MONTREAL, Canada – Dugongs — giant herbivorous marine mammals generally often called “sea cows” — at the moment are threatened with extinction, in accordance with an official listing up to date Friday.
These light cousins of the manatee graze on seagrass in shallow coastal waters, and are an essential supply of ecotourism of their tropical habitats.
Despite their moniker, they’re extra carefully associated to elephants than to cows.
Dugong populations in East Africa and New Caledonia have now entered the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List as “critically endangered” and “endangered,” respectively.
Globally, the species stays categorised as “vulnerable.”
Their main threats are unintentional seize in fishing gear in East Africa and poaching in New Caledonia, in addition to boat accidents in each places.
In East Africa, fossil gasoline exploration and manufacturing, air pollution and unauthorized growth are additionally degrading their seagrass meals supply. In New Caledonia seagrass is being broken by agricultural run-off and air pollution from nickel mining, amongst different sources.
Habitat degradation is compounded by local weather change all through the dugongs’ vary within the Indian and western Pacific Oceans.
The up to date listing comes as delegates from internationally meet in Montreal for a UN biodiversity convention to finalize a brand new framework for “a peace pact with nature,” with key targets to protect Earth’s forests, oceans and species.
IUCN deputy director Stewart Maginnis advised AFP: “The ability to slow and limit extinction rate, to buy us more time has been focused very much on a large terrestrial species.”
“But the fact is that we are 30 years behind on effective marine conservation — now hopefully we can catch that up.”
Climate change is driving ocean acidification in addition to deoxygenation, whereas flows of agricultural and industrial air pollution from the land are inflicting important impacts on ocean species, results that cascade all through meals webs.
Maginnis burdened that the Red List isn’t a hopeless catalog of doom — it serves as a scientifically rigorous instrument that helps focus conservation motion.
It contains greater than 150,000 species, with over 42,000 threatened with extinction. Over 1,550 marine animals and vegetation assessed are liable to extinction, with local weather change impacting at the very least 41 p.c of these threatened.
Poaching, air pollution, local weather change
In different updates to the IUCN listing, 44 p.c of all abalone shellfish at the moment are threatened with extinction, whereas pillar coral has moved to “critically endangered.”
Abalone species are thought-about gastronomic delicacies, resulting in unsustainable extraction and poaching by worldwide organized crime networks, for instance in South Africa.
They are additionally deeply prone to local weather change, with a marine heatwave killing 99 p.c of Roe’s abalones off Western Australia in 2011.
Agricultural and air pollution run-off additionally trigger dangerous algal blooms, which have eradicated the Omani abalone, a business species discovered within the Arabian Peninsula, throughout half of its former vary.
Twenty of the world’s 54 abalone species at the moment are threatened with extinction.
“Abalones reflect humanity’s disastrous guardianship of our oceans in microcosm: overfishing, pollution, disease, habitat loss, algal blooms, warming and acidification, to name but a few threats,” mentioned Howard Peters of the University of York who led the evaluation.
“They really are the canary in the coal mine.”
Pillar coral, that are discovered all through the Caribbean, moved from “vulnerable” to “critically endangered” after its inhabitants shrunk by over 80 p.c throughout most of its vary since 1990.
Bleaching attributable to sea floor temperature rise — in addition to antibiotics, fertilizers and sewage operating into the oceans — have left them deeply prone to Stony coral tissue loss illness, which has ravaged their numbers over the previous 4 years.
Overfishing round coral reefs has piled on extra stress by depleting the variety of grazing fish, permitting algae to dominate.
“The pillar coral is just one of the 26 corals now listed as Critically Endangered in the Atlantic Ocean, where almost half of all corals are now at elevated risk of extinction due to climate change and other impacts,” mentioned Beth Polidoro of Arizona State University. — Agence France-Presse
