News and research about endangered species from around the world
Less than a month ago Bouba N'Djida National Park in northeastern Cameroon was home to 450 elephants. Today, at least half of those elephants are gone, slaughtered by armed horsemen who traveled hundreds of kilometers, probably from Sudan, to kill the animals for their valuable ivory tusks...
The population of the world's smallest and rarest dolphins has dropped by half in the past seven years to an estimated 55 individuals, according to research released March 13 by the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC), the University of Auckland and Oregon State University...
It's been a rough year for Western Australia's iconic but endangered Carnaby's black cockatoos ( Calyptorhynchus latirostris ), which are endemic to the state and live nowhere else in the world...
Billionaire media mogul Ted Turner has made a $1 million donation to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International to help support a new initiative to save endangered Grauer's gorillas (also known as eastern lowland gorillas, Gorilla beringei graueri ), a subspecies living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) whose population is on the decline.The donation, the largest the Fossey Fund has ever received, will be used to build field stations from where rangers can protect gorillas from armed groups fighting over natural resources in the war-torn nation...
Two endangered rhinos have been critically injured and a third died after poachers in South Africa hunted the animals down and chopped off their horns.
India's leopards are dying at a rate of at least one per day, according to a report released this week by the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI).
Australia has a long history of invasive species that have damaged the island nation's ecology and driven several species into extinction. The most famous example, of course, is the cane toad ( Rhinella marina ), which was introduced by Australia in 1935 in an attempt to control sugar cane pests, but which instead proved devastating to many species of frogs, turtles, and even salt-water crocodiles.Another invasive species plaguing Australia is a beautiful flowering plant known as mother-of-millions ( Bryophyllum spp .)...
In 2008 biologists studying the eastern massasauga rattlesnake ( Sistrurus catenatus catenatus ) made a gruesome discovery: three sick snakes suffering from disfiguring lesions on their heads...
And then there was one. The last known Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog ( Ecnomiohyla rabborum ) now lives by himself at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia after the zoo euthanized the only other member of its species.The euthanized frog, another male, had been experiencing a "marked decline in health and behavior" according to a Zoo Atlanta news release...
In May 2011 Indonesian customs officials inspecting a shipment of fish and turtle meat bound for Vietnam came across a gruesome discovery: 5.9 metric tons of pangolin meat and another 790 kilograms of pangolin scales hidden within the cargo.It was just one of the nearly four dozen illegal pangolin shipments seized in Indonesia, Vietnam, India, China and other countries in 2011...
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