October 25, 2000 - AP
More than a quarter of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed by pollution and global warming, experts said Monday, warning that unless strong measures are taken, most of the remaining reefs could be dead in 20 years.
In some of the worst hit areas, such as the Maldives and Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, up to 90 percent of coral reefs have been killed during the past two years due to rises in water temperature.
Coral reefs play a crucial role as an anchor for most marine ecosystems, and their loss would place thousands of species of fish and other marine life at risk of extinction.
Addressing 1,500 delegates from 52 countries at the 9th International Coral Reef Symposium on the island of Bali, researchers warned that governments must urgently reverse global warming trends, cut pollution and crack down on overfishing.
"You have to go and look at the coral reefs now, as we are losing them," said Clive Wilkinson, a leading Australian scientist.
Wilkinson said that in some areas fishermen use dynamite or cyanide to catch fish, blowing the reefs apart or poisoning them. In other areas, governments pump untreated sewage and other waste directly into oceans.
But the most serious and immediate threat to the world's reefs is global warming, which causes a damaging condition known as coral bleaching. This occurs when higher water temperatures heat up the coral, causing them to expel the microscopic plants that give them their vibrant color. If the coral is not cooled, it dies.
Oceanographers say the El Nino weather pattern two years ago, which led water temperatures to rise by up to six degrees, did enormous damage to the coral reefs, some of which had been alive for up to 2.5 million years.
Australian scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said 26 percent of coral reefs around the world have already been destroyed and in another 20 years, water temperatures are likely to rise to the point where corals will be sitting in a "hot soup" in which they are unable to survive.
Wilkinson said the loss of the reefs would not only be a major blow to the environment, but would also threaten the livelihood of a half billion people around the world who rely on them for food and income.
The reefs bring in an estimated $400 billion a year in fishing and tourism revenues.
Wilkinson said millions of affected people in poorer countries may not be able to find alternative sources of income and may become reliant on foreign aid.
"The world's attitude to global warming must change," he said.
While many Western countries have started to seriously address the problem, some governments in Asia have ignored it.
Indonesian scientist Rili Djohani said many regional governments cut their conservation budgets by up to 80 percent when the Asian financial crisis hit three years ago.
Indonesia's maritime affairs minister Sarwono Kusmaatmadja said half the nation's coral reefs have already died and the other half could soon follow suit.
"We don't have the resources to protect them," he said.
Indonesia, an archipelago nation of 13,000 islands, relies heavily on its colorful coral reefs to attract hundreds of thousands of tourists a year.
Valerie Paul, a professor at the University of Guam, said the loss of the coral reefs would also be a devastating blow to the medical industry, which is exploring the possibility that the marine ecosystems may unlock secrets to new medicines.
She said there are many natural chemicals in the reefs that are still to be found.
An adult female California condor named AC-8 was released Tuesday in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, northwest of Los Angeles, Calif. When this bird was captured in June 1986 to help save her species from extinction, AC-8 was the last female and one of only six California condors remaining in the wild.
April 6, 2000 - AP
Nearly 14 years after she was captured to help save her species from extinction, a California condor spread her wings Tuesday and soared to freedom.
Known only as Adult Condor No. 8, or AC-8, the vulture hopped out of a pen and extended her wings to their 9-foot span in the warm sunshine bathing remote cliffs of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, northwest of Los Angeles, Calif.
"It looked like she knew right where she was," condor recovery team leader John Brooks says.
Minutes later, two younger condors raised in the Los Angeles Zoo took off to join AC-8 and experience life in the wild for the first time.
California condors once roamed North America. Their numbers fell as human settlements reduced food sources. Others were shot or poisoned by lead fragments in carcasses left by hunters. Poison bait and pollutants killed more. By the 1970s there were only a few dozen left.
There are now 49 California condors flying free in California and Arizona.
Before she was captured in June 1986, AC-8 was the last female and one of only six California condors remaining in the wild.
While at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, AC-8 produced 12 offspring. She is the first condor from the breeding program to taste freedom again.
Condors can live for 40 years or more. AC-8 is believed to be between 28 and 40.
There are about 6,000 tigers left in the wild
March 30, 2000 - BBC
Poachers are continuing to kill the world's remaining tigers, despite progress in reducing the use of the animals' bones in traditional medicine.
A report by the Traffic network, the wildlife trade monitoring programme of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN), says the poaching is continuing "unabated".
