International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced its new Red List today, showing that mammals on earth are in real trouble. We now have 5,487 mammal species. That’s down 76 (or 1.3%) since 1500.
But we know that 1,141 mammal species are officially endangered and at risk of becoming extinct. That’s more than 20% of our mammals. But there’s another problem: we can’t even find enough another 836 mammals to figure out their status. They’re listed as “data deficient.”
“The reality is that the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent,” says Jan Schipper, of Conservation International who wrote about the findings in the magazine Science.
About 3.4% of mammal species fall into the worst category, Critically Endangered.
They’re not all charismatic megafauna. A lot of the animals in trouble are bats and mice.
But one critically endangered is the Iberian Lynx (Lynx pardinus). There’s less than 200 left because it eats the European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), which is also disappearing.
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