Posted on 3-10-2003
Goodbye
Cruel World
Lion numbers have dropped by 90% in 20 years.
The other big cats are going fast. How long before all the Earth's
'mega species' disappear from the wild?
By Tim Radford, Oct 2, 2003, The
Guardian
Collectively, the householders of the world could be about to
put the cat out. African lion numbers have fallen by 90% in
the past 20 years, according to a recent report. There are only
about 23,000 alive today. That's the number of seats at Barnsley
football club stadium.
The tiger is also an endangered species. At the highest estimate,
there are fewer than 8,000 left. To put that number in perspective,
about that many people work on Ministry of Defence sites in
Wales. There are probably only 15,000 or so cheetahs in the
whole of Africa. The Iberian lynx is down to about 600.
And it's not just the cats that we're putting out. The Cross
River gorilla sub species, for example, which lives on the border
between Nigeria and Cameroon, is down to about 200 at the most.
That is fewer than the number of British men who each year develop
breast cancer. There are fewer than 50 Chinese alligators surviving
in China. Most books give a estimate for sperm whales of 1 to
2 million, but a paper published last year gave an estimate
of 360,000. The most recent estimate for southern hemisphere
minke whales is about half the total estimate of 760,000 derived
from surveys in the late 1980s.
Lions, cheetahs and lynxes share certain characteristics with
many other threatened creatures: they are large, they are carnivores,
they are fussy about where they live, they need a large range,
they have small litters and a long gestation period, and they
are hunted.
This makes them natural candidates for extinction in a world
in which human numbers have soared from 2.5 billion to more
than 6 billion in 50 years. The planet's population grows by
more than 80 million every year. There are roughly 240,000 extra
mouths to feed every day.
Each of these humans has a personal ecological footprint: that
is, each appropriates an average of 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres)
to provide water, food, energy, housing, transport, commerce
and somewhere to tip the waste. (Americans on average take up
almost 10 hectares each.) Even though the rate of growth in
human numbers is beginning to decline, the wild things are being
pushed towards oblivion at an ever faster rate. That is because
the numbers of individual households - empty nesters, yuppies,
singletons and one-parent families - is exploding, even in those
countries with low population growth. That means yet more pressure
on the wild to provide timber, gravel and lime, plant fibres,
food and water.
Survivors in an increasingly human world need a different set
of characteristics. They must be small herbivores that produce
large numbers of offspring very swiftly, adapt happily to concrete,
tarmac and fossil-fuel pollution and are prepared to live anywhere.
So the typical wild animals of the 21st century, as one American
biol ogist predicted more than 30 years ago, "will be the
house sparrow, the grey squirrel, the Virginia opossum and the
Norway rat". The lion, denied the lion's share, could slope
off into the eternal night.
The big animals are merely the most visible of endangered species.
One eighth of all bird species are at serious risk of extinction.
At least 13% of the world's flowering plants could be about
to perish. One-fourth of all mammals are to some extent endangered
and around 30 species are down to their last thousand members.
There are 19 critically endangered primates, and 16 species
of albatross could be about to fly away for ever. These are
sober estimates from the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature about animals that are already well studied. But biologists
simply do not know how many species there are on the planet.
The big ones are easy to spot, the smaller ones are literally
beyond counting. About 1.8 million little birds, beasts and
beetles have been named, but there could be seven million or
even 70 million.
Five years ago, John Lawton, a population biologist and now
the chief of Britain's Natural Environment Research Council,
tried to take the measure of biodiversity in the Cameroon. He
and colleagues marked out a few plots of forest and started
trying to count the species in eight taxonomic groups. They
spent 10,000 hours on the research and then abandoned it: the
job would have kept 1,200 taxonomists busy for years.
"We surveyed birds, butterflies, ants and then all the
way down to itsy-bitsy nematode worms," he says. "The
percentage of species we found that were actually known and
described by taxonomists was inversely related to their body
size. In other words, we didn't discover any new birds. We found
a new subspecies of butterfly. And 90% of all the nematode worms
had never been seen by a scientist before. It was just a huge
effort: the number of scientist days it took to identify the
things was again inversely related to their body size, the smaller
the critters were the longer and longer and longer it took to
sort them out."
The Earth's most heart-rending problem comes with a catch-all
title, biodiversity. These six clumsy syllables sum up the totality
of life on Earth, from subterranean fungi to wind-borne spores,
from cloud-forest beetles to Arctic bears, from ocean algae
to tubeworms in the abyss. Many of these creatures quietly underwrite
human economic growth: they oxygenate the atmosphere, cleanse
drinking water, fix nitrogen, recycle waste and pollinate crops.
A team at the University of Maryland once calculated that nature
delivered goods and services worth $33 trillion to the global
economy every year. The gross national product of the whole
world at the time was only about $18 trillion.
One school of thought argues that if the big, beautiful beasts
- the charismatic megavertebrates - are going, then thousands
of small, nondescript creatures could go with them, with unpredictable
consequences. There are almost apocalyptic predictions about
rates of extinction. Edward O Wilson, one of America's most
distinguished biologists, once calculated that 27,000 species
of creature went extinct every year in the tropical forests
alone. A few years later, a team of biologists at Stanford University
suggested that populations of plants and animals were being
wiped out at the rate of 1,800 an hour. These may be wild overestimates,
but even the most conservative biologists tell a bleak story:
this, they say, is the sixth great extinction of life in the
history of the planet. The first five extinctions, recorded
in the ancient rocks, were all natural: from volcanic catastrophe,
climate change, asteroid impact, or even deadly radiation from
an exploding star. But this one, they all agree, is the unwitting
work of humankind.