A recent WWF survey in Indonesia found that at least 66 Sumatran tigers had been killed in the last two years alone.
This represents almost 20% of the wild Sumatran tiger population. Of the total lost, 37 animals were killed in national parks.
WWF says the discovery in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, of a pet shop with two tiger cubs on open sale in 1998 "demonstrates how blatant the tiger trade has become in some countries".
Progress undermined
The report says there has been progress in reducing the use of tiger bones in Chinese medicines, because of tougher laws and enforcement, and because substitutes are increasingly accepted.
But it says the progress is being undermined by the trade in tiger skins, teeth and claws, with major tiger markets flourishing openly in most countries where the animals live.
The report, Far from a Cure, says: "Disturbingly large markets for tiger skins persist, and other large cats, such as leopards, are poached as substitutes for tiger bone."
In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, it says, a raid last December resulted in one of the largest seizures of recent times, including the skins of four tigers and 70 leopards, and 18,000 leopard claws.
In the spotlight
The Traffic researchers say all range states (countries with wild tigers) and countries which use parts of the animal should get tougher on tiger crime, introducing and enforcing stronger laws to deter poaching and illegal trade.
They say there were markets in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma and Laos during the last few months of 1999.
WWF is demanding immediate action from these states, which it says will be in the spotlight at the CITES (UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) meeting in Kenya in April.
Stuart Chapman of WWF-UK said: "The tiger is running out of time, and governments are running out of excuses. This barbaric trade must end."
He told BBC News Online: "We think it is realistic to demand action from range states, even though they are poor countries.
"They do have the capacity to stop the open sale of tiger parts. It's simply a question of a police officer walking the street and preventing the sale of skins, or cubs.
Applying pressure
"It's not rhetoric. We've seen examples in the past where action under CITES has produced results.
"Indonesia has a huge wildlife trade in things like reptile skins, coral and songbirds.
"If countries like that feel the pinch in other areas, a low-level issue like tigers will come right up the agenda."
The number of wild tigers, thought perhaps to have been as high as 100,000 a century ago, is now put at around 6,000.
The only known specimen of the new rodent:
The 35 mm camera lens cap shows scale
February 29, 2000 - BBC
Zoologists say they have made a "dramatic" discovery in the Peruvian Andes - a hitherto unknown genus of mammal.
The discovery of the animal, a tree rat the size of a domestic cat, was made by Dr Louise Emmons, a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
She found it while climbing in the Vilcabamba mountains near the ruins of the Inca city of Macchu Picchu, an area which had not been researched before.
Dr Emmons was about 700 metres up the mountain when she came across the rat, which had just been killed by an Andean weasel.
Lucky strike
"I think I must have disturbed the weasel. It ran off and left the mammal almost literally at my feet.It was a really exciting discovery. I knew it was something I had never seen before, but it's wonderful to realise that this is a totally new genus of rodent. It was tremendous luck for me that the weasel had just struck, because the rat is too big to be caught in the traps we set for mice and other small mammals, so I wouldn't have seen it but for the weasel.
"It was also extremely lucky the rat dropped exactly where it did. Another metre either way in that dense vegetation, and I'd have missed it."
Dr Emmons named the rat Cuscomys ashaninka, a reference both to the nearby city of Cusco and to the indigenous people of the area, the Ashaninka.
It is a powerfully-built animal, pale grey, with a white streak running along its head to its snout, and possesses large claws.
The expedition was organised by Conservation International (CI), based in Washington DC.
More to find
Dr LeeAnne Alonso of CI said: "This is an important discovery, and there are certain to be more of these animals out there. The fact than an animal so big remained undiscovered for so long makes you wonder what else remains undiscovered. It shows how elusive even quite large forest mammals can be. We didn't expect to find anything as dramatic as that."
Louise Emmons says the tree rat's nearest relative is a large mammal which appears to have been kept as a pet by the Incas who lived at Machu Picchu.
Some have been found in tombs in the city's ruins, and it is thought they had been buried with their owners.
These Inca tomb rats were also large and adapted for living in trees. They are thought to be extinct, but Dr Emmons now believes some could still survive.
The Vilcabamba expedition notched up several other successes apart from finding Cuscomys.
It also found two new mouse species, two orchids, 11 butterflies and more than a dozen new species of frog and lizard.
