What are some animals that were close to extinction, but are now thriving (or close to it)?
Three examples that I can think of:
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus): In elementary school (early 70’s), I was taught that the number of bald eagles was in the low thousands. Now they’re Least Concern. In fact, I saw one in the wild (in southeast Missouri) a few weeks ago.
American Alligator (Alligator Mississippiensis): Hunted almost to extinction for their skins, now they’re back, and with a vengeance, almost to the point of being a nuisance.
American Bison (Bison Bison): Also hunted to near extinction. A few specimens exist in the wild, others exist on private reserves, and others are being raised for livestock.
Peregrine falcon (US subspecies) - as bird predators, they were hit hard by bioaccumulative pesticides. Regulation allowed their numbers to recover.
Black-footed ferrets - I wouldn’t say they are “thriving” per se, but the population has been greatly strengthened by a very strong captive breeding program.
Galapagos tortoises - feral goats were removed from several islands, allowing tortoise populations to rebound.
Desert tortoises - special protective status was assigned to several populations, including stricter regulation on keeping them as pets.
There’s a few of these positive stories that zoos love to trot out. This is US Fish & Wildlife’s list of plants and animals removed from the endangered species list.
(NB, I find it odd that USFWS listed, then delisted, red kangaroos in Australia. Most of the rest of this list consists of species native to the US. Anyone know the story here? Colibri?)
Not quite thriving, it’s still critical, but the White-winged guan (Penelope albipennis) it was discovered in 1877 and not seen in 100 years and declared extinct. It was re-discovered in 1977 and it’s making a steady comeback but the total number is still in the few hundreds.
Whooping crane: After being pushed to the brink of extinction by unregulated hunting and loss of habitat to just 21 wild and two captive whooping cranes by 1941, conservation efforts have led to a limited recovery. As of 2011, there are an estimated 437 birds in the wild and more than 165 in captivity
Not exactly recovered, but they were the poster child for “nearly extinct” when I was growing up.
I live in Vancouver, Canada and there are currently hundreds of these beautiful birds living near the local landfill that I pass on my way to work. I’ve seen 20+ in a single tree.
I guess the sea otterwould be another example; it’s estimated that the population fell to between 1,000 and 2,000 individuals at its lowest. (It’s still considered endangered, though.)
The most extraordinary story I know is the Chatham Island Black Robin, which at one point was reduced to a population of 5, only one of which was a reproductive female. Through extraordinary efforts by the New Zealand Wildlife Service the species was brought back from the brink and now has more than 200 individuals.
I am glad to have had Don Merton, the lead officer on this project, as a colleague when I worked for the New Zealand Wildlife Service in the early 1980s.
My current favorite: these amazing giant, walking-stick-like insects, “tree lobsters”: Dryococelus australis. They’re awesome. They were thought extinct, wiped out by rats. About 24 were found on a single, scrawny bush on this island with a crazy steep peak that looks like it must be something out of fiction. Now there are about 700 of these gentle giant bugs in a captive breeding program. They will survive!
The Kakapo, a large, flightless, nocturnal New Zealand parrot, was reduced to only about 40-50 birds in the early 1990s. Since then, through intensive conservation efforts, the population has grown to about 120 birds.
When I was with the New Zealand Wildlife Service in the early 1980s, I helped with some parts of the Kakapo recovery program. I worked with the translocation program on Little Barrier Island, which was my main research site for another species I was studying, the Stitchbird. I helped release or catch 5 birds on the island, about 10% of the know population at the time. I also worked with the radiotracking studies of other birds on Stewart Island, and went on survey trips by helicopter into some of the most remote valleys in Fiordland to try to track down some of the last remaining males on the South Island.
Northern Elephant Seal ( Mirounga angustirostris ), hunted to extinction (it was thought) except for an undiscovered remnant population. From the Wikipedia article:
Stupid Smithsonian expedition! Found what they thought were the last 8 remaining, and killed 7 of them just to bring their carcasses back to put in a museum. According to the story as I learned it, the population survived because there was another small cluster of them living on the far side of the same island, that they didn’t notice.
Note the mention of “genetic bottleneck” in the above Wiki excerpt. This is a problem that happens when a population falls to near-extinction levels but then manages to recover. When a population falls to such low levels, there remains very little genetic variety in that small population. Thereafter, the recovered population will all be cousins descended from just a few common ancestors, so the entire population will be very genetically uniform for many many generations, perhaps forever.
This means the population will be very vulnerable to future disasters. Any change in the environment, or any disease epidemic that kills a few of them is likely to kill a lot of them, or even wipe them out entirely.
Several populations of Gray Whales were hunted to extinction (e.g., Atlantic Gray Whales). The Northern Pacific Gray Whale ( Eschrichtius robustus ) was hunted very nearly to extinction, but has recovered fairly well, once protected.
Though it doesn’t quite qualify, I’m surprised no one has yet brought up the Pyrenean Ibex. They died out in 2001, but eight years later, scientists managed to successfully clone one, which was born live. Sadly, its lungs were underdeveloped, which happens a lot with clones, and it died seven minutes later, but for those seven minutes, the Pyrenean ibex was no longer extinct.
The media largely ignored this, preferring instead to focus on Obama’s inauguration (remember how long that went on?), and in a way I’m glad. Granted, most people don’t know about what was a major moment in the scientific history of our species, but on the other hand, the bumper stickers would have a lot less impact if they said “Extinction is forever… kinda”.