According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also named the tiger as an animal of the year—but on a list that’s not cause for celebration. The tiger, the polar bear, the Pacific walrus, the Magellanic penguin, the leatherback turtle, the bluefin tuna, the mountain gorilla, the Monarch butterfly, the Javan rhinoceros, and the giant panda are the ten animal species the WWF says are most threatened.
Climate change is a major factor in the endangerment of many of the species. As many people know, ice in the Arctic is rapidly melting. Polar bears hunt for food on ice and also need ice to move from their hunting areas to their denning and resting areas. In some parts of Canada, polar bear populations have decreased 25 percent over the last 25 years. The melting of Arctic ice also destroys the habitat of another one of the ten animals on the WWF watch list, the Pacific walrus. Changes in ocean currents and temperatures have forced Magellanic penguins to swim farther to find fish. For the leatherback turtle, nest temperature has a strong effect on the sex of offspring, and rising temperatures have led to a reduction in the number of male turtles*.
Tigers aren’t Arctic-dwelling or aquatic animals, but climate change is partly to blame for their dwindling numbers. Sea level rise, which is caused by climate change, threatens the habitats of tiger populations in Bangladesh and India*. Poaching and deforestation have also negatively impacted tiger populations; recent studies have found that there may be as few as 3,200 tigers left in the wild.
While the polar bear may be the iconic figure of how climate change negatively affects animals, the Monarch butterfly is also extremely vulnerable. The Monarch butterfly of the United States and Canada travels south in the fall to hibernate, and then returns north in the spring, where they reproduce. Changes in weather conditions in both the Monarch’s wintering grounds and its summer breeding grounds pose serious threats to the species’ continued existence.
The mountain gorilla, the Javan rhinoceros, and the giant panda all might be bigger than the Monarch butterfly, but poaching and the destruction of their habitats put them at risk for extinction. Less than sixty in number, the Javan rhinoceros is believed to be the most endangered large mammal in the world*. There are about 720 mountain gorillas currently left in the wild, but many of these live in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the borders of Rwanda and Uganda, a region battered by war. For the most part, the approximately 2,500 giant pandas in the wild today are safe from poachers, but their habitats are threatened by land development for human uses.
If you think that you’ve seen the name “bluefin tuna” before, you’ve probably right—it’s on restaurant menus and in the fish section of supermarkets. Bluefin tuna mature slowly, and many are caught before they can reproduce. In the past 40 years, the adult bluefin tuna population in the Atlantic population has decreased somewhere from 70 to 80 percent.
The numbers are shocking, but there are things you can do to help save these animals. Don’t buy or eat bluefin tuna until the population recovers, and encourage stores and restaurants not to sell or serve it. Urge your Congressional representatives to pass legislation that tackles climate change. You can adopt an animal from an endangered species by making a donation to WWF. Let’s see how many animals we can get off the WWF’s future watch lists!
Source: BecauseAction.com
