Scientists Warning: Most of World's Biggest Beasts Could Be Extinct by 2100

  One day, your grandchildren may open their science textbooks and read  about elephants, tigers and lions as majestic, extinct creatures that  once roamed the Earth like woolly mammoths and Triceratops.   That is the message of a new paper, written by dozens of conservation biologists from around the world.   The authors argue that many of the the world's biggest beasts  could be extinct by 2100 if drastic measures are not taken. To  forestall that future, governments and conservation organizations should  implement several steps to prevent the mass extinction, the scientists  report. [Species Success Stories: 10 Animals Back from the Brink]Report this Advertisement   "To underline how serious this is, the rapid loss of biodiversity and  megafauna, in particular, is an issue that is right up there with, and  perhaps even more pressing than, climate change,"  Peter Lindsey, lion program policy initiative coordinator at  conservation organization Panthera and a senior co-author of the paper,  said in a statement. 

Under pressure

It's not news that many of the world's most beloved species are endangered. Poaching and the ever-creeping expansion of human settlement into wild terrain have decimated rhino and elephant  populations, corralled big cats into ever-smaller territories, and  forced the wildlife into conflict with human populations that live on  the fringes of their habitat, several studies have shown. But the global  impact of these trends can sometimes be hard to grasp.   To get a sense of how bleak the picture is for the world's nonhuman  megafauna, the experts cataloged the species in peril across six  continents — all of the species across the globe that the International  Union for Conservation of Nature lists as threatened with extinction.   When they looked at the prognosis for each of those species, the  forecast was dire, the researchers found. Roughly 59 percent of the  world's big carnivore species (those heavier than 33 lbs., or 15  kilograms), such as Bengal tigers; and 60 percent of the world's big  herbivore species — such as white rhinos and Western lowland gorillas —  could disappear from the Earth if critical steps are not taken.   "There is a risk that many of the world's most iconic species may not  survive to the 22nd century," the researchers wrote in the paper.   The threat was particularly dire in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where much of the world's biodiversity resides.   "The more I look at the trends facing the world's largest terrestrial  mammals, the more concerned I am we could lose these animals just as  science is discovering how important they are to ecosystems and to the  services they provide to people," lead author William Ripple, an  ecologist at Oregon State University, said in the statement. "It's time  to really think about conserving them, because declines in their numbers  and habitats are happening quickly." 

Dire future could be avoided

While the symbolic loss of such iconic species as elephants, rhinos  or lions would be paramount, this loss would also have significant  effects on the ecosystem, the experts said in the new paper, which was  published Wednesday (July 27) in the journal BioScience.   Still, this big-animal-free future isn't inevitable. The team outlines  13 steps that could be taken to forestall the impending loss. Among them  are acknowledging the scope of the problem, recruiting governments and  nongovernmental organizations to stop practices that harm some of the  species under threat, and finding ways to funnel the value of these  megafauna into the communities that live among them (for instance, using  tourist dollars from natural preserves in poor countries to help  communities that live nearby).   The team also wants to foster an international consensus on the urgency  of the crisis. In addition, big creatures could be reintroduced into  areas they've been eliminated from, using time-tested approaches that  have been validated scientifically, the experts said. Examples of  creatures that have been reintroduced are Yellowstone National Park's wolves and the Père David's deer.  Original article on Live Science.