Endangered Animals You Didn't Know Were In Crisis

Humans love big cats — we can imagine hanging out with them in our houses and watching them destroy furniture while they chase a laser dot all over the living room. Yeah, it would be super fun to have a big cat as a family pet, except for the part where they are prone to the occasional eating of the dog and smaller family members.

Even so, we love them and wish the best for them, and yet many of them are critically endangered because, as a species, we've done a pretty terrible job at protecting the prey animals they depend on and the habitat they're adapted to living in. 

The most endangered of the big cats is one you might not have heard of — it's the Amur leopard, which lives in the Amur Heilong Landscape along the far eastern border of Russia and into neighboring China. According to the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), the Amur leopard is a cold-weather cat, with a coat that can grow nearly three inches long in the winter. Because of that gorgeous fur coat, they're a popular target for hunters, but that's not the only reason why they're critically endangered. The roe and sika deer they depend on for food are also hunted by humans, and the cats are losing habitat, too. Happily, conservation efforts have helped to increase their numbers, but there's still a long way to go — less than 100 individuals now exist in the wild.

It's hard to imagine that there are any large species of mammal that science has yet to discover, but in 1992, a team consisting of World Wildlife Federation researchers and Vietnam forest control agents obtained a skull from a local hunter that looked nothing like anything they'd ever seen. That was how the saola — a forest-dwelling ungulate that lives in the Annamite mountains along the border of Vietnam and Laos — became known to modern science. The saola looks like an antelope but may be a primitive bovine, has two long horns and white stripes on its face, and is said to be one of the most elusive animals in the world; so elusive, in fact, that it's been nicknamed "the Asian unicorn." 

Shortly after it was "discovered," a pair of saola were captured, but both died within a few months. Then in 1998, researchers got a photo of one on a trail cam. The next year, they got another photo. And then 15 years passed before anyone saw another saola. 

Saola are vulnerable to poaching, though many of the snares that trap them are set for other species. Still, their numbers are estimated at less than 750 individuals, maybe even less than 100. Many scientists believe the only hope for this species is a captive breeding program, which is a tall order considering that no biologist has ever actually seen one of these things in the wild.

[Featured image by Silviculture via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]

One particular rhino species qualifies as one of the most endangered species on earth. The northern white rhino, in fact, is considered "functionally extinct," because the last male member of the species died in 2018, and his two surviving offspring — a mother-daughter pair — aren't healthy enough to reproduce. 

That seems like an evolutionary dead end, but there might actually be hope. According to Smithsonian, there are scientists on four continents working on the northern white rhino problem, and they think they may be able to bring the species back from the brink by harvesting eggs from the two remaining females or by working with pluripotent stem cells, which can be generated from other adult cells and then used to make functioning egg cells. The eggs can then be implanted in a surrogate such as a southern white rhino or — get this — a horse. And the advantage of using stem cells is you can generate eggs with a broad genetic variety, which solves the shallow gene pool problem you get when trying to revitalize a very small population of animals. So it may seem bleak, but thanks to science, the northern white rhino still has a shot.

America has its fair share of critically endangered animals. In Florida, there are two types of native cat: the bobcat and the Florida panther. The latter is the one we're most concerned about, though, because the National Park Services says that over the years, it's lost more than 95 percent of its original range, which once stretched all the way from Florida, northwest through Louisiana, and most of Arkansas. Today, Florida panthers are confined to the southwest tip of Florida, and probably fewer than 100 remain.

The reasons for the decline of the Florida panther are complex, but can mostly be traced back to the 1800s, when hunters were paid a bounty in exchange for killing them. Then, between 1850 and 1919, huge swaths of land were cleared for lumber and agriculture, both of which decimated the panther's habitat as well as reducing the numbers of white-tailed deer — the panther's primary food source — from around 13 million to less than 1 million. And their limited numbers also put them at risk for genetic disorders. Conservationists have helped mitigate the problem by introducing small numbers of other puma types into the population — this sort of genetic exchange would have occurred naturally anyway, so it's thought to be a valid and inexpensive way to increase numbers without the risk of genetic abnormalities.

One victim of the human war against large predators is the Mexican wolf, a subspecies of gray wolf that lives in the southern United States and Mexico. The Mexican wolf was a victim of government bounty programs and extermination efforts by private landowners, and by 1998, there were just seven Mexican wolves left in the wild. Today, things are looking up — a 2018 survey found 131 individuals in Arizona and New Mexico, and there are some in Mexico as well. Of course, border walls don't just keep out people — biologists are concerned that a wall will keep the Mexican population from exchanging genes with the American one, and we already know how problematic a shallow gene pool can be for the health of a species.

Fortunately, Cronkite News says there are also several captive breeding programs, which means there is a healthy population of genetically unrelated wolves that could theoretically be returned to the wild to add new genes to the small population of wild wolves. So, this species may not have the numbers, but we can at least be optimistic about its potential for recovery.

Like the dodo bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker is one of those sad stories of species extinction that serves as a cautionary tale about the unnecessary cruelty and callousness of the world's human overlords. But what you probably didn't realize is that the ivory-billed woodpecker's story might actually be one of near-extinction, rather than certain-extinction. Sure, it's true that there has been no confirmed sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker since 1944 (unless you count the report published in 2005, which was loudly criticized by skeptics as "inconclusive," per National Geographic), but its habitat is deep within the forested swamps of Florida and Louisiana, which means there are plenty of places for isolated pockets of the species to hide.

