What Animals Have Eaten Other Animals To Extinction
I f there is a single dish that has come up to symbolise humans' willingness to consume other animals out of existence, it is the ortolan bunting. Traditionally, yous devour this diminutive songbird, prized since Roman times, whole, in one roughshod bite, your head subconscious under a napkin to hibernate your shame from God (although, drowned in armagnac and deep-fried, this "delicacy" is also only manifestly messy).
In France, where hunting ortolans has been banned since 1999, 30,000 birds are however trapped every year, co-ordinate to the RSPB; they are said to fetch up to €150 (£130) apiece. Despite conservation efforts, ortolan numbers dropped by 84% between 1980 and 2012.
Even so the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the ortolan as "a species of least concern". There are many animals that are in far greater peril, according to Prof David Macdonald of the University of Oxford, who reported in 2016 that our culinary habits threaten 301 land mammal species solitary with extinction.
Here are 10 of the creatures that are virtually at risk, based on Macdonald'southward study, guidance from the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), the IUCN'southward cherry list of endangered species and the Zoological Gild of London'due south (ZSL) Edge of Beingness conservation programme.
Chinese giant salamander
In one case establish across central, south-western and southern Communist china, the world'due south largest amphibian has seen its natural population fall past 80% since 1960, according to ZSL's Olivia Couchman. Despite a Cites appendix I listing (the highest level of protection given by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild animals and Flora), specimens reportedly fetch more than $1,500 (£1,150) each on the blackness market, where they are prized equally much every bit a delicacy as for their medicinal properties. In 2015, the Washington Mail reported that undercover reporters from a Chinese newspaper had caught 14 police officers feasting on salamander during a banquet at a seafood restaurant in Shenzen.
Beluga sturgeon
These ancient, supersized fish (they can weigh upwards to a tonne and a half) could one time exist found all the way from cardinal Russia to Italy and northern Iran, but overfishing – for their mankind and caviar – and the devastating effect of mod river infrastructure on their migratory spawning patterns have caused their range to contract to just two rivers, the Ural and the Danube, and the basins they feed into, the Caspian and the Black Body of water, respectively. As the MCS's Jean-Luc Solandt says, this is "definitely one that could become extinct within a generation". With Beluga caviar fetching thousands of pounds a kilo, it's easy to see why overexploitation remains a trouble. And information technology's not the only sturgeon in problem: of the 27 species, the IUCN puts xv others in the same critically endangered bracket.
Pangolin
Since 2000, more than than a one thousand thousand pangolins, the world's most trafficked wild mammal, are idea to accept been killed for flesh and blood, as well as their scales (which is used in traditional Chinese medicine). When all eight species of pangolin were given an appendix I list in 2016, everyone at the Cites convention is said to have applauded. Still, as Oxford University'southward Dan Challender points out, alarming seizures continue to take identify: 8.3 tonnes of scales (amounting to thirteen,800 pangolins) in Hong Kong in Jan (the shipment from Nigeria was bound for Vietnam); 30 tonnes of alive and frozen animals and body parts in Malaysia in Feb. With the Asian species, peculiarly the Sunda and Chinese, no longer commercially feasible because at that place are so few left, local demand is being met by intercontinental trade. Paul De Ornellas, the main wildlife advisor at WWF UK, describes this every bit "i continent hoovering upwards wildlife from some other".
Angelshark
The MCS says this species is "only one step away from extinction" in the wild. Its range – which until the eye of the 20th century stretched from Norway and Ireland to Morocco and the Blackness Sea – has contracted past 80%; it has been declared extinct in the North Body of water. This bottom-domicile, sedentary fish is most threatened by trawling for other species, where it forms part of the accidental bycatch.
Yangtze giant softshell turtle (AKA Red river turtle)
Once widespread in Vietnam and China, this species is now down to just four known individuals, thank you to the local ambition for its meat and eggs. With two males in different Vietnamese lakes and the other pair in an as-yet-unsuccessful Chinese captive convenance plan (the male has a damaged penis, according to the New Yorker), Couchman says it would be very surprising if the species survives. This freshwater turtle's plight highlights that of the wider turtle population: later primates, they are the second-nearly threatened of the world'south major vertebrate groups.
Eastern lowland gorilla (AKA Grauer's gorilla)
Found in the mountains of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, this gorilla is particularly vulnerable to poaching for bushmeat, associated with illegal mining camps. While the other eastern gorilla subspecies – the mount gorilla – is the only swell ape to come across its numbers rising, the eastern lowland's are in steady pass up. Although violence in the region has made accurate accounting incommunicable, its population is estimated to have dropped by 77% in a single generation to 3,800 individuals, according to the Edge of Beingness listing.
European eel
These mysterious fish migrate from the Atlantic (they are thought to be spawned in the Sargasso Sea) to fresh and coastal waters to grow, and so head back out to the bounding main to breed. While little is understood nigh any of the procedure, juvenile ("drinking glass") and mature (argent or yellow) eels alike accept been consistently overfished, to the point where yields accept halved since the 1960s. With excessive exploitation only 1 of the many threats the eels face, the MCS urges us to "avoid eating European eel at any phase in its lifecycle".
Red colobus
Christoph Schwitzer of the Bristol Zoological Society says this group of monkey species – there are 18 – is a prime number example of big-bodied primates being hunted to extinction "because they make a good family repast". They are plant beyond sub-Saharan Africa, where habitat degradation and improved road access have seen the commercialisation of bushmeat-hunting, with devastating effects. One species, Miss Waldron's scarlet colobus, is already feared extinct, having not been seen in the wild since 1978, while the near recently discovered, the Niger delta blood-red colobus, is on rails to disappear within the next five years.
Indri (AKA babakoto)
Madagascar's lemurs – of which the singing, black-and-white indri is the largest – are the earth's most endangered primate group: 105 of the island'south 111 known species and sub-species are threatened with extinction. While habitat degradation due to slash-and-burn agriculture has long been an issue (with human being eating habits posing an indirect threat), the past 15 years have seen an alarming rise in subsistence hunting and commercial poaching for local restaurants, according to Schwitzer. This new threat is linked to the isle's political and economic crisis. As Couchman puts it, people are starving.
Saola
They may look like antelopes, but these large forest-dwelling mammals, plant in the Annamite Mountains along the edge between Lao people's democratic republic and Vietnam, are more closely related to wild cattle and buffaloes. Western science only got air current of their existence in the early 1990s, when horns were found in the homes of Vietnamese hunters. Little is all the same known about them today, including how many are left. The Edge of Existence list says it could be equally few equally xxx left. For De Ornellas, the saola is linked to "empty forest syndrome", a real business concern for this region of s-east asia where almost all the large animals accept been hunted out for food.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/03/deadly-appetite-10-animals-we-are-eating-into-extinction
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