Articles by Alex Taylor - Page 27

New research has assessed the ecological impact of returning Tasmanian devils to the mainland and the results show that doing so would improve Australia’s biodiversity.

A new study has revealed that shifting trade winds and ocean currents have resulted in a doubling of their population over the past 30 years.

Today, gibbons are some of China’s most threatened species, surviving in only a few remote forest patches in the far southwest of the country. All four species face extinction.

The west coast population has increased by nine percent and the east coast population has increased by ten percent. These are the highest increases documented worldwide.

Using fossil records and extinction counts, the researchers compared a highly conservative estimate of current extinctions with a background rate twice as high as those widely used in previous analyses. This way, they brought the two estimates as close to each other as possible.

Widespread persecution by European settlers led to the downfall of this subspecies. The big cats were killed to protect the settlers and their livestock through hunting, trapping, poisoning and bounty programmes.

This bird is an endangered species in Norway, with numbers plummeting from around 160,000 pairs in the 1960s to just 15,000 breeding pairs today.

It has been the saviour of many critically endangered species. One in particular that was brought back from the brink is the Arabian Oryx, a species that was declared extinct in the wild in 1972 due to overhunting.

The cause of the outbreak is unknown, but scientists believe that it is always fatal.