All posts tagged with international-year-of-biodiversity

As we know, 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. Programming throughout the year in support of all things biodiverse has been wide-ranging. Activities for scientific explorations of climate change and habitat preservation abound as well as opportunities for local involvement and youth directed campaigns, like the 2010 International Biodiversity Art Competition.

The modern ecological movement* can be traced back to the 1970 observance of Earth Day. Now a global celebration, the first Earth Day was conceived by a United States Senator from Wisconsin and called for nationally coordinated educational programming to raise consciousness about increasing environmental degradation. Forty years later, “Earth Day is everyday” and the UN has named 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity in an effort that mirrors Sen. Gaylord Nelson’s hopeful vision.

The Aye-Aye. Also known as Daubentonia madagascar-iensis. This creature is peculiar, even by the lemur’s standards of peculiarity. It has a distinctively slender and very long middle finger used to seek out grubs and other possible food sources from tree trunks, like a woodpecker. They have dark brown or black fur that can have white flecks at the tip. The Aye-aye’s tail is much longer than its body in a way that frustrates our expectations for proportion and, well, let’s just say the eyes are intense.

For this week’s book of the week, we highlight another of EOL’s featured species – Sepia apama, perhaps better-known as the Australian Giant Cuttlefish. With a maximum recorded mantle length of 520 mm and a weight of 6.2 kg, the Sepia apama is the largest species of cuttlefish in the world.

As part of our on-going series related to the International Year of Biodiversity, we’ll take a closer look at conservation status and occasionally highlight species in each rank. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is the primary global organization responsible for risk assessment organizes threat in 8 categories–Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Conservation Dependent, near Threatened, and Least Concerned.

The awareness of the need to protect endangered species has grown widely in the past few decades. The decimation of species throughout the world due to both natural and man-made conditions has pushed many species to the brink of extinction. While there are many efforts underway to protect and revive the species on the endangered list today, the struggle of many species to survive is still uncertain. This week’s book of the week, Selected vertebrate endangered species of the seacoast of the United States (1980), published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, outlines some of the species that were facing this battle for survival thirty years ago.