work at a zoo or wildlife refuge

Nearly 200 animals and plants have been added to a global database of threatened species, the World Conservation Union announced Wednesday, adding that the number is certainly on the low end.

From the lowland gorillas of Africa to corals of the Galapagos Islands, more than 16,300 species are threatened with extinction, the group said in releasing its annual Red List.

“The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing, and we need to act now to significantly reduce it and stave off this global extinction crisis,” Julia Marton-Lefèvre, the group’s director general, said in a statement.

The group noted that while extinctions are a part of nature, its findings show that humans are accelerating some extinctions. “Estimates vary greatly, but current extinction rates are at least 100-1,000 times higher than natural background rates,” it said in a statement.

In what is billed as the world’s most authoritative assessment of Earth’s plants and animals, the group considered 41,415 species and found that of those, 16,306 were under threat, said Craig Hilton-Tailor, the list’s manager.

That is 188 more species than last year. Even so, Hilton-Tailor said, there are probably many more than that.

‘Tip of the iceberg’
“The estimate is low; we know it’s low,” he said. “We’ve only really looked at the tip of the iceberg in terms of species that are out there that are known to science.”

The total number of extinct species has reached 785 and a further 65 are only found in captivity or in cultivation, the group, also known by the acronym IUCN, said in its statement.

One in four mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70 percent of the world’s assessed plants on the 2007 Red List are in jeopardy, the IUCN added.

While it does not play a major role in U.S. decisions on wildlife conservation because the United States does this through its own Endangered Species Act, the IUCN is highly influential in other regions, particularly in developing countries that cannot afford to make their own assessments of which species are in trouble.

Its members includes nations, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and thousands of scientists.

The IUCN noted that while the total number of species on the planet is unknown, estimates vary between 10 million and 100 million — with 15 million species being the most widely accepted figure. Nearly 1.8 million species are known to exist.

Corals and warming seas
For the first time, corals were added to the list due to threats that include the warm-water Pacific Ocean pattern El Nino and global warming.

“The fact that corals are now present on the IUCN’s Red List should sound warning bells to the world that the oceans are in trouble,” said Simon Cripps, director of the global marine program at the World Wildlife Fund, an IUCN partner.

Hilton-Tailor said global warming is a factor in these and other species’ endangerment, but not the only factor.

“It’s really hard to identify whether it’s climate change or not that’s driving some of these species to extinction,” he said. “Climate change doesn’t operate by itself, it’s operating in tandem with other threats and it’s usually the combination of climate change and possibly the threat of a new disease … it’s different combinations that can push species over the brink.”

The Galapagos Islands saw 10 native coral added to the list, as well as 74 seaweed species.

Besides being affected by warmer water, the seaweeds are also indirectly affected by overfishing, which removes predators from the food chain and results in an increase of sea urchins and other herbivores that overgraze seaweed beds.

Ebola wiping out gorillas
Asked to name a particularly troubling example of an endangered species, Hilton-Tailor mentioned the western lowland gorilla, which moves from endangered to critically endangered on the latest list. Its decline is due to the Ebola virus and commercial hunting of so-called bush meat.

“In the last 10 years, Ebola is the single largest killer of apes. Poaching is a close second,” said Peter Walsh, a member of IUCN’s primate specialist group. “Ebola is knocking down populations to a level where they won’t bounce back. The rate of decline is dizzying. If it continues, we’ll lose them in 10-12 years.”

Female gorillas only start reproducing at the age of 9 or 10 and only have one baby about every five years. Walsh said even in ideal conditions, it would take the gorillas decades to bounce back.

Hilton-Tailor said the plight of gorillas points up the need for better viral controls, and for an alternative source of food for people in the gorilla’s range, from Angola to Congo to Gabon.

Development is the culprit in the decline of the Yangtze River dolphin, also known as the baiji, Hilton-Tailor said. It is critically endangered and possibly extinct, with perhaps one or two individual creatures remaining in China.

Changes in river flows due to dams, pollution, over-fishing and the use of electric shocks to fish in the Yangtze system are all factors in the cetacean’s disappearance. Heavy river traffic in fast-developing China is another cause.

“Any poor dolphin would really have to do amazing acrobatics to avoid being hit by one of those ships,” Hilton-Tailor said.

Birds in decline
For birds, the Red List shows 1,221 species are considered threatened with extinction, and 189 species are listed as critically endangered. The overall status of the world’s birds has deteriorated steadily since 1988, when they were first comprehensively assessed.

Birds did see the only success story on this year’s list, however. The Mauritius echo parakeet, which was one of the world’s rarest parrots 15 years ago, went from critically endangered to endangered — the only species to see its status improve.

The IUCN tied the improvement to close monitoring of nesting sites and supplementary feeding combined with a captive breeding and release program.

But it also expressed frustration that only one species on the list showed improvement.

“This is really worrying in light of government commitments around the world, such as the 2010 target to slow down the rate of biodiversity loss,” said Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy chief of the IUCN’s species program. “Clearly, this shows that much more needs to be done.”

The IUCN said that humans “are the main reason for most species’ decline” given their impact on habitat, introducing invasive species, unsustainable harvesting, pollution and disease. “Climate change is increasingly recognized as a serious threat, which can magnify these dangers,” it said.

