• Many endangered orangutans in Indonesia are facing a triple-edged tragedy immediate death by fire; death from poachers if they escape the fires; or death by starvation because the fruit trees on which they rely will take several years to recover.

• According to recent biological surveys, the planet is now losing a species of plant or animal life to extinction every sixty minutes. Within the next decade, we may lose nearly 20 percent of all the remaining species of life on earth. Most of these species exist in remote areas and have not yet been seen by human eyes.

• The World Conservation Monitoring Center (WCMC), IUCN -- the World Conservation Union, and WWF recently announced that at least 10% of the world’s known tree species face extinction, including 259 species in the US.

• The forests of the Klamath-Siskiyous in northern California support more conifer species and rare plants and animals than any temperate conifer forest in the world.

• According to Vice President Al Gore, we are losing species of animals and plants 1000 times faster than at any time in the past 65 million years. (Earth in the Balance)

• In the past decade and a half, dusky shark numbers off the Atlantic coast of the United States have declined by at least 80 percent from overfishing.

• In 1900 there were 100,00 tigers in the world, and today there are fewer than 6,000. -- ENN Daily News.

• In the past 200 years, the United States has lost 50 percent of its wetlands, 90 percent of its northwestern old-growth forests, 99 percent of its tall grass prairie, and up to 490 species of native plants and animals. --ENN

• "We are in the midst of a mass extinction, an event not seen since the disappearance of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago." --Worldwatch Institute, in a study Losing Stands in the Web of Life: Vertebrate Declines and the Conservation of Biological Diversity.

• Only habitat loss ranks as more serious threat, affecting 85% of our vanishing species, while alien species affect 49%. Alien species ranks well ahead of pollution (24%), overharvest (17%), and disease (3%) as threats to biodiversity. Agriculture and commercial development are identified as the two most widespread causes of habitat loss for wildlife, affecting 38% of imperiled species, followed by commercial development (35%) and water development (30%). --from: For the Ecological X-Files: Proof that Aliens are Destroying Endangered Species, Environmental Defense Fund.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Dept. of the Interior.

	Endangered1		Threatened 2		Total listings3	Species with recovery plans4
Group	U.S.	Foreign	U.S.	Foreign
Mammals	59	251	8	16	334	43
Birds	75	178	15	6	274	77
Reptiles	14	66	20	14	114	30
Amphibians	9	8	7	1	25	11
Fishes	68	11	42	0	121	79
Snails	15	1	7	0	23	19
Clams	61	2	8	0	71	45
Crustaceans	16	0	3	0	19	7
Insects	28	4	9	0	41	21
Arachnids	5	0	0	0	5	4
Flowering plants	525	1	114	0	640	408
Conifers	2	0	0	2	4	1
Ferns & others	26	0	2	0	28	26
Total	903	522	235	39	1,699	771

1. Endangered species are Those in danger of extinction.

2. Threatened species are those likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future.

3. Separate populations of a species listed both as endangered and threatened are tallied only once, for the endangered population. Those species are the argali, leopard, gray wolf, piping plover, roseate tern, chimpanzee, green sea turtle, olive ridley sea turtle, stellar sea lion, and saltwater crocodile.

4. There are 488 approved recovery plans sponsored by the endangered species program of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They are dedicated to restoring species to a secure status in the wild. Some recovery plans cover more than one species, and a few species have separate plans covering different parts of their ranges. Recovery plans are drawn up only for species in the United States.