Amur tigers on ‘genetic brink’
Posted on July 2, 2009
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Editor, Earth News
The world’s largest cat, the Amur tiger, is down to an effective wild population of fewer than 35 individuals, new research has found.
Although up to 500 of the big cats actually survive in the wild, the effective population is a measure of their genetic diversity.
That in turn is a good predictor of the Amur tiger’s chances of survival.
The results come from the most complete genetic survey yet of wild Amur tigers, the rarest subspecies of tiger.
At the start of the 20th Century, nine subspecies of tiger existed, with a total world population of more than 100,000 individuals.
Human impacts have since caused the extinction of three subspecies, the Javan tiger, Bali tiger and Caspian tiger, and world tiger numbers could now have fallen to fewer than 3000.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8128000/8128738.stm
World ’still losing biodiversity’
Posted on July 2, 2009
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 Southern elephant seals are one of the species under threat
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An unacceptable number of species are still being lost forever despite world leaders pledging action to reverse the trend, a report has warned.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says the commitment to reduce biodiversity loss by 2010 will not be met.
It warns that a third of amphibians, a quarter of mammals and one-in-eight birds are threatened with extinction.
The analysis is based on the 44,838 species on the IUCN Red List.
“The report makes for depressing reading,” said co-editor Craig Hilton Taylor, manager of the IUCN’s Red List Unit.
“It tells us that the extinction crisis is as bad, or even worse than we believed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8130942.stm
India:No Demographic Dividend
Posted on July 2, 2009
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Thanks to Rahul Singh for this editorial by him, which was published in edited form in the world’s most widely distributed English language newspaper, the Times of India. Infosys is one of the India’s largest IT companies, and Nandan Nilekani is its co-founder. His book has sold a lot of copies. Rahul is the Chair of the Population Institute’s Global Media Awards Committee.
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In his otherwise perceptive book, “Imagining India,” Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has sadly got it completely wrong as far as the population problem is concerned.
In a key section of the book, titled “India By Its People,” he says, “As a poor and extremely crowded part of the world, we seemed to vindicate Thomas Malthus’s uniquely despondent vision – that greater population growth inevitably led to greater famine and despair.”
http://www.populationmedia.org/2009/07/01/no-demographic-%e2%80%9cdividend%e2%80%9d/
