ENVIRONMENT WATCH

Life on Earth is fast disappearing
Paul Icamina

THE mighty Philippine Eagle is one of the five most critically endangered creatures on Earth, facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.
And the squaretail coralgrouper, found on coral reefs in the Philippines and the Western Pacific, is considered vulnerable.

In the Philippines and the Western Pacific, the squaretail coralgrouper is popular on restaurant menus and exported to Hong Kong and mainland China where they fetch high prices. This species is now protected in Palawan and in Fiji .

The eagle and the grouper made it to the latest Red List, the most reliable evaluation of the conservation status of the world's species.

The list classifies them according to their risks, from extinct, critically endangered (“extinction is very close” like the Philippine Eagle) to endangered and vulnerable like the Squaretail Coralgrouper.

"Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken," warns the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in the latest edition of the Red List, the international catalogue of threatened wildlife, released mid-September.

Corals are included for the first time in this year’s list. Ten species from the Galapagos islands have entered the list, with two in the critically endangered category and one in the vulnerable category.

Gorillas, vultures, corals and Asian crocodiles joined thousands of other species on the slide towards extinction.

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 severely depleted by the commercial bushmeat trade and the Ebola virus.

Of the great apes, the orang-utan is in desperate trouble. The Sumatran orangutan 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.

In the last year, nearly 200 additions were made to the list, upping the number of threatened species worldwide from 16,118 to 16,306. In danger are 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.

All in all, 16,306 species are threatened with extinction, but this may be a gross underestimate because fewer than 3% of the world’s 1.9 million described species have been assessed by the Red List.

Human activities threaten 99% of the species are at risk. Humans are the main cause of extinction and the principle threat to species at risk of extinction.

Habitat loss and degradation are the leading threats. They affect 86% of all threatened birds, 86% of the threatened mammals assessed and 88% of the threatened amphibians.

Another threat is the introduction of alien species. Some of the worst include cats and rats, green crabs, zebra mussels, the African tulip tree and the brown tree snake. Introductions of alien species can happen deliberately or unintentionally, for example, by organisms "hitch-hiking" in containers, ships, cars or soil.

Mining, logging, hunting and fishing for food, pets and medicine threatens many species. So do pollution and disease.

The most species threatened are in the tropics, especially on mountains and on islands. Over the last 20 years roughly 50% of extinctions occurred on continents: Central and South America; Africa south of the Sahara; and tropical South and Southeast Asia . They contain most of the Earth’s terrestrial and freshwater species.

The total number of species on the planet is unknown; estimates vary between 10 to 100 million, with 15 million species being the most widely accepted figure. Only about 1.7 - 1.8 million species are known today.

The Red List considers a species extinct when exhaustive surveys in known or expected habitats fail to record any individuals. The 2007 Red List documents 785 extinctions and 65 extinctions in the wild since 1500AD (when historical scientific records began).

This number doesn’t account for the thousands of species that go extinct before scientists even have a chance to describe them.

Stepping closer to extinction, many species have moved into the critically endangered category since 1996, the first time the Red List was published. It suggests that the situation is deteriorating for many species.

But many that have been listed as extinct have subsequently been discovered to exist. The Philippines bare-backed fruit bat, for example, was previously considered to be extinct after no records of the species since 1964. However, it was rediscovered on Cebu in 2000 and then on Negros in 2003. It is now listed as critically endangered.