VN May 2017

Lead Article I Hoofartikel

It’s time to stand tall for imperilled giraffes

Bill Laurance, Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University

Pardon the pun, but it’s time to stick our necks out for giraffes. We have mistakenly taken the world’s tallest mammal for granted, fretting far more about other animals such as rhinos, elephants and great apes.

B ut now it seems that all is not well in giraffe-land, with reports emerging that they may be staring extinction in the face. Why? For starters, thanks to modern molecular genetics, we have just realised that what we thought was one species of giraffe is in fact four, split into between seven and nine distinct subspecies. That’s a lot more biodiversity to worry about. Even more disturbing is the fact that giraffe populations are collapsing. Where once they roamed widely across Africa’s savannas and woodlands, they

now occupy less than half of the real estate they did a century ago. Where they still persist, giraffe populations are increasingly fallen by 40% in just the past two decades, and they have disappeared entirely from seven African countries. Among the most imperilled is the West African giraffe ( Giraffa camelopardalis peralta ), a subspecies now found only in Niger. It dwindled to just sparse and fragmented. Their total numbers have

The current distribution of seven subspecies

IUCN Red List confirms: Giraffe are under threat The iconic giraffe, one of the world’s most recognisable animals and the tallest land mammal, has moved from ‘Least Concern’ to ‘Vulnerable’ in the newly (end 2016) released International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Widespread across southern and eastern Africa, with smaller isolated populations in west and central Africa, new population surveys estimate an overall 36-40% decline in the giraffe population from approximately 151 702 – 163 452 in 1985 to 97 562 in 2015. Of the nine currently recognised subspecies of giraffe, five have decreasing populations, whilst three are increasing and one is stable. This updated assessment of giraffe as a species was undertaken by the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) Giraffe & Okapi Specialist Group (GOSG), hosted by Giraffe Conservation Foundation (GCF) and Zoological Society of London (ZSL). Recent genetic-based research by GCF, Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Change Research Centre and other partners, suggests that there are four distinct species of giraffe instead of only one, however, the IUCN currently only recognises giraffe as one species. Should these new genetic findings be confirmed and become widely accepted, this would likely result in three of the four giraffe species being listed as under considerable threat on the IUCN Red List. Taxonomy is just one of many gaps that still exist in our overall understanding of giraffe and highlights that they are indeed Africa’s forgotten megafauna. (Source: https://giraffeconservation.org/2016/12/08/iucnredlist-giraffe-vulnerable/ )

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