I have been serving as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University where we established the Stony Brook World Environmental Forum, and the Annual Human Evolution Symposium. As many of you are probably aware, I made my name in paleoanthropology, studying our long extinct human relatives. But I’m not locked in the past. In 1996, Roger Lewin and I wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction which collated a body of fossil evidence about past extinctions compared with the mass extinction of species which is currently under way. This time human fingerprints are all over the evidence. At that time we estimated that during the previous 500 years up to writing the book, human activity had forced over 800 species into extinction. In the 10 years prior to writing the book, the number of threatened animal species had increased from 5,205 to 7,266.

Now, a decade on, we woke up to the even more disheartening news that the number of species threatened with extinction had shot up to 15,000 species of plants and animals. Of these, one in four mammals are under threat, and one in eight birds. I am going to tell you about two success stories.

The cheetah, one of the most endangered mammals in the world may have a new lease of life as a result of a breakthrough in assisted cheetah reproduction using pioneering methodologies developed by the Cheetah Conservation Fund and two partner organizations. You can read more about it on the cheetah conservation blog.

Another success story is the Pemba Island Flying Fox which has been brought back from the brink of extinction. This enormous fruit bat which is endemic to the island of Pemba in Tanzania, was though to have declined to a mere handful of individuals 10 years ago and were placed on the critically endangered list of the IUCN. Today there are over 11,000 individuals thanks to the courageous activities of local communities on the island of Pemba. The species has been removed from the critically endangered list and is now on the vulnerable list. I’m proud to welcome this project to our website as I’m sure that the lessons from Pemba are relevant for many other threatened bat species. For both of these projects, donor support was critical to their success. This is why I believe that WildlifeDirect can contribute significantly to avert the crises that so many of our species face and I take this time to thank you all for your generous donations to our partners and for enabling our teams to identify and support good projects on the ground.

I leave you with a picture of a relaxed herd of elephants, an iconic species that has also been rescued by unprecedented conservation attention and action.

Share This