December 16, 1999. Copyright 1999. Graphic News. All rights reserved.

A CENTURYÕS LOST ANIMALS
By Elisabeth Ribbans

LONDON, December 16, Graphic News:  A CHILD born at the close of the 20th century will never get the chance to see some of the animals that roamed the earth in his or her great-grandparentsÕ time. The beautiful pink-breasted passenger pigeons that used to flock in millions across the North American skies are all gone. An Australian will have to look in books for a glimpse of the desert bandicoot or the toolache wallaby. And in South America, ornithologists continue to search in vain for the glaucous macaw, last seen in 1955.
In the past 100 years, more than 200 documented animal species have become extinct and many times more are thought to have disappeared before scientists had a chance to discover them. It is reckoned that we share the planet with around 10 million animal and plant species Ð and so far only 1.4 million of them have been named. As recently as 1990, a new species of monkey was discovered. Moreover, species are generally not declared extinct until 50 years after a last sighting, so figures for extinctions are highly conservative. The number of documented extinctions over the past century is also small compared to those predicted for the coming decades Ð partly a result of improved data, and partly due to the continuing effects of human activity.
Conservation groups claim between 5 and 20 per cent of species face extinction within the next 30 years unless action is taken. Animals in extreme danger include the black rhino, the Siberian, Sumatran and South China tigers, the mountain gorilla, the blue whale and, in Europe, the Iberian lyn.
XMany less obvious life-forms are also in dire threat. ÒFresh water species are perhaps the most vulnerable of all,Ó says Nels Johnson of the Washington-based World Resources Institute. ÒNot only have we altered the aquatic environment with damming and dredging, but everything humans do ends up in the water.Ó At the start of the century, the biggest threat to biodiversity was from hunting. Today, this problem still affects animals such as the tiger, the rhino and certain primates, but worldwide the main threat is habitat alteration Ð 17 million hectares of tropical forests are being cleared annually Ð followed by the invasion of non-native species that may prey upon or displace a native creature. Here, world trade, which has increased 14-fold since 1950, plays a large part. For example, according to Johnson, the reproductively prolific zebra mussel, originally from the Black Sea region, was brought to the inland waterways of North America in the bilge water of ships in the 1980s and now threatens a variety of native molluscs with extinction.
The loss of an entire species is the most extreme form of extinction, but local extinction Ð where an animal is wiped out in one country but survives in another Ð has also impoverished many environments. In Britain, according to the WWF, more than 110 types of animal have died out in the past century. The last was the short-haired bumble bee in 1998. A similar number have been recorded as becoming extinct in the United States.
ENDS