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Wild Life: Temperatures Up, Species Down
Temperatures Up, Species Down
More than one million species could disappear because of climate change in the next 50 years, according to a study in the science journal Nature.
The report’s authors used computers to simulate how species’ ranges would move in response to changing temperatures. The results were sobering: between 15 and 37 percent of all terrestrial plant and animal species could go extinct.
“This study makes it clear that climate change is the most significant new threat for extinctions this century,” says Lee Hannah, a co-author and a researcher with Conservation International. “But extinctions aren’t inevitable. What we can do is reduce greenhouse gases and improve conservation strategies, like protecting parks and creating wildlife corridors.”
Howl and Farewell
Two of the most famous wolves in the country are gone—ending a chapter in one of the nation’s most ambitious wildlife experiments—but their legacy lives on.
The two females known as 41 and 42—born in Canada and later relocated to Yellowstone National Park—died within weeks of each other in Wyoming this winter. The two sisters were the last survivors of the 31 wolves brought to Yellowstone amid much publicity in 1995 and 1996 to help restore this important predator to its rightful place in the park’s ecology.
Wolf 42, the matriarch (or “alpha female”) of the Druid Peak pack, was killed in a fight over territory with a neighboring wolf pack on January 31 in the park’s Specimen Ridge area. On February 12, her sister was shot by federal officials north of Cody, Wyoming, after she had killed several calves in the area. Number 41 left her sister’s pack in 1999, traveled east of the park and formed the Sunlight Basin pack, which she helped lead for several years. Both females had several litters of pups during their lives, and dozens of their offspring are among more than 300 wolves that now live in and around the park.
“They played a pretty significant role in the history of wolf recovery in Yellowstone,” says Doug Smith, the park’s wolf recovery project leader. Thanks in part to their contributions, he says, “the population is now on good footing.”
Good News in the Gorillas' Struggle
Mountain gorillas are coming out of the mist, and the view is promising. A new census of the rare primates in Africa’s Virunga Mountains, the first in 15 years, shows that the population there has increased 17 percent to 380 animals.
Mountain gorillas are among the largest of all primates, with average adult males dwarfing all but the heftiest human sumo wrestlers. But their impressive stature belies their status: found only in high-altitude forests on the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mountain gorillas are among the most endangered species on the planet, with a total population of only about 700.
The burgeoning human population in this part of Africa has turned most of the gorillas’ forested habitat into farmland, and poaching of the animals for body parts and meat has been a chronic threat. Years of war in the region have added to the species’ problems, and have made a thorough gorilla census impossible since 1989.
But late last year, a team of 100 researchers launched a survey in the Virungas, one of the two chief remaining habitats for the gorillas. The researchers were pleasantly surprised to find 56 more gorillas. However, says Eugene Rutagarama, director of the International Gorilla Conservation Program, “we have to be vigilant because the major threat to gorillas, the human pressure and related illegal activities, remains.”
