The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recently updated its international list of threatened species to add giraffes.
Over the last 30 years, giraffe numbers have dropped by 40 percent across the globe, from around 151,702 to 163,452 individuals in 1985 to 97,562 giraffes in 2015, said officials who updated the threatened species list for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The update was released today (Dec. 8) at the 13th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Cancun, Mexico.
The stresses on giraffes over the past few decades include loss of habitat, civil unrest and illegal hunting, according to the IUCN. The IUCN has adopted a resolution in the hopes of attracting enough attention and finances to help reverse this decline. According to the IUCN, the ubiquity of giraffes in zoos and our cultures has given us a false sense of security in how they are being treated in their natural habitat, being passed over for more concerted conservation efforts in part because they are studied much less. The IUCN also announced hundreds of other animals that have been added to the list.
The giraffe declines are not the only news from the IUCN today. The group also recently added 742 newly discovered bird species that it assessed to its red list. Some 11 percent of these newly discovered birds are threatened with extinction. “Many species are slipping away before we can even describe them,” IUCN Director General Inger Andersen said in a press statement.
Nearly everywhere you look these days in the animal kingdom, there are declines. The world is undergoing a mass die-off of amphibians, a particularly concerning trend given that frogs appeared to survive the dinosaur extinction just fine. By one joint estimate from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, the world will lose two thirds of the wild animals it had in 1970 by 2020 (in terms of population numbers).
Some rays of light were also released in the IUCN’s announcement.
But there is a little hopeful news in the list as well with the rediscovery of a few species thought to have been lost, such a Madagascan freshwater fish which had not been seen since the 1960s, and the recovery of the Seychelles white-eye bird after conservation efforts.
The natural world is in the midst of a mass extinction as wild places are destroyed by conversion to farmland, mining and pollution, and animals are hunted in huge numbers. In October, a major analysis found the number of wild creatures was on track to fall by two-thirds by 2020, compared to 1970. Recent red list updates have found the eastern Gorilla and whale shark moving closer to extinction, while the prospects of the giant panda are improving.
The IUCN red list can be found here.
“A Poem on the Neck of a Running Giraffe” by Shel Silverstein
PLEASE
DO NOT
MAKE F
UN OF
ME AN
D PLEAS
E DON'T
LAUGH
IT ISN'T
EASY T
O WRIT
E A PO
EM ON
THE NE
CK OF
A RUN
NING
GIRA
FFE .