The Best Way to Support Recovery of Endangered Species

Taking specific steps towards sustaining biodiversity is an acknowledged twin endeavour along with carbon sequestration in programmes to address climate change. Sustaining biodiversity means preventing extinctions and recovering biomass of wild animals as well as their plant foods. 

Take a look at this table showing the impacts of nine potential interventions on seven key aspects of endangered wildlife species recovery. 

When we talk about nutrition, it is usually in a human health context. But all life depends on nutrition. 

Wild species become endangered when the formerly widespread population has been depleted so much that only a few clusters of individuals remain in some areas. Typically – but not always - those clusters are in sub-optimal patches of habitats in protected areas. There is one type of intervention that can lead to recovery of depleted clusters of endangered wild animal species. That intervention is to provide adequate and sustained daily nutrition to the members of the remnant cluster. Remember the magic of all living things. All will eventually die, but all living things can reproduce. That is what they have evolved to do. Availability of constant nutritious food to each individual animal is the only thing that has a sustained positive influence on fertility (individual ability to have offspring), fecundity (reproductive capacity of a population), infant survival, individual growth rate, good health, recovery after disease or injury, and longevity. Together, those factors can have a powerful positive effect on species recovery. In contrast, along with predation, disease and old age, poaching increases the number of deaths per year, but does not prevent inevitable deaths. In reality, the most fashionable interventions currently promoted and implemented as means to save endangered species have little or no positive impact. 

What sort of interventions can be made in relation to nutrition for endangered species? The NGO BORA (www.bringingbackourrareanimals.org) is: growing key orangutan food plants in oil palm plantations, as a means to sustain the current remnant sparse population in the long term; developing and managing grasslands with supplementary mineral sources for elephants and wild cattle; providing foods for a tiny remanent cluster of Bornean bearded pigs, as a potential source for rewilding the species elsewhere; and developing feeding grounds for wild sambar deer in Pahang as a means towards boosting tiger prey productivity.