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Gorillas, vultures, corals, Asian crocodiles and even seaweeds are joining thousands of other species on the slide towards extinction, according to the latest edition of the Red List, the international catalogue of threatened wildlife.
In the past 12 months nearly 200 species have been added to the list, which is published by the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), taking the number threatened worldwide from 16,118 to 16,306.
This means that one in four of the world's mammals, one in eight birds, one-third of all amphibians and 70 per cent of the world's assessed plants on the current list are in now in jeopardy.
"Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken," the IUCN said.
The Red List is recognised as the most reliable evaluation of the conservation status of the world's species. It classifies them according to their extinction risk, through the categories extinct, critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable.
Once an organism is classified as critically endangered, extinction is very close.
A grim statistic contained in the latest list is that the western gorilla has moved from endangered to critically endangered, after the discovery that the main subspecies, the western lowland gorilla, has been depleted by the bushmeat trade and the Ebola virus.
Their population has declined by more than 60 per cent over the past 20 to 25 years, with about one-third of the total population found in protected areas killed by the Ebola virus over the past 15 years.
The change has been revealed in a depressing reassessment of the status of the great apes, which shows the orang-utan, in particular, to be in desperate trouble.
The Sumatran orang-utan remains in the critically endangered category and the Bornean orang-utan in the endangered category. Both are threatened by habitat loss due to illegal and legal logging and forest clearance for palm oil plantations.
Corals have been assessed and added to the list for the first time. Ten species from the Galapagos Islands have entered the list, with two in the critically endangered category and one in the vulnerable category. Wellington's solitary coral has been listed as critically endangered. The main threats to these species are the effects of the El Nino warm water phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean, and climate change.
In addition, 74 seaweeds from the Galapagos have been added to the list, 10 of them listed as critically endangered, with six of those highlighted as possibly extinct. The coldwater species are threatened by climate change and the rise in sea temperature that characterises El Nino. The seaweeds are also indirectly affected by overfishing, which removes predators from the food chain, resulting in an increase of sea urchins, and other herbivores that overgraze the algae.
The Gharial crocodile, found in India and Nepal, is also facing threats from habitat degradation, and it too has moved from endangered to critically endangered. Its population has declined by 58 per cent, from 436 breeding adults in 1997 to just 182 in 2006. Dams, irrigation projects, sand mining and artificial embankments have all encroached on its habitat, reducing its domain to just 2 per cent of its former range.
Asia faces a further crisis with enormous declines in its populations of vultures, which are important as scavengers. The use on cattle of the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, which is fatal to the birds when they consume it in cattle carcasses, is partly to blame. The red-headed vulture has moved from near-threatened to critically endangered, and the Egyptian vulture from least concern to endangered.
One of the saddest accounts of all concerns China's Yangtze River dolphin, or baiji, which was thought to be the world's rarest mammal, but may now have gone completely. After an intensive but fruitless search last November and December, it has been listed as critically endangered (possibly extinct).
- Independent
