Road-building plans threaten endangered Indonesia tigers

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia is preparing to greenlight the construction of several highways through a park that has one of the world’s few viable populations of wild tigers, conservationists warned Thursday. The move would be especially alarming, they said, because it would come just months after the government signed a deal in Russia promising […]

Population of Italy’s rare bear ‘below the threshold of survival’

By Stephen Messenger, Porto Alegre, Brazil 3 May 2011 In the forests of Italy’s Abruzzo National Park live one of the rarest creatures on Earth: the Marsican brown bear. For the last several decades the species has been on the brink of extinction — with current estimates putting their population at less than 50 individuals, […]

Antimalarial trees in East Africa threatened with extinction

ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2011) — Research released in anticipation of World Malaria Day finds that plants in East Africa with promising antimalarial qualities — ones that have treated malaria symptoms in the region’s communities for hundreds of years — are at risk of extinction. Scientists fear that these natural remedial qualities, and thus their potential […]

Warmer temperatures exterminating pika populations one-by-one

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.comApril 21, 2011 The last decade has not been a good one for the American pika (Ochotona princeps) according to a new study in Global Change Biology. Over the past ten years extinction rates have increased by nearly five times for pika populations in the Great Basin region of the US. Examining […]

Plenty more fish in the sea? Not for much longer

Contact: Nicki Chadwick, Media Relations Officer, IUCN Office, t +41 22 999 0229, m +41 79 528 3486, nicki.chadwick@iucn.org;19 April 2011 More than 40 species of marine fish currently found in the Mediterranean could disappear in the next few years. According to a study for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ on the status […]

Insatiable appetites drive Madagascar tortoises to extinction – ‘Systemic extermination of this species’

Contact: Dr. Herilala Randriamahazo, Madagascar Tortoise Conservation CoordinatorTurtle Survival Alliance/MadagascarPhone: +261 0331187993, +261 0343776701Email: herilala@turtlesurvival.org Antananarivo, Madagascar, April 8 — Despite being one of the most culturally significant and iconic species in Madagascar, the Radiated Tortoise (Astrochelys radiata) is being catapulted to extinction because it is a source of food for local people and a […]

Mass death of Pacific salmon may be caused by leukemia-type virus

By Rob Hotakainen, McClatchy Newspapers14 April 2011 WASHINGTON — In Canada’s Fraser River, a mysterious illness has killed millions of Pacific salmon, and scientists have a new hypothesis about why: The wild salmon are suffering from viral infections similar to those linked to some forms of leukemia and lymphoma. For 60 years before the early […]

Britain’s taste for cheap food is destroying Brazil’s ‘other wilderness’

By Martin Hickman11 April 2011 An “upside-down forest” of small trees with deep roots, Brazil’s wildlife-rich outback is home to a 20th of the world’s species, including the spectacular blue and yellow macaw and giant armadillos. Yet this vast wilderness – as big the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain put together – is being […]

Kenya: Rare Mountain Bongo facing imminent extinction

April 14 (Coastweek) – The Mountain Bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus isaaci) is on the edge of extinction mainly due to genetic factors, predation, disease, and forest habitat threats. This has been confirmed by both the Director of Kenya Wildlife Service Julius Kipng’-etich and Dr Jake Veasey, Co-ordinator for Bongo, IUCN Antelope Specialist Group. A recent joint […]

Graph of the Day: The Spread of White-nose Syndrome Across North America, 2006-2010

Contact: Mollie Matteson, Conservation AdvocateCenter for Biological Diversity, Northeast Field OfficePO Box 188Richmond, Vermont 05477802-434-2388mmatteson@biologicaldiversity.org In the span of just four winters, a deadly new disease called white-nose syndrome (WNS) that devastates bat populations has spread rapidly across the country from east to west. The bat illness was first documented in a cave in upstate […]

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