Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. They are not yet gone. But for thousands of species, the Earth is already holding its breath. A new review published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment confirms what conservationists have long suspected: more than 10,000 species now sit on the precipice, listed on the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, as critically endangered (CR) — the final designation before vanishing from the wild entirely. Nearly 1,600 of these are believed to have fewer than 50 mature individuals remaining, reports Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough. “It is surprising,” said study co-author Rikki Gumbs of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), “that more than 1,500 species … are estimated to have fewer than 50 mature individuals remaining in the wild, a large number of those plants.” They span continents and taxonomic kingdoms: trees whose names may never again be spoken in their native tongues, obscure frogs whose calls now echo unanswered, orchids whose final bloom may have come and gone unnoticed. For some, like the vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) or the Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis), statistical models predict a better-than-even chance of extinction within a decade. Others may already be lost, disappeared without record, their fate sealed in silence. There are patterns, and there are outliers. Seventy-seven percent of these species are clinging to increasingly fragmented habitats. More than 96% live in just one country. Sixteen nations, many of them island or coastal, hold the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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