments are cutting back on the numbers of fish.
Nearly 40 percent of fish species in North American streams, rivers and lakes are now in jeopardy, according to the most detailed evaluation of the conservation status of freshwater fishes in the last 20 years.
The 700 fishes now listed represent a staggering 92 percent increase over the 364 listed as "imperiled" in the previous 1989 study published by the American Fisheries Society. Researchers classified each of the 700 fishes listed as either vulnerable (230), threatened (190), or endangered (280). In addition, 61 fishes are presumed extinct.
The new report, published in Fisheries, was conducted by a U.S. Geological Survey-led team of scientists from the United States, Canada and Mexico, who examined the status of continental freshwater and diadromous (those that migrate between rivers and oceans) fish.
"Freshwater fish have continued to decline since the late 1970s, with the primary causes being habitat loss, dwindling range and introduction of non-native species," said Mark Myers, director of the USGS. "In addition, climate change may further affect these fish."
If immigration continues unabated the United States alone will have 450 million people by the middle of the century. Habitats will shrink further and we'll lose lots of these species of fish along with other types of species.
Lots of types of fish are threatened.
The groups of fish most at risk are the highly valuable salmon and trout of the Pacific Coast and western mountain regions; minnows, suckers and catfishes throughout the continent; darters in the Southeastern United States; and pupfish, livebearers, and goodeids, a large, native fish family in Mexico and the Southwestern United States.
Nearly half of the carp and minnow family and the Percidae (family of darters, perches and their relatives) are in jeopardy. Fish families important for sport or commercial fisheries also had many populations at risk. More than 60 percent of the salmon and trout had at least one population or subspecies in trouble, while 22 percent of sunfishes — which includes the well-known species such as black bass, bluegill and rock bass — were listed. Even one of the most popular game species in the United States, striped bass, has populations on the list.
This problem is going to get worse. Population growth and economic growth along with depleting fossil fuels all push more land into human uses.
The rarer tree species are especially vulnerable to extinction.
Common tree species in the Amazon will survive even grim scenarios of deforestation and road-building, but rare trees could suffer extinction rates of up to 50 percent, predict Smithsonian scientists and colleagues in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
How resilient will natural systems prove to be as they weather the next several decades of severe, human-induced global change? The debate is on between proponents of models that maximize and minimize extinction rates.
The Amazon basin contains about 40 percent of the world's remaining rainforest. One of the fundamental characteristics of tropical forests is the presence of very rare tree species. Competing models of relative species abundance, one based on Fisher's alpha statistic and the other based on Preston's lognormal curve, yield different proportions of rare trees in the forest.
It isn't clear how much of the expected extinction they expect will come from climate change versus logging and conversion of forests to pasture and farm land.
A few thousand tree species might be lost.
In this offering, the authors use the neutral theory to predict the number of tree species and to test predictions of the Millenium Ecosystems Assessment that forecasts major tree extinctions in the Amazon over the next several decades. First, they estimate that the Brazilian Amazon has (or had) 11,210 large tree species, and, of these, 5,308 species are classified as rare.
Based on optimistic and non-optimistic scenarios for road construction in the Amazon published by the Smithsonian's William Laurance and colleagues in the journal Science in 2004, they predict that the rare species will suffer between 37 and 50 percent extinction, whereas the extinction rate for all trees could be from 20 to 33 percent overall.
How much rain forest will survive the growth in demand for trees, livestock grazing land, and farm land for food and biomass energy crops? Economic development, population growth, and depletion of oil and natural gas fields each create pressures to convert more and more wild lands into industrial uses. Jungles look to become rare.
Want some meat on part of the argument for why a Scripps researcher expects big ocean extinctions? Here's a pretty impressive indicator of bad trends in the oceans: the hypoxic (oxygen deficient) dead zones are growing in size.
A global study led by Professor Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, shows that the number of "dead zones"—areas of seafloor with too little oxygen for most marine life—has increased by a third between 1995 and 2007.
How much of that dead zone size growth is due to expanded use of nitrogen fertilizers? All of it? The only development I can see on the horizon that will change this trend is Peak Oil. Declining availability of fossil fuels will push up the cost of nitrogen fertilizer made using natural gas. But at some price of fertlizer the use of wind, solar, or nuclear electric power will become competitive for nitrogen fertilizer production. So I do not expect a permanent shift toward lower nitrogen fertilizer usage.
Diaz and collaborator Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden say that dead zones are now "the key stressor on marine ecosystems" and "rank with over-fishing, habitat loss, and harmful algal blooms as global environmental problems."
