Fun Environmental Facts

Sorry for the obviously contradictory title. There are no fun facts concerning the environment.

On May 1^st, the BBC reported that the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) just released their Red List of Threatened Species. (As usual, I didn’t see anything anywhere else, but I admit that I didn’t search too hard.) The Red List is the end result of a massive collection of data on species of all major groups (e.g., plants, mammals, fishies, amphibians, etc.), as to whether they face extinction. The categories are Threatened, Endangered, and Critically Endangered. I thought I would share some of their delightful statistics:

- 1 in every 3 species of frog (on earth) is apparently Threatened with extinction

- human activities threaten 99% of all the species on the list

This year was the first time that they included marine life, for some reason. The scientists themselves were apparently unprepared for (i.e., shocked at) the findings:

- 20% of the 547 species of sharks surveyed are on the Red List

- 56% of the fish species of the Mediterranean are Threatened with extinction

Overall,

- out of the 40,168 species studied, 16,118 species are Threatened with extinction

If you are interested in the report, here is their website: http://www.redlist.org/. It’s actually quite navigable.

The BBC article is as follows: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4963526.stm

In other news, almost 2000 years ago Ptolemy marveled at snow-capped mountains in the hot climes of East Africa, which fed into the Nile. He called them “The Mountains of the Moon.” According to a recent British-Ugandan study, the glaciers on these Rwenzori Mountains have halved from around two square km to just under one since 1987. At that rate, they should be gone for good in twenty years. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4987186.stm)

-W.