Thanks ARKive!
Just one of ARKive’s “vacation pix”…cooling photos of chilling critters, including this surfing Gentoo penguin.
The ARKive website provides a fantastic service, offering video, photographs, and information on endangered species around the world. Sometimes, however, even they have trouble finding images of rare species, including today’s Endangered All-Star, Marley’s Golden Mole. If you’re traveling to the Lebombo Mountains and happen to photograph this elusive subterranean creature—alive and in its element—let them know. Check out other species without photos at ARKive’s Most Wanted List. Or donate, to support this great resource.
The 6-Foot Salamander
Imagine encountering today’s Endangered All-Star on a swim: A 6-foot long Chinese Giant Salamander looms out of the gloom, training its tiny eyes upon you. Sadly, that encounter is about as likely as meeting little green men from outer space: The Chinese Giant, world’s largest amphibian, is critically endangered thanks to a taste among the wealthy for this rare delicacy. 14 reserves have been established throughout China to save the species, but conservationists are concerned about intrusive tourism and development cropping around the protected areas.
You can help: Make a donation at the Zoological Society of London’s EDGE: Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered to help pay for native plant restoration in Giant Salamander breeding territory.
Photo: © Daniel Heuclin / www.nhpa.co.uk for ARKive
A Tiny River Horse
“A creature even mightier than the crocodile,” Pliny called the hippo, and right he was. But he was talking about the massive and always impressive full-sized hippo. Today’s Endangered All-Star is an altogether daintier and sadly more endangered animal. Perhaps 3,000 survive in the wild, their forests increasingly logged and converted to agriculture. The few countries where they still occur, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea, have suffered through civil wars and political instability, as damaging for wildlife as for the human population. May the Pygmy Hippo not follow its closely related subspecies—in Madagascar and Nigeria—into extinction.
Photo: © Pete Oxford / naturepl.com for ARKive
The Golden Fleece
Today’s Endangered All-Star: The Takin, a goat-antelope of the Himalayas. There are four subspecies, including the Golden Takin, rumored to bear the precious fleece sought by Jason and the Argonauts. But in the real world, all four subspecies are considered Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with a probable decline of some 30% over the past several generations. A heavily built alpine specialist, the Golden Takin is the national animal of Bhutan; this and the other subspecies occupy ranges that include western China, Tibet, northern Myanmar, and India. Accurate population figures are hard to come by because the Himalayan habitat favored by these creatures is remote and inaccessible. The IUCN suggests perhaps 5,000 Golden Takin (Budorcas taxicolor bedfordi) survive in China, along with several thousand of the related subspecies across its range.
Despite enjoying protected status in China, India, and Bhutan, the takin faces severe pressure from hunting: Local people or poachers lie in wait at salt licks where the animals congregate. Over a dozen nature reserves have been established to protect the Takin, and ten of those within Sichuan—intended to secure giant panda habitat—have also helped provide a safe haven for Takin. Captive-breeding programs are also underway: The Czech Republic’s oldest zoo, in the city of Liberec, recently welcomed another calf in January 2010, its sixth. Two more are expected soon.
Photo: © Xi Zhinong / naturepl.com for ARKive
Dhole
The Asian Wild Dog, also known as the Dhole or Red Dog, is today’s Endangered All-Star, its population reduced to perhaps 2,500. Like the African wild dog, the dhole is a spectacularly gifted hunter, capable of leaping high in the air to get a whiff of nearby prey. A famous late-addition to Kipling’s Jungle Book, the dhole hunts cooperatively, driving fawns or spotted deer into a line of waiting pack members or even into the water; the dhole is reportedly a capable swimmer. The species was once an important predator across Asia, common throughout India, China, Indonesia, southeast Asia, and the Russian far east. Today, persecuted as vermin by villagers and farmers, poisoned in mass campaigns in Bhutan, the dhole survives only in greatly diminished and fragmented populations, listed as Endangered on the IUCN’s Red List.
Persecution and widespread habitat loss represent major threats: There are reports from India of farmers clubbing pups to death at the den. But the dhole also faces the loss of most of its prey base. Coexisting with tiger, the dhole generally targets smaller prey, from hares to medium-sized deer, but many countries across the species’ former range have lost the full suite of ungulate species; those deer that remain may be present in greatly reduced numbers. In India, the Project Tiger reserves have proven to be safe havens for dhole as well, but even those reserves have lately fallen on hard times as the government cut funding for ranger programs and poaching escalated.
Despite these growing threats and the sharply dwindling number of these fascinating social dogs, the dhole has never received the kind of concentrated conservation attention it clearly needs. Even WWF, normally a trove of information on most endangered species, offers little concrete information about the dhole, but ARKive provides valuable photos, videos, and information. According to one report, available at the Dhole Home Page, there is some hope that larger protected area networks being planned for Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam may provide more protection.
Photo: © Nick Garbutt / www.nhpa.co.uk
It’s Rodent Week on iWild!
This week we’re featuring the world’s endangered rodents. Today: The Southern Giant Slender-Tailed Cloud Rat, endemic to the Philippines, is a large, shy, squirrel-like creature with big feet and a furry tail. Largely nocturnal, this rat frequents the tops of forest trees and is found only on the southern half of Luzon Island and one other island. It bears only a single pup a year. Threatened by a slow reproduction rate and by heavy and unsustainable hunting—some residents claim to catch 50 of the rats a year—the species may also be endangered by extensive deforestation. ARKive and the World Wildlife Fund are urging that the largest remaining remnant of the southern Luzon rain forests near Mount Isarog be protected: The region contains 13 mammal species listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List, including the Southern Giant Slender-Tailed Cloud Rat, as well as the largest bat on earth, the golden-crowned flying-fox.
Photo: © Daniel Heuclin / www.nhpa.co.uk
