EndangeRed - The Caspian Seal

The Caspian Seal - Image from Science Daily

The future looks bleak for one of the world's smallest species of seal - the Caspian. Recent reports of one in four mammals being in danger of extinction includes the Caspian. Scientists from the University of Leeds along with international partners have studied the species, which is found only in Caspian Sea. A series of surveys have shown that their numbers have sharply fallen by 90% in the last 100 years. These findings have prompted the Internation Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to shift the status of the Caspian from Vulnerable to Endangered on its official IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2008. What has caused these sweet looking cuddly beings to disappear? Commercial hunting, habitat degradation, disease, pollution and drowning in fishing nets are a few of the reasons, which have caused their numbers to decline from more than one million at the beginning of the 20th century to just a meagre 100,000 today.

What is the Caspian Seal?

The Caspian Seal Project