Tigers, black rhinos, Sumatran elephants, orangutans, gorillas on decline, say Israeli animal ecologists

Hashem made wild beasts of every kind and cattle of every kind, and all kinds of creeping things of the earth. And Hashem saw that this was good.

Genesis

1:

25

(the israel bible)

January 31, 2022

3 min read

Animal conservationists worry that species that used to thrive in nature and are now preserved and bred almost exclusively in zoos will be lost to mankind in the future. Extinction is the unwanted conclusion of a process that starts with harm to individual animals or plants by people and leads to their populations declining. 

 

Human activities have dire consequences on the natural world. A lot of focus and attention by the public, governments and non-governmental organizations is focused on the extinction of species. This alarming figure raised a lot of attention to the dire current state of nature, and without concentrated efforts, we are bound to lose many more of the most prominent animals of our world in the coming decades. 

 

The world will be much poorer and sadder if the tigers, black rhinos, Sumatran elephants, orangutans, gorillas, hawksbill turtles and many other species disappear.

 

In the past 24 years, the Living Planet Report  (https://livingplanet.panda.org) has been published biannually by the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund. These reports highlight the major declines that vertebrate populations have experienced globally. The 2020 report that was last showed that on average vertebrate populations declined by 68% between 1970 and 2016.

 

Some scientists have claimed that this 68% average decline is heavily biased and dependent on a few populations experiencing massive declines, tipping the scales for all 20,811 of the populations monitored in the Living Planet Report.

 

However, a new paper published in the prestigious journal Nature under the title “Emphasizing declining populations in the Living Planet Report” by a group of scientists based in Israel shows that this assessment is not only unfounded but that the Living Planet Report may actually greatly underestimate global population declines.

 

Dr. Gopal Murali from Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev in Beersheba who was the lead author of the paper commented: “The previous critique of the report was unfair. In the previous study, the researchers removed less than three percent of the most declining populations and found that this was enough to reverse the Living Planet Report’s over-declines to a no-net-loss trend. However, by removing only those populations experiencing greatest declines, these researchers in essence gave much more weight to those populations showing greatest increases.”  

 

He added that “when we corrected this error and removed both most declining and increasing populations, we found that the overall population trend reported in the original Living Planet Report remained more or less the same – a 65% decline over the past nearly 50 years.”

 

The authors also analyzed the overlap of the monitored populations with protected areas. They then compared these to a random sample of locations and the placement of the global network of protected areas. They found that populations sampled in the Living Planet Report are much more likely to be found inside protected areas than would be expected to occur by chance.

 

“This is truly alarming” said Dr. Gabriel Caetano, also from BGU who co-led the paper. “If populations inside protected areas where we focus a lot of our conservation efforts are doing so badly, those that reside outside protected areas are probably worse off. The true situation of nature – mostly not monitored or protected – may be much worse.” 

 

The authors highlighted the need for proper accounting of the status of nature when making generalizations as they have done in their paper. However, they also advocated for greater monitoring of populations and species in different locations and stressed that many populations, species, and pristine locations would be lost forever without concentrated and direct action.

 

Prof. Shai Meiri of Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History who co-authored the study added: “Rather than discourage us from action, we feel that our work should be viewed as a call to arms. Rapid and comprehensive changes in how we view our relationships with nature are needed – and the onus is on us to make sure they happen before it is too late.”

 

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