Robert May - Lord May of Oxford, president of the Royal Society,
a former government chief scientific adviser and once a research
partner of Edward O Wilson - reckons that at the very least,
the rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than the "background"
rate of extinction over hundreds of millions of years, recorded
in fossils from Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic rocks. Should
people care? Most conservation action by bodies such as the
WWF concentrates entirely on the charismatic big vertebrates,
such as the panda and tiger, rhino and lion. Could we live without
them? "Maybe we can, but if people aren't going to care
about them disappearing, who is going to give a stuff about
the insects and fungi until the consequences emerge?" May
says. "A stronger argument is that we are not sure how
much we can simplify the world and still have it deliver all
the services we depend on."
Lions won't be extinguished, he says. "They will be kept
in reserves and zoos. But the question is, whether you are keeping
a lion or whether you are keeping a Latin binomial, Felis leo,
and that is a question that is awkward to ask."
The lion, according to Georgina Mace, director of science at
the Zoological Society of London, was the one animal conservationists
had not been worried about. Until recently, it had been widespread
in Africa, though it had all but disappeared from Asia. There
are two ways of alarming conservationists, she says. "One
is that you are incredibly rare and you just sit on a remote
island, being a species that is found nowhere else and there
are just 50 of you, but you could have been rare for ever and
ever: that is the nature of the life you have. The other way
of being of conservation concern is to decline very quickly,
and we have been much better at spotting the former rather than
the latter. But the latter is probably the one that is going
to affect most species. If you are just sitting there being
very rare, people are usually protecting you."
The lion, as she sees it, is not an isolated case. The population
of bluefin tuna had crashed by 95% before anybody noticed. The
passenger pigeon once existed in tens of millions, but was wiped
out. The American buffalo almost disappeared. There would once
have been lions by the million.
"Carnivore numbers fluctuate. If you are looking in one
place, you'd see them come and go. Actually, what they are doing
is moving large scale across the landscape, occupying areas
where there is abundant prey and then moving somewhere else;
they are quite hard to monitor. You think, oh, they are rare
here - and then you suddenly realise that actually, they are
rare everywhere."
The bitterest irony is that animal populations are dwindling
and extinctions accelerating despite a 30-year campaign to establish
parks and wildlife reserves in all the great wilderness areas
of the world: the rainforests, savannahs, estuaries, deserts,
mountains, grasslands, wetlands and so on. These wildernesses
cover 46% of the land surface, but hold just 2.4% of the population.
More than 10% of these places are now protected by national
and international edict. Yet ultimately they cannot protect
the wild things. Poachers look to make a killing in both senses
of the word. Big animals stray and become a menace to small
farmers, who drive them off or kill them. And the tourists turn
up, bringing even more of mankind and its expensive ways into
the wilderness. A study of the Wolong Reserve in China - opened
decades ago to protect the giant panda - revealed that the panda
was still in decline and that more humans had moved in, cutting
back the bamboo forest for roads, homes and tourist services.
The lions in Africa - and all the creatures in Africa's national
parks - are still being hunted, hounded or harassed by humans.
There are some who argue that some species will only be saved
in zoos (indeed, London Zoo played a big part in saving the
almost-extinct Arabian oryx and restoring it to its native wild).
But Mark Collins of the UN world conservation monitoring centre
in Cambridge says he cannot accept the idea that the lion might
survive only in safari parks, or that zoos could be the last
resort as the saviours of species. The big wilderness reserves
exist, and they could be made to work.
"I feel we have sufficient knowledge of how to manage these
key habitats. It is just a matter of political will," he
says. "I do not accept that the doors are closed. We have
parks, and even outside parks, we have the technology and the
knowledge to manage most of these habitats like forests and
so on, properly. It's just that we are not actually doing it."
L ife's richest places are also those where humans are poorest.
Africans are already struggling against hunger, poverty, Aids,
malaria, cattle diseases and - in many cases - civil war. Nobody
knows how this one is going to end. "It is all very well
for you and me, but if I was some poor, oppressed farmer in
Africa I am not so sure I would look kindly on the elephants
that trample my crops," says May. Nor have Europeans and
Americans held up much of an example. When western governments
began pressing African and Asian nations about the fate of the
elephant, developing nations retali ated by suggesting that
the Atlantic cod, too, should be protected. The point is well
made. Developed nations with sophisticated fishing technology
have knowingly put cod and tuna at risk, and had begun to wipe
out the barn door skate and great white shark as their nets
swept through the seas. "There is a real irony," says
Mace.
The lions of Africa - and the wild creatures further down the
food chain - can only be saved by money and political will from
both national and international communities. The developing
nations do have an incentive to protect their biodiversity.
It represents potential wealth, one way or the other. Some extinctions
of already rare creatures are inevitable. But spend on the lions,
says Lawton, and you could save a lot more besides. Committed
spending saved the black and white rhino - targets of poachers
as well as victims of human pressure - but the sums of money
invested were critical.
"If you create big, effective reserves for these charismatic
guys at the top of the food chain, huge numbers of other creatures
we don't even know exist could just slip through to the end
of the century on the coat-tails of the lions," Lawton
says. "So it is a matter of putting enough resources in.
In a world which is prepared to spend an extra £55bn on a war
in Iraq, we are talking about peanuts."
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