The study, which appears in the August 15 issue of the journal Science, tallies 405 dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, affecting an area of 95,000 square miles, about the size of New Zealand. The largest dead zone in the U.S., at the mouth of the Mississippi, covers more than 8,500 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey.
Diaz began studying dead zones in the mid-1980s after seeing their effect on bottom life in a tributary of Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore. His first review of dead zones in 1995 counted 305 worldwide. That was up from his count of 162 in the 1980s, 87 in the 1970s, and 49 in the 1960s. He first found scientific reports of dead zones in the 1910s, when there were 4. Worldwide, the number of dead zones has approximately doubled each decade since the 1960s.
As China develops, the US population grows by 50%, and other areas grow in population and industry this these dead zones will grow much larger. Is it possible for farmers to maintain high levels of crop production without nitrogen fertilizer run-off so high that it causes dead zones at the mouths of rivers?
Diaz and VIMS colleague Linda Schaffner estimate that Chesapeake Bay now loses about 10,000 metric tons of carbon to hypoxia each year, 5% of the Bay's total production of food energy. The Baltic Sea has lost 30% of its food energy—a condition that has contributed to a significant decline in its fisheries yields.
From 1974 to 2000 world nitrogen fertilizer usage grew by about a factor of 2.5. The economic development of China, southeast Asia, and India creates the possibility of a far larger growth in nitrogen fertilizer demand in the next 25 years. How big will the dead zones become?
The outlook for fertilizer demand is up up up.
The FAO report estimates that world fertilizer supply (nitrogen, phosphate and potash nutrient) will increase by some 34 million tonnes representing an annual growth rate of 3 percent between 2007/08 and 2011/12, comfortably sufficient to cover demand growth of 1.9 percent annually.
Total production is expected to grow from 206.5 million tonnes in 2007/08 to 241 million tonnes in 2011/12. Fertilizer demand will increase from 197 million tonnes today to 216 million tonnes in 2011/12.
World nitrogen supply is forecast to rise by 23.1 million tonnes by 2011/12; world phosphate fertilizer supply will increase by 6.3 million tonnes and potash supply by 4.9 million tonnes.
The Daily Telegraph has a worldwide map of hypoxic areas.
Update: A Time article reports use of winter wheat crops could catch nitrogen released by spring thaws. But that costs money and the incentive isn't there to do this.
Jeremy Jackson sees a downward spiral in the health of the world's oceans.
Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing.
Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past.
Many forms of environmental damage are acting synergistically to cause a greater impact.
He cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.
Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, has tagged the ongoing transformation as "the rise of slime." The new paper, "Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean," is a result of Jackson's presentation last December at a biodiversity and extinction colloquium convened by the National Academy of Sciences.
The nutrient run-off from farms will get worse as more farms automate in response to high world food prices and growing demand from industrializing countries. The same will happen with overfishing. More countries need to impose more severe restrictions on fishing.
Jackson sees 3 main drivers of this coming ecological disaster.
To stop the degradation of the oceans, Jackson identifies overexploitation, pollution and climate change as the three main "drivers" that must be addressed.
"The challenges of bringing these threats under control are enormously complex and will require fundamental changes in fisheries, agricultural practices and the ways we obtain energy for everything we do," he writes.
If we slowed, stopped, and reversed human population growth that would greatly reduce the strain on the oceans. But even a shrinking population that is rapidly industrializing (e.g. China) will put a growing strain on the environment. We also need for developing countries to put a greater priority on controlling pollution. But they are far more interested in raising their living standards.
The world faces a big problem with China's industrialization in particular. The US industrialized with a much smaller population than it has now. So it went through its dirtiest stage with perhaps an eighth or tenth of China's current population. To have a country as big as China industrialize and go through its most polluting stage with so many people means a massive scale of pollution. Add in India, south east Asia, and other industrializing areas and the quantities of pollutants going into the atmosphere and oceans exceeds the pollution from European and American industrialization and comes up top of the remaining quantities of pollutants still emitted in the West.
I expect world pollution to get much worse before it gets better.
Humans are diverting a rising fraction of all biomass for their own purposes. The politically sponsored push for biomass energy just accelerates that trend. Population growth and industrialization also lead to more habitat destruction. One result: half the world's primate species are threatened with extinction.
Edinburgh, Scotland – Mankind’s closest relatives – the world’s monkeys, apes and other primates – are disappearing from the face of the Earth, with some literally being eaten into extinction.
