Humpback whales off endangered list
Humpback whales off endangered list
The Australian - August
12, 2008
Forty
years ago conservationists feared that humpback whales were being
hunted to extinction.Now numbers have returned to such a level that they have been taken off the danger list.
The latest count stands at 40,000 mature individuals, meaning that, for now at least, the humpback is safe from the threat of extinction.
Several other whales, such as the blue whale, the biggest animal on earth, and the sei and southern right whales, are also growing in number after similar scares.
The populations of several smaller species of whales and other cetaceans are still falling, however, and it is feared that some may be close to disappearing, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The vaquita, Phocoena sinus, a porpoise found in the Gulf of California, Mexico, is now thought to be down to the last 150 individuals and has been named by the union as the cetacean mostly likely to become extinct next.
The resurgence of the humpback, Megaptera novaeangliae, has nevertheless heartened conservationists. Whalers, especially the Soviet Union's Antarctic whaling fleet, had caused devastation to the humpback population until hunting was halted in the Sixties.
The humpback had been described by the union as vulnerable to extinction, but it has now been reclassified as being of "least concern" - the lowest rating.
Southern right whales, Eubalaena australis, have also been taken off the critical list after their population doubled from 7,500 in 1995.
They, too, get a "least concern" rating in the union's latest update of its Red List of threatened animals. Researchers assessing the number of blue, sei and and fin whales con-cluded that their populations were also rising, but not enough for their endangered listing to be lifted.
Randall Reeves, a cetacean specialist for the union, believes that the improvement in the population of the bigger species of whales is mostly attributable to bans on hunting.
"Humpbacks and southern right whales are making a comeback in much of their range mainly because they have been protected from commercial hunting," he said.
"This is a great conservation success and clearly shows what needs to be done to ensure these ocean giants survive. So long as commercial whaling isn't happening, the increase should continue."
The recovery has been going on for at least 20 years, he said, but it is a slow process because the large whales breed slowly.
Almost half of the monkeys and apes are facing a worsening threat of extinction because of deforestation and hunting for meat, an international report showed on Tuesday.
“We have solid data to show that the situation is far more severe than we imagined,” said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) primate specialist group. An assessment for an IUCN “Red List” of endangered species found that 48% of the 634 known species and sub-species of primates, humankind’s closest relatives such as chimpanzees, orangutans, gibbons and lemurs, were at risk of extinction.
In a previous report five years ago, using different yardsticks, just 39% of primates were judged at risk. The IUCN includes governments, scientists and conservation groups. Habitat destruction, led by burning and clearing of tropical forests for farmland, and the hunting of monkeys and apes for their meat were the main threats. Some species were “literally being eaten into extinction,” a statement said.
“Gorilla meat, chimpanzee meat and meat of other apes fetches a higher price than beef, chicken or fish” in some African countries, Mittermeier said. He said that deforestation was aggravating hunting. Roads cut to help loggers and burning of forests to create farmland were opening previously inaccessible regions to poachers.
Primates were suffering most in Asia, with 71% of all species at risk, against 37% in Africa. The report was to be released at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. In south-east Asia, human populations were higher than in Africa and habitats for orangutans, gibbons or leaf monkeys were getting ever more fragmented. Demand for pets and Chinese hunger for traditional medicines were adding pressures.
Among
species most at risk, or “critically endangered”, were the
Bouvier’s red colobus, an African monkey which has not been seen in 25
years, and the greater bamboo lemur of Madagascar totaling only about
140 in the wild.“If you took all the individuals of the top 25 most endangered species and assigned each of them a seat... they probably wouldn’t fill a football stadium,” Mittermeier said. Chimpanzees stayed “endangered”, the middle of a three-stage scale of risk. The mountain gorilla, found in jungles in Rwanda, Uganda and Congo, stayed critically endangered despite a rise in numbers.
See also:
Ashes to ashes, blubber to blubber
Killer whales blamed for decline of Scottish seals
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