Endangered Animals:
Here is a list of critically endangered animals in India and this does not limited to land animals only, there are several other species that are undergoing rapid population decline. Some of the foremost reasons for the decline is widespread hunting, overfishing, and pollution. Let’s take a look at these critically endangered animals.
Great hornbill
Also known as the great Indian hornbill or great pied hornbill, is one of the larger members of the hornbill family. It is found in South and Southeast Asia. Its impressive size and colour have made it important in many tribal cultures and rituals
The great hornbill is long-lived, living for nearly 50 years in captivity
Vitex altissima has been noted as another important food source. Great hornbills also forage on lipid-rich fruits of the Lauraceae and Myristicaceae families such as Persea, Alseodaphne and Myristica. They obtain the water that they need entirely from their diet of fruits
They will also eat small mammals, birds,small reptiles and insects. Lion-tailed macaques have been seen to forage alongside these hornbills.They forage along branches, moving along by hopping, looking for insects, nestling birds and small lizards, tearing up bark and examining them
Clouded leopard
It is a cat found from
the Himalayan foothills through mainland Southeast Asia into China,
and has been classified as Vulnerable in 2008 by IUCN. Its total
population size is suspected to be fewer than 10,000 mature individuals, with a
decreasing population trend, and no single population numbering more than 1,000
adults.
The fur of clouded leopards is of a dark grey or
ochreous ground-colour, often largely obliterated by black and dark dusky-grey
blotched pattern. There are black spots on the head, and the ears are black.
They are threatened by habitat loss following
large–scale deforestation and commercial poaching for the wildlife
trade.
Hunting is banned in Bangladesh, China, India,
Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. These bans are however poorly enforced in India, Malaysia and Thailand.
Gir lion
Also known as the Indian lion, is
a lion subspecies that exists as a single population
in India's Gujarat State. It is listed
as Endangered by IUCN due its small population size.
The lion population has steadily increased in
the Gir Forest National Park, more than doubling from a low of 180
individuals in 1974 to 411 individuals consisting of 97 adult males, 162 adult
females, 75 sub-adults, and 77 cubs as of April 2010.
TheGir lion currently exists as a single
subpopulation, and is thus vulnerable to extinction from unpredictable events,
such as an epidemic or large forest fire.
Farmers on the periphery of the Gir Forest
frequently use crude and illegal electrical fences by powering them with high
voltage overhead power lines. These are usually intended to protect their crops
from nilgai, but lions and other wildlife are also killed.
Tiger
The species is classified in the
genus Panthera with
the lion, leopard, jaguar and snow leopard. Tigers
are apex predators, primarily preying on ungulates such
as deer and bovid.
They are territorial and generally solitary
but social animals, often requiring large contiguous areas of habitat that
support their prey requirements.
Tigers once ranged widely across Asia,
from Turkey in the west to the eastern coast of Russia. Over the
past 100 years, they have lost 93% of their historic range, and have been
extirpated from southwest and central Asia, from the islands
of Java and Bali, and from large areas
of Southeast and Eastern Asia.The tiger is an endangered
species.
Poaching for fur and body parts and
destruction of habitat have simultaneously greatly reduced tiger
populations in the wild. At the start of the 20th century, it is estimated
there were over 100,000 tigers in the wild, but the population has dwindled
outside of captivity to between 1,500 and 3,500.
India is home to the world's largest population
of wild tigers but only 11% of the original Indian tiger habitat remains,
and it has become fragmented and degraded.From 1973, India's Project
Tiger, started by Indira Gandhi, established over 25 tiger reserves in
reclaimed land, where human development was forbidden.
Snow leopard
It is a large cat native
to the mountain ranges of Central and South Asia. It is listed
as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened
Species because as of 2003, the size of the global population was
estimated at 4,080-6,590 adults, of which fewer than 2,500 individuals may
reproduce in the wild.Snow leopards
inhabit alpine and subalpine zones at elevations from 3,000
to 4,500 m (9,800 to 14,800 ft).
Numerous agencies are working to conserve the
snow leopard and its threatened mountain ecosystems. These include
the Snow Leopard Trust, the Snow Leopard Conservancy, the Snow
Leopard Network, the Cat Specialist Group and the Panthera Corporation.
These groups and numerous national governments
from the snow leopard’s range, nonprofits and donors from around the world
recently worked together at the 10th International Snow Leopard Conference in
Beijing.
Dugong
Dugong dugon, is a large marine
mammal which, together with the manatees, is one of four living
species of the order Sirenia. It is the only living representative of the
once-diverse family Dugongidae; its closest modern relative, Steller's
sea cow , was hunted to extinction in the 18th century.This population possibly shared ancestry with the Red Sea population, and the Mediterranean population had never been large due to geographical factors and climate changes.
The Mediterranean is the region where the Dugongidae originated in the mid-late Eocene, along with Caribbean Sea.