The first comprehensive review in five years of the world’s 634 kinds of primates found that almost 50 percent are in danger of going extinct, according to the criteria of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Issued at the 22nd International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland, the report by the world’s foremost primate authorities presented a chilling indictment on the state of primates everywhere. In Asia, more than 70 percent of primates are classified on the IUCN Red List as Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered – meaning they could disappear forever in the near future.
This problem is going to get far worse as the human population hits 7, 8, 9 billion and as rising Asian buying power surpasses Western buying power to cause more tearing down of rain forests for food, crop land, and grazing land. Expanding cities also convert land from farming and necessitate the conversion of more forests and savannahs into agricultural uses.
Southeast Asia is especially hard hit.
With the input of hundreds of experts worldwide, the primate review provides scientific data to show the severe threats facing animals that share virtually all DNA with humans. In both Vietnam and Cambodia, approximately 90 percent of primate species are considered at risk of extinction. Populations of gibbons, leaf monkeys, langurs and other species have dwindled due to rampant habitat loss exacerbated by hunting for food and to supply the wildlife trade in traditional Chinese medicine and pets.
“What is happening in Southeast Asia is terrifying,” said Jean-Christophe Vié, Deputy Head of the IUCN Species Program. “To have a group of animals under such a high level of threat is, quite frankly, unlike anything we have recorded among any other group of species to date.”
Elsewhere, species from tiny mouse lemurs to massive mountain gorillas face challenges to survive. In Africa, 11 of the 13 kinds of red colobus monkeys assessed were listed as Critically Endangered or Endangered. Two may already be extinct: Bouvier’s red colobus (Procolobus pennantii bouvieri) has not been seen in 25 years, and no living Miss Waldron’s red colobus (Procolobus badius waldroni) has been seen by a primatologist since 1978, despite occasional reports that some still survive.
“Among the African species, the great apes such as gorillas and bonobos have always tended to grab the limelight, and even though they are deeply threatened, it is smaller primates such as the red colobus that could die out first," said IPS President Richard Wrangham.
Market solutions will not prevent this disaster. Ecotourism can save only a small fraction of the threatened land because far more people will buy food, biomass energy, and wood products than will pay to visit wilderness areas. The buying power (both mass market and political market) is lined up against habitat preservation.
Lax enforcement of anti-poaching laws has allowed a resurgence of the poachers.
African elephants are being slaughtered for their ivory at a pace unseen since an international ban on the ivory trade took effect in 1989. But the public outcry that resulted in that ban is absent today, and a University of Washington conservation biologist contends it is because the public seems to be unaware of the giant mammals' plight.
The elephant death rate from poaching throughout Africa is about 8 percent a year based on recent studies, which is actually higher than the 7.4 percent annual death rate that led to the international ivory trade ban nearly 20 years ago, said Samuel Wasser, a UW biology professor.
But the poaching death rate in the late 1980s was based on a population that numbered more than 1 million. Today the total African elephant population is less than 470,000.
"If the trend continues, there won't be any elephants except in fenced areas with a lot of enforcement to protect them," said Wasser.
Poaching got cut down in the last 1980s and could be again.
In 1989, most international ivory trade was banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (http://www.cites.org/), which regulates trade in threatened and endangered species. The restrictions banned ivory trade except for ivory from elephants that nations legally culled from their herds or those that died naturally.
At the time the treaty was enacted, poachers were killing an average of 70,000 elephants a year. The ban instigated much stronger enforcement efforts, nearly halting poaching almost immediately. However, that sense of success resulted in waning enforcement. Western aid was withdrawn four years after the ban was enacted and poaching gradually increased to the current alarming rates, Wasser said.
"The situation is worse than ever before and the public is unaware," he said, "It's very serious because elephants are an incredibly important species. They keep habitats open so other species that depend on such ecosystems can use them. Without elephants, there will be major habitat changes, with negative effects on the many species that depend on the lost habitat.
Continued rapid human population growth also poses a big threat to elephants and other wild animals of Africa. We need international agencies to make a serious effort to cut down the fertility rate in Africa. Too many people means more poverty, disease, and habitat loss.
Yet another sign that the human population has become too big:
Sharks are disappearing from the world’s oceans. The numbers of many large shark species have declined by more than half due to increased demand for shark fins and meat, recreational shark fisheries, as well as tuna and swordfish fisheries, where millions of sharks are taken as bycatch each year.
This is going to get much worse. The human population is increasing and Asian industrialization is massively increasing the number of people who can afford to eat fish caught in the ocean.
Now, the global status of large sharks has been assessed by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), which is widely recognized as the most comprehensive, scientific-based information source on the threat status of plants and animals.
