Your 2015 Goodbye List: Amur Leopard, Javan Rhino, Mountain Gorilla And More On The Brink

Poached for its beautiful, spotted fur, the Amur Leopard is possibly the rarest and most endangered big cat in the world. Found along the border areas between the Russian Far East and northeast China, this species also faces habitat destruction and a loss of prey animals — i.e., food — due to poaching. Today, around 30 individual Amur leopards remain in the wild.


The smallest of the Asian elephants, the Sumatran elephant’s numbers have declined by an astonishing 80 percent in less than 25 years due to deforestation, habitat loss and human-elephant conflict in Sumatra. Around 2,400 to 2,800 individuals survive today.

Male Asian elephants have relatively small tusks, but poachers still kill to sell them in the illegal ivory market, thus skewing the sex ratio among wild elephants and making future breeding and species survival difficult.

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Known as the Asian unicorn, the saola is rarely seen in the wild, and none live in captivity. (The photograph above represented the first time in 14 years that a saola had been photographed in the wild.) The current population is estimated to be between a few dozen and a few hundred. Saola are hunted to supply growing demands for traditional medicine in China and food markets in Vietnam and Laos.

Habitat loss and reduced genetic diversity also threaten this species’ already dwindling population.


As the world’s most rare marine animal, the vaquita is on the brink of extinction with fewer than 100 individuals left in the world.

Found in the upper Gulf of California, one out of every five vaquita gets entangled and drowned in gillnets that are intended to catch another critically endangered species, the totoaba, whose swim bladders are illegally sold for about $4,000 a pound.

As long as this illegal international trade thrives, the vaquita population will continue to decline.

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http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/science/wildlife-news/141231/13-species-we-might-have-say-goodbye-2015