Dugongs — large herbivorous marine mammals commonly known as “sea cows” — are now threatened with extinction, according to an official list updated on Friday.
These gentle cousins of the manatee graze on seagrass in shallow coastal waters, and are an important source of ecotourism in their tropical habitats. Despite their moniker, they are more closely related to elephants than cows.
Dugong populations in East Africa and New Caledonia have now entered the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as “critically endangered” and “endangered,” respectively.
Photo: Reuters
Globally, the species remains classified as “vulnerable.”
Their primary threats are unintentional capture in fishing gear in East Africa and poaching in New Caledonia, as well as boat injuries in both locations.
In East Africa, fossil fuel exploration and production, pollution and unauthorized development are also degrading their seagrass food source. In New Caledonia seagrass is being damaged by agricultural runoff and pollution from nickel mining, among other sources. Habitat degradation is compounded by climate change throughout the dugongs’ range in the Indian and western Pacific oceans.
The updated list comes as delegates from across the world meet in Montreal for the COP 15 UN biodiversity conference to finalize a new framework for “a peace pact with nature,” with key goals to preserve Earth’s forests, oceans and species.
“The ability to slow and limit extinction rate, to buy us more time has been focused very much on a large terrestrial species, but the fact is that we are 30 years behind on effective marine conservation — now hopefully we can catch that up,” IUCN deputy director Stewart Maginnis said.
Climate change is driving ocean acidification, as well as deoxygenation, while flows of agricultural and industrial pollution from the land are significantly impacting ocean species, effects that cascade throughout food webs.
Maginnis said that the Red List is not a hopeless catalog of doom — it serves as a scientifically rigorous tool that helps focus conservation action.
It includes more than 150,000 species, with more than 42,000 threatened with extinction. More than 1,550 marine animals and plants assessed are at risk of extinction, with climate change affecting at least 41 percent of those threatened.
In other updates to the IUCN list, 44 percent of all abalone shellfish are now threatened with extinction, while pillar coral has moved to “critically endangered.”
Abalone species are considered gastronomic delicacies, leading to unsustainable extraction and poaching by international organized crime networks, for example in South Africa.
They are also deeply susceptible to climate change, with a marine heatwave killing 99 percent of Roe’s abalones off Western Australia in 2011.
Agricultural and pollution runoff also cause harmful algal blooms, which have eliminated the Omani abalone, a commercial species found in the Arabian Peninsula, across half of its former range.
Twenty of the world’s 54 abalone species are now threatened with extinction.
“Abalones reflect humanity’s disastrous guardianship of our oceans in microcosm: overfishing, pollution, disease, habitat loss, algal blooms, warming and acidification, to name but a few threats,” said Howard Peters, a marine conservation researcher at the University of York who led the assessment. “They really are the canary in the coal mine.”
Pillar coral, which are found throughout the Caribbean, moved from “vulnerable” to “critically endangered” after its population shrunk more than 80 percent across most of its range since 1990.
Bleaching caused by sea surface temperature rise — as well as antibiotics, fertilizers and sewage running into the oceans — have left them deeply susceptible to disease. Overfishing around coral reefs has piled on more pressure by depleting the number of grazing fish, allowing algae to dominate.
“The pillar coral is just one of the 26 corals now listed as Critically Endangered in the Atlantic Ocean, where almost half of all corals are now at elevated risk of extinction due to climate change and other impacts,” said Beth Polidoro, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences.
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