“As a result of high and mostly unrestricted fishing pressure, many sharks are now considered to be at risk of extinction,” explained Julia Baum, a member of the IUCN’s Shark Specialist Group who will be speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Conference in Boston, which runs from February 14 to 18. She will outline management measures required to conserve sharks at an afternoon press conference on February 17.
“Of particular concern is the scalloped hammerhead shark, an iconic coastal species, which will be listed on the 2008 IUCN Red List as globally ‘endangered’ due to overfishing and high demand for its valuable fins in the shark fin trade,” added Baum, who is an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The capture of sharks makes more fish from lower in the food chain available for human consumption. Humans are basically displacing other predators at the top of large numbers of food chains.
It is always open season in shark fishing in international waters. Every year the amount of capital available to sweep the oceans free of fish keeps going up.
Baum pointed out that fishing for sharks in international waters is unrestricted, and she supports a recently adopted United Nations resolution calling for immediate shark catch limits as well as a meaningful ban on shark finning (the practice of removing only a shark’s fins and dumping the still live but now helpless shark into the ocean to die).
Will growing Asian buying power overwhelm any attempt to stop fisheries shrinkage?
A boat discovered off of China draws attention to Chinese demand for endangered species.
Endangered, hunted, smuggled and now abandoned, 5,000 of the world's rarest animals have been found drifting in a deserted boat near the coast of China.
The boat had lots of rare species.
According to the local media, the cargo included 31 pangolins, 44 leatherback turtles, 2,720 monitor lizards, 1,130 Brazilian turtles as well as the bear paws. Photographs showed other animals, including an Asian giant turtle.
All of these south-east Asian species are critically endangered, banned from international trade and yet openly sold in restaurants and markets in China's southern province of Guangdong, which is famous for its exotic cuisine.
The accidental discovery highlights the negative impact that the growing power of Chinese consumption is having on global conservation efforts.
Growing Chinese demand is wiping out species in a growing list of countries.
As a result of demand, the pangolin populations of China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been wiped out. With traders moving further and further south, the animal is declining even in its last habitats in Java, Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula. It is a similar story for many species of turtle, tortoise, frog and snake.
As the buying power of Chinese consumers continues to grow rapidly this problem will only get worse. Brian Wang thinks China might surpass the United States in GDP terms by 2020. Brian also believes the rate of urbanization in China is faster than generally believed.
The United States went through industrialization with a much smaller population than it has now and a far smaller population than China has now. Mass Chinese demand for environmental protections will not happen until Chinese per capita GDP rises to some multiple of what it is today. That means Chinese economic growth will cause far larger amounts of environmental damage than US economic growth did when the US passed through the same stages of development. Hence the wiping out of many species in southeast Asia.
Global warming gets all the press. But if you want to look at it from the standpoint of the many endangered species why care about global warming? These species will go extinct and therefore won't still be around to experience global warming.
Industrialization and population growth pose huge problems for remaining shrinking habitats. They pose far larger problems than the possibility of global warming. Western intellectuals who have worked themselves up into a tizzy about global warming are ignoring problems that should be treated as much higher priority.
I wish species extinctions got one tenth the attention that global warming gets. Many European mammalian species are at risk of extinction.
One-sixth of Europe's mammal species are threatened with extinction, according to a comprehensive survey by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Unless the trend is reversed, conservationists fear that the European Union will not be able to meet its self-imposed target of halting biodiversity loss by 2010.
Of the roughly 250 mammal species that live in Europe and western Russia, some 15% are classed as 'vulnerable' or worse, according to the IUCN's criteria. This means that they face a "high risk of extinction in the wild" if action is not taken.
The Europeans could reduce the pressure on species by stopping immigration. Fewer people means more room for animals.
The world as a whole has even bigger problems.
OSLO -- Human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour and the world must do more to slow the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs by 2010, the United Nations said Tuesday.
Scientists and environmentalists issued reports about threats to creatures and plants including right whales, Iberian lynxes, wild potatoes and peanuts on May 22, the International Day for Biological Diversity.
The UN calculates its estimates based on the loss of habitats rather than based on specific species previously known that can't be found. But lots of species haven't been cataloged and for some species no one is going out to check.
Some people think the world's population growth is no longer a problem due to a projected peaking at 9 billion. But the next 3 billion humans are going to wipe out a lot of habitats before the problem stops getting worse. Also, biotechnological advances will increase human life expectancy and human fertility. Natural selection for higher fertility (especially for a stronger desire to have kids) will also exert effects that could make the current growth projection excessively optimistic.
The embrace of biomass energy by political elites is also going to contribute to species extinction since land used to grow biomass energy crops is land that ceases to support assorted plant and animal species.