Tiger numbers have fallen by more than 70 percent in slightly more than a decade in the Greater Mekong, with the region’s five countries containing only 350 tigers, according to a new World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report released today.
“Tigers on the Brink: Facing up to the Challenge in the Greater Mekong” comes as leaders from [...]

[Read more →]

Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just the deaths of frogs and salamanders, University of California, Berkeley scientists said Tuesday.
Researchers said substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet, the scientists said [...]

[Read more →]

Some large whale species such as the humpback, minke and southern right whale are recovering from a threat of extinction, helped by curbs on hunts since the 1980s, the world’s largest conservation network said on Tuesday.
A review of cetaceans — grouping about 80 types of whales, dolphins and porpoises — showed many small species were [...]

[Read more →]

Check out this excellent article by Oliver Tickell in todays Guardian. It paints a rather catostrophic future unless we pull our collective fingers out. Read on below:
“We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate [...]

[Read more →]

The endangered golden lion tamarin. Photograph: Anup Shah/Getty Images

Nearly half of all primate species are now threatened with extinction, according to an evaluation by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The study, which drew on the work of hundreds of scientists and is the most comprehensive analysis for more than a decade, [...]

[Read more →]

Endangered species could become extinct 100 times faster than previously thought, scientists warned yesterday in a bleak reassessment of the threats to global biodiversity. They say methods used to predict when species will die out are seriously flawed and dramatically underestimate the speed at which some will disappear.

[Read more →]

Dragging on a cigarette between his wrinkled lips, Hou Fengqi fingered a dusty bamboo bow and rusty iron-tipped arrows, before recounting his days as a “tiger hunting hero” in the rugged hills of southern China.

[Read more →]

Mountain gorilla in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. Photograph: Andy Rouse/Corbis

Endangered species may become extinct 100 times faster than previously thought, scientists warned today, in a bleak re-assessment of the threat to global biodiversity.
Writing in the journal Nature, leading ecologists claim that methods used to predict when species will die out are seriously flawed, and [...]

[Read more →]

Rhino numbers in Africa have reached record levels but one sub-species confined to a remote and lawless corner of Congo is on the brink of extinction, a leading conservation group warned on Tuesday.
While populations thrive elsewhere, the northern white rhino — found only in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Garamba National Park — has [...]

[Read more →]

Fragile continent: penguins on an iceberg in Antarctica. Photograph: Corbis

There has been a rush of “see it before it’s gone” tourism in recent years. The advent of “climate tourism“, and its close relative “extinction tourism“, has been reflected in (and encouraged by, no doubt) travel journalism.

[Read more →]