The ivory-billed woodpecker is kind of a goofy-looking thing — it's the largest of its kind, and it's brightly colored like the woodpeckers we're used to seeing, but it's also long and lean. As you can imagine, spotting an ivory-billed woodpecker these days would be like the holy grail of birdwatching, and Audubon says a birder named Michael Collins might have got footage of the woodpeckers in 2006, 2007, and 2008. But the videos are blurry and inconclusive, so it's still not considered proof.

[Featured image by Jerry A. Payne, USDA-ARS via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]

Orangutans are startlingly human. Not only are they genetically among our closest relatives, they socialize and have complex social relationships like humans do, and are able to make their own tools, like utensils and umbrellas. As similar as humans are to orangutans, we are also the biggest threat to their survival, and they are currently in crisis.

In the past, orangutans lived throughout Southeast Asia, but today they are only found in Borneo and Sumatra. These last safe havens are also in peril because their rainforests are being illegally burned to make way for palm oil farms. In addition to destroying their home, these fires can also kill orangutans trapped in the burning trees. On top of this, the orangutans who are displaced often find themselves in human communities trying to survive. There, these intelligent and sensitive creatures can be kidnapped or killed by poachers looking to make money off them as pets or trophies.

There are staggeringly low levels of orangutans remaining in the wild, and without serious change, they may vanish from our planet completely. Some organizations are desperately trying to save this species, such as Orangutan Outreach, which, in addition to protecting wild orangutans, rescues and prepares orphaned infants for a life in the jungle. Others, like the Borneo Nature Foundation, work to preserve the few places on the planet where orangutans can still survive.

Asian elephants are known as ecosystem engineers – creatures that shape their environments just by living in them. The footprints they leave in the soil become pools, they create grasslands by pulling down trees — and then plant new ones by defecating the seeds they eat. Everywhere they go, they change the world around them, creating new habitats and preparing the way for an entire ecosystem to thrive: The loss of the Asian elephants would mean a crisis for countless species. Tragically, over the last three generations the number of Asian elephants has dropped by more than half due to deforestation and habitat loss, and many of the survivors are part of a horrifically cruel tourism industry.

In Thailand, it's believed that there are between 1,000 and 3,000 elephants remaining in the wild. The tourist industry, which separates the highly emotional and social elephants from their families, keeps them in chains, and forces them to perform for humans, giving rides which, despite their massive size, can injure their spines.

Organizations like Save Elephant Foundation rescue and rehabilitate elephants that have suffered in captivity, often relocating them to ethical sanctuaries like the famous Elephant Nature Park in Thailand. They also work to protect the few wild Asian elephants that remain, so that the elephants can shape and preserve the wild places they call home.

[Image by Basile Morin via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

When people think of African elephants, they might typically imagine enormous animals with large, flapping ears walking across the savanna — but there is another, less-known kind of African elephant. The African forest elephant is smaller than their savanna cousins, though they still stand up to 10 feet tall and weigh 2-5 tons. They have distinctive light yellow eyes, are rarely seen, and, as implied by their name, live deep in the tropical jungles of Gabon and the Republic of Congo. Like other elephants, they have a significant impact on the environment around them, shaping the forests by eating fruits, carrying the seeds inside them, and releasing them as waste miles away. Tragically, these captivating creatures are considered critically endangered, and their numbers are only decreasing.

It is believed that between 2002 and 2011, their population decreased by more than 60%, leaving around 415,000 in total — in regions that used to be home to millions of elephants. African forest elephants are losing their forest homes to human development and climate change, but the main threat to the species is poaching: Their tusks are valuable, leading people to kill them for ivory. Conservationists near the largest populations of African forest elephants have been successful in creating a few areas of protected habitats, with anti-poaching units to keep the animals that live there safe. 

[Image by Thomas Breuer via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 2.5]

The northern hairy-nosed wombat is a beloved symbol of South Australia, and it's easy to see why. These fascinating animals live in deep warrens, dug by their ancestors as much as a century ago, carry their children in pouches like a kangaroo, and are able to hold their own in fights against canine predators. However, they are also one of the most endangered animals in the world, with only around 315 left in the world as of 2021.

In the 19th century, large portions of their territory were destroyed to make way for farmland. There, they lost out to invasive species like rabbits and livestock, and were shot in massive numbers by humans — at one time, only 35 of these wombats were believed to remain. Their numbers only started to improve after 2001, thanks to conservation measures, which included creating a designated reserve for the northern hairy-nosed wombat where they could live and breed safely.

Leatherback turtles have been swimming the planet's oceans for more than 100 million years, are able to travel more than 10,000 miles a year, and can dive almost 4,000 feet underwater. The species as a whole is only classified as vulnerable rather than endangered, but some subpopulations, such as those that live in the Pacific Ocean, are critically endangered and facing extinction.

In the Pacific, leatherback turtle populations have decreased by more than 90%, driven by human encroachment into and destruction of the beaches where turtles have laid their eggs for generations. A combination of factors have caused these locations to become unsuitable for turtle nests, including rising ocean levels due to climate change, human development on beaches, and bright lights overnight preventing baby turtles from reaching the ocean. As recently as the early 1950s, there were as many as 10,000 leatherback turtle nests on Malaysian beaches yearly. Since the early 2000s, there have been only one or two nests every year.

In the past, some leatherback turtles and their eggs were hunted by humans for food. While this is illegal in many places today, turtles are often still killed accidentally by humans harvesting other sea creatures. Pollution and trash in the oceans have also done terrible damage to leatherback turtles, who may accidentally eat or become trapped in human garbage floating in the water.