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At least 500 species and subspecies of plants and animals have gone extinct in North America since the 1500s; among them, the great auk, the Labrador duck, the heath hen, the Eskimo curlew, and the sea mink. Natural causes appear to have claimed just one, a marine snail. We barely got to know many of the others. These excerpts from the book written by Douglas H. Chadwick and photographed by Joel Sartore, depict a few survivors.
 

 
CLICK FOR MORE ON THE FLORIDA PANTHER Florida panther

    This mangy Florida panther photographed itself by tripping an infrared beam. When wildlife biologists saw the photograph they were enthusiastic about how much better the panther looked since they’d last seen it. Besides mange, “Number 51” is believed to be suffering from ringworm as well—diseases unknown in healthy populations of mountain lions elsewhere in the U.S. (Regionally, Felis concolor coryi  is called mountain lion, cougar, puma, panther, painter, and just plain lion.)
    More than a century of inbreeding has seriously depleted the panthers’ gene pool, making them subject to disease, congenital defects, reproductive failure, and other calamities. Healthy cougars from west Texas have been introduced into the panthers’ south Florida range with the hope that interbreeding the subspecies will produce offspring with a healthier genetic mix. Ironically, saving this subspecies may well require diluting its genetic distinctiveness.
    Because an adult panther needs a lot of room to roam, the available habitat in the Big Cypress Swamp and along the edges of the Everglades may never support many more than the 30 to 50 panthers now prowling south Florida’s wildlands.

 

 
CLICK FOR MORE ON THE CONDOR California condor

    Oblivious to the fundamental questions posed and the furor raised by their tenuous existence, these hungry, captive-bred juvenile condors eagerly feed on handouts from their human protectors in the California Condor Recovery Team. Every three days, biologists chain part of a stillborn calf carcass to this rock in Los Padres National Forest—easy pickings free of the coyote poisons, lead bullets and shotgun pellets, pesticides, and other carrion contaminants that almost exterminated the condor.
    The 1986 decision to capture all the remaining condors for a last-ditch captive-breeding program raised troubling questions about the role of natural extinction in evolution and wildlife conservation—questions with which the wildlife community was ill prepared to wrestle. Condors are now being returned to the wild and to a world in which they were already declining before Europeans set foot on this continent.

 

 
CLICK FOR MORE ON THE RED WOLF Red wolf

    The first endangered species for which a recovery plan was put in place, and the first predatory mammal ever reintroduced to the wild, the red wolf has rebounded from just 17 animals to approximately 300. From captive-breeding facilities red wolves have been released on public wildlands in North Carolina and Tennessee, where they are now breeding. If they stray too far, they are “soft-trapped” and returned to their isolation from human neighborhoods.
    Having survived hunting, trapping, poisoning, the destruction or alteration of much of its original habitat, and the extinction of two of its three subspecies, the red wolf faces new peril. Recent DNA studies have failed to distinguish between red wolves and wolf-coyote hydrids. More studies, and a scientific review of endangered species management, are underway.

 

 
CLICK FOR MORE ON THE VERNAL POOL TADPOLE SHRIMP Vernal pool tadpole shrimp

    Evolution has adapted these living fossils to drought, flood, heat, and cold, but vernal pool tadpole shrimp haven’t been well prepared to cope with the ways of human beings. These bottom-scuttling creatures live just long enough to hatch, grow, mate, and lay eggs—maybe three months. Then the vernal pools in which they live dry up, and the unhatched eggs must wait several weeks, or even years, in the dried mud of their ephemeral home pools.
    A few eggs may be transplanted to other vernal pools on the legs of wading birds or in the mud-matted hair of mammals, which is why saving individual pools may not be enough, and why preservation of the pool complexes that define a population is so important to the species’ survival. Other eggs succumb to water projects, urban sprawl, agriculture, roads, off-road vehicles—the forces that have destroyed some 90 percent of all the vernal pools in California’s Central Valley, formerly prime habitat for the tadpole shrimp.

 
©1996 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

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