A quiet but significant decrease in giraffe populations during the past three decades makes the world’s tallest land mammal vulnerable to extinction, according to new statistics released by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on Wednesday.
Speaking at a biodiversity conference in Mexico, IUCN officials increased the threat levels for the giraffe and 34 other species on its international Red List of threatened species while reducing the at-risk classification for seven others, BBC News and the Associated Press reported.
Based on the organization’s figures, the global number of giraffes has fallen from approximately 155,000 in 1985 to just 97,000 in 2015 – a decrease of nearly 40% in just 30 years. The creatures were considered to be of “least concern” in previous Red Lists, but their numbers are falling due to habitat loss, poaching, and civil unrest throughout Africa, IUCN officials have revealed.
People think that giraffe populations are thriving, but that isn’t the case (Credit: Guy Roberts/Unsplash)
“Everyone assumes giraffes are everywhere,” said Julian Fennessy, co-director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and one of the biologists responsible for putting the creatures on the Red List. However, the fact is that while elephants attract more attention from conservationists, there are four times fewer giraffes on Earth than pachyderms, he told USA Today.
“If you go on a safari, giraffes are everywhere,” he said to BBC News. “While there has been great concern about elephants and rhinos, giraffes have gone under the radar,” Fennessy noted, adding that he and his colleagues were “a little shocked” that the giraffe population “declined by so much in so little time.” The creatures, he said, are experiencing a “silent extinction.”
Civil unrest has caused some to turn to giraffes for food
The rapid expansion of farming and cultural development linked to the increase in people living near giraffe habitats is one of the reasons for their declining numbers, the ICUN noted. In addition, conflict in northern Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia near the South Sudan have caused many to turn to the giraffe as a source of food, the biologist told BBC News.
Of the nine subspecies of giraffe officially recognized by the Red List, five have been found to have experienced population declines. A sixth has remained stable, while the others are growing. In fact, Fennessy reported that the subspecies living in southern Africa have increased by two to three times their previous numbers. Nubian giraffes living in East Africa, on the other hand, have seen their populations drop by as much as 95% in some areas, he added.
Experts like Chris Ransom of the Zoological Society of London are confident that the trends can be reversed, and point to the success in southern Africa as a blueprint for how to save the species in other parts of the continent. In southern Africa, Ransom explained to BBC News, “there is a lot of moving of animals between different conservation areas, it is a very different scenario than in most of the rest of Africa.”
“With the right conservation efforts, and we can ensure that the animals do live in the wild,” he added. While the IUCN said that a total of 860 plant and animal species are extinct, and another 68 have been declared extinct in the wild, Ransom emphasized that there are also “a lot of cases of success in conservation. The giraffes could be one.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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