Seahorses are being fished in huge numbers
February 8, 2000 - BBC
They are actually a type of fish related to the stickleback, but with their long horse-like snout, strange upright swimming style and delicate grasping tail, seahorses have fascinated us for centuries, spawning poems and seafaring legends.
Zoologists are warning that if we are not careful, those legends may be all we have left of these fascinating creatures unless we can find ways of halting an alarming decline in their numbers.
Some populations are thought to have been cut by half in just five years, and one species in South Africa is now officially on the endangered list.
Habitat destruction
Humans are responsible for this decline in a number of ways - we are destroying their coastal habitats with holiday developments and pollution, leaving fewer and fewer places where they can lurk in the sea grass and pounce on their prey.
Seahorses are also being fished in huge numbers, mainly for their value in traditional Chinese medicine, where they are highly prized as treatment for asthma, lethargy and impotence.
At least 20 million of them are taken from the sea each year to meet this demand. Many hundreds of thousands more are turned into souvenirs for tourists or captured live for the international aquarium trade.
Project seahorse
An international programme known as Project Seahorse is being co-ordinated at London Zoo, where the warning is being made.
Curator Dr Heather Hall says a better understanding of the biology and ecology of the seahorse is imperative if action is to be taken to stem the decline.
The zoo has a successful seahorse breeding programme, but aquarium keeper Brian Zimmerman warns that rearing them is extremely difficult.
They need to feed constantly as they have no stomachs and will normally insist on live food. Unaware of this, many people buy seahorses at pet shops and watch helplessly as they starve to death within days.
Because most seahorses are not technically endangered, the trade is legal, and the project sees one of its aims as education, working with Chinese medicine practitioners to find alternatives to wild-caught seahorses. It also wants to persuade tourists that these beautiful creatures are much more attractive viewed live at an aquarium, rather than dead as a trinket sold in a market.
January 30, 2000 - Reuters - South Africa
When renowned ape researcher Jane Goodall came to Tanzania 40 years ago, she could climb to a hilltop and see nothing but rain forest and chimpanzee habitat stretching to the horizon.
Today, the home of her ground-breaking studies into chimpanzee behavior is only a tiny piece of its old size, about ten miles long and three miles deep, surrounded by cleared land and eroding soil.
The plight of the 120 chimps stranded in that oasis is shared by all of Africa's Great Apes -- the chimpanzees and gorillas, Goodall said in an interview in Johannesburg.
``I think it is a real race against time. Give it just 10 to 20 years and it will be too late...they (the Great Apes) are disappearing even as we speak,'' she told Reuters.
Goodall said Africa's three species of chimpanzees and its gorilla populations were under grave threat from logging, expanding human settlement and the bush meat trade.
``There isn't a forest now. It is just patches of forest all shrinking as human populations expand and logging companies drive deeper into them,'' she said.
At the start of the 20th century, there were believed to have been close to two million chimpanzees along Africa's great equatorial forest belt, Goodall said.
She said there are now thought to be only around 200,000 chimpanzees left, with the only significant populations in the two Congos, Gabon and Cameroon. Gorillas are even more threatened, with only some 300 mountain gorillas in the wild.
Goodall was in South Africa to oversee work on a sanctuary for orphaned chimpanzees.
Adaptability A Problem
Goodall said one of the chimpanzee's greatest liabilities was its inability to adapt to new habitats. Unlike baboons, which can thrive in most of Africa's ecosystems, chimpanzees cannot survive outside the rain forest.
The same holds true for their cousins, the gorillas and the orang-utans of southeast Asia.
``Chimpanzees and other Great Apes have a very conservative nature,'' she said.
As logging companies push into the rain forests, their roads give ruthless hunters access to chimp populations, which they kill for the lucrative trade in bush meat.
``This is not done to feed starving people. It is done because it is culturally preferable to eat the meat of wild animals,'' she said, adding that much of the meat ends up in upscale restaurants in African cities.
Goodall said she hoped the South African chimpanzee sanctuary -- to be built near the famed Sterkfontein caves, where scientists recently discovered a 3.3-million-year-old ape man's arm and hand -- would be an educational center for the public that could prove to be one of the chimp's last refuges.
``The whole panorama of human evolution is laid out for people. Our closest living relative the chimpanzee and our stone age ancestors...just side by side on the savannah,'' she said. ''It is a wonderful educational opportunity.''
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