The group also noted that:

Most threatened birds, mammals and amphibians are on the tropical continents — the regions whose forests are thought to hold most of Earth’s terrestrial and freshwater species.
Of the countries assessed, Australia, Brazil, China and Mexico hold “particularly large numbers of threatened species.”
The vast majority of extinctions since 1500 AD have taken place on islands, but over the last 20 years extinctions on continents have become as common as island extinctions.
Jane Smart, head of the IUCN’s species Program, added that protecting wildlife is in the interest of humans. “Our lives are inextricably linked with biodiversity,” she said, “and ultimately its protection is essential for our very survival.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population could be gone by midcentury if predictions of melting sea ice hold true, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Friday.

The fate of polar bears could be even bleaker than that estimate, because sea ice in the Arctic might be vanishing faster than the available computer models predict, the geological survey said in a report aimed at determining whether the big white bear should be listed as a threatened species.

“There is a definite link between changes in the sea ice and the welfare of polar bears,” said Steve Amstrup, who led the research team. Arctic sea ice is already at an all-time low this year and is expected to retreat farther this month, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

That means that polar bears, some 16,000 of them, will disappear by 2050 from parts of the Arctic where sea ice is melting most rapidly, along the north coasts of Alaska and Russia, researchers said in a telephone briefing.

Other polar bear populations could survive beyond that date but many of those could be gone by 2100, Amstrup said. By century’s end, the only polar bears left might live in the Canadian Arctic islands and along the west coast of Greenland.

“Projected changes in future sea ice conditions, if realized, will result in loss of approximately two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population by the mid 21st century,” the report’s executive summary said.

“Because the observed trajectory of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be underestimated by currently available models, this assessment of future polar bear status may be conservative.”

ARE POLAR BEARS ‘THREATENED’?

In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, noting polar bears depended on sea ice as a platform to hunt seals, their main prey.

The research released on Friday was sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service. A decision on the bears’ status is expected in January.

Without enough sea ice, polar bears would be forced onto land, but they are inefficient hunters once they get out of the water and ice, the researchers said. The bears’ disappearance would probably take place as young cubs failed to survive to adulthood and females were unable to reproduce successfully.

The first polar bears probably first appeared about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, and the species has not lived through a period as warm as the one predicted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientists said.

In a series of reports this year, the U.N. climate panel said with 90 percent probability that global climate change was occurring and that human activities contributed to it. The emission of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide from petroleum-fueled vehicles and coal-fired power plants, is the prime human cause of this warming trend, the panel said.

Global warming was an important topic of discussions of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum this week in Australia and will be the subject of a special U.N. meeting later this month.

That I didn’t get the internship at the zoo for this summer.

But, I do have a zoology class this fall, so hopefully I’ll do well enough in it that my teacher will write me a wonderful letter of recommendation to the zoo and then I’ll be able to have the internship.

The main problem they said why they can’t have me is because I wanted housing.

Oh well… I’ll just apply even earlier than I did last time. I’ll probably send it off whatever date the Spring Internship spots will be filled.

Read this on yahoo, thought I’d share.

BOGOTA, Colombia – A colorful new bird has been discovered in a previously unexplored Andean cloud forest, spurring efforts to protect the area, conservation groups said Monday.

The bright yellow and red-crowned Yariguies brush-finch was named for the indigenous tribe that once inhabited the mountainous area where it was discovered.

For conservationists the discovery of the species came at a crucial time — the government has decided to set aside 500 acres of the pristine cloud forest where the bird lives to create a national park.

“The bird was discovered in what is the last remnants of cloud forest in that region,” Camila Gomez, of the Colombia conservation group ProAves, said on Monday. “There are still lots of undiscovered flora and fauna species that live in the area.”

The small bird can be distinguished from its closest relative — the yellow-breasted brush finch — by its solid black back and the lack of white marks on its wings.

“There are about two to three new birds found in the world every year,” Thomas Donegan, the British half of an Anglo-Colombian research duo who discovered the bird in January 2004, told The Associated Press on Monday. “It’s a very rare event.”

To access the bird’s isolated habitat, Donegan and partner Blanca Huertas regularly hiked 12 hours into the nearly impenetrable jungle, depending on helicopters to drop off supplies at mountain peaks 10,000 feet above sea level.

“We first went to Yariguies about three years ago,” Donegan said. “It’s a huge patch of isolated forest that no one knew about, not even in Colombia.”

The new finch, the size of a fist, is native to Colombia’s eastern Andean range and considered by its discoverers to be near threatened and in need of close monitoring to prevent it from becoming endangered.

One of the two birds caught by the team was released unharmed after they took pictures and DNA samples, while the other died in captivity.

Donegan said this was one of the first time researchers were able to confirm a new bird without having to kill it.

The last new bird discovery in Colombia was a Tapaculos species found in the south last year.

With as many as 1,865 different species, Colombia has long been considered a bird watchers’ paradise, albeit a risky one because of the country’s four-decade-old civil war.

In 1998, rebels kidnapped four American bird watchers who were later found unharmed.

I really want an internship down at the Cincinnati Zoo.

But I need more school/classroom time. So not this summer, but next summer is when {I hope} I’ll have it.

Then after I graduate, who knows where I will go.