News

Asian vultures will be extinct in the wild within a decade without urgent action to eliminate the livestock drug that has caused their catastrophic decline, a newly published paper warns.

The new study shows that the population of White-rumped Vultures Gyps bengalensis is dropping by more than 40 per cent each year in India where it has plunged by 99.9 per cent since 1992. Numbers of Indian G. indicus and Slender-billed Vultures G. tenuirostris together, have fallen by almost 97 per cent in the same period.

The natural world holds secrets to the development of new kinds of safer and more powerful pain-killers; treatments for a leading cause of blindness – macular degeneration – and possibly ways of re-growing lost tissues and organs by, for example, studying newts and salamanders.

But the experts warn that we may lose many of the land and marine-based life forms of economic and medical interest before we can learn their secrets, or, in some cases, before we know they exist.

The new book, ‘Sustaining Life’, is the most comprehensive treatment of this subject to date and fills a major gap in the arguments made to conserve nature.