Wednesday, July 2, 2008

A new study claims that random differences between individuals can significantly affect the risk of extinction for an entire population. In addition, the effect is larger in smaller, already at-risk populations.

Current assessment methods routinely take in to account several other types of random events, such as accidental death and bad weather, but they apparently do not tend to consider individual physical variations or variations in the population sex ratio.

"By accounting for random differences between individuals, extinction rates for endangered species can be orders of magnitude higher than conservation biologists have believed."

While this story isn't specifically about cats, it certainly applies. According to the IUCN, every single cat species has a negative global population trend.