Random Endangered Species Generator

What the endangered species generator does

You need a species. Maybe it is for a school project, maybe a poster, maybe a quiz, maybe you are writing something and you want an animal that is not the tiger everybody picks.

This gives you one, or as many as you want to read through.

What follows is the part worth staying for. What the word endangered actually means, why almost nobody notices any of this happening, and why two rhinos in Kenya are the reason this page exists at all.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One if you want a subject. Twenty if you want to be surprised by how many you have never heard of.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

Endangered is a rank, not a feeling

Most people use endangered the way they use rare. It sounds like a mood. It is not.

It is a rank, and it sits on a ladder. The International Union for Conservation of Nature runs the ladder, and it goes like this. Least Concern at the bottom, then Near Threatened, then Vulnerable, then Endangered, then Critically Endangered, then Extinct in the Wild, then Extinct.

Three of those rungs are the ones people mean when they say a species is in trouble. Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered. Together they are called threatened, and the difference between them is not vibes. It is numbers. How many are left, how fast they are falling, how small the range has become, what the odds are over three generations.

So when you see Amur Leopard and Giant Panda on the same list, they are not in the same trouble. One of them has a few dozen left in the wild. The other one has been climbing back for forty years.

Which brings up the thing that makes this whole subject strange. A species can move.

Why nobody notices it happening

Here is a question. How many fish should there be in the sea?

You do not know. Neither do I. And that turns out to be the entire problem.

In 1995 a fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly published a paper that was one page long and changed how people think about this. He noticed that every generation of scientists started their careers, looked at the sea in front of them, and quietly treated that as normal. Then they measured decline from there. The next generation arrived, found a poorer sea, and treated that as normal instead.

He called it shifting baseline syndrome. Everyone is measuring the fall from wherever they happened to come in.

Your grandparents saw more birds than you do. You will not miss what they saw, because you never had it. Your grandchildren will not miss what you have. Nobody is lying and nobody is being careless. The baseline just walks quietly downhill, one lifetime at a time, and each of us grades it against the wrong starting line.

That is why lists like this exist. Not because a list saves anything. Because a written record is the only thing that does not shift when we do.

Who decides, and how a species gets on the list

The IUCN was founded in 1948, and the Red List came out of it in the 1960s. Before that there was no shared answer to a simple question. Which animals are actually in trouble, and how badly?

What makes it work is that it is not an opinion. To move a species onto a rung, somebody has to submit an assessment against published criteria, and other people who study that species have to agree. Population size. Rate of decline. Geographic range. Fragmentation. Then it gets reviewed, and reviewed again, and it can be challenged.

It is slow, and it is argued over, and both of those are the point. A species does not get called Critically Endangered because somebody felt strongly. It gets called that because the numbers cleared a bar that was set before anyone looked at the numbers.

The flip side is that the ladder is only as current as the last assessment. Some species get looked at every few years. Others sit for a decade because nobody has the funding to go and count them. So the list is a photograph, not a live feed, and it is a photograph taken at different times for different animals.

Two rhinos in Kenya

Take one name off the list and follow it all the way down. Northern White Rhino.

There are two of them left. Not two thousand. Two.

Their names are Najin and Fatu. They are mother and daughter. Both were born in a zoo in the Czech Republic, and both were flown to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya in December 2009, on the theory that being on the right continent might help. They live in a guarded enclosure with armed protection around the clock.

Najin is in her mid thirties, has bad knees from her years in captivity, and her front horn droops forward. Fatu is twenty five, has had her horn trimmed so she does not hurt her mother, and spends most of her time with a southern white rhino called Tawu rather than with Najin. So Najin, who is one of the last two members of her kind on the planet, mostly grazes alone because her daughter has a best friend.

The last male was called Sudan. He died on the 19th of March, 2018, and the moment he did, the subspecies was finished as a breeding population. That is what functionally extinct means. Still here. Cannot continue.

Neither female can carry a pregnancy. Fatu still produces viable eggs, so there is a team trying in vitro fertilisation with stored sperm and a southern white rhino surrogate. It has never been done in a rhino before.

Their head keeper is a man called Zacharia Mutai. He spends twelve hours a day with them, most days. He was there when Sudan died. He says they have different personalities, the way people do, and that Najin is his favourite because she stays so calm.

That is the whole population. One conservancy, one enclosure, one man who knows both of their moods.

Every other name on this list is somewhere behind them on the same road.

Where these come from

The species here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is picked out of it at random.

That is all there is to it, and it happens on your own device.

The ones that came back

This is the part that gets left out, and it is the part worth knowing.

In 2016 the IUCN moved the Giant Panda down a rung, from Endangered to Vulnerable. Forty years of habitat protection and captive breeding in China, and the wild population had grown enough to clear the bar. The panda is still in trouble. It is just in less trouble than it was, and that happened because people decided it should and then spent four decades on it.

The southern white rhino is the better story. Look at Fatu's friend Tawu and you are looking at a subspecies that was down to somewhere around twenty animals in the late 1800s. Twenty. One population, in one reserve in South Africa. Today there are more than fifteen thousand of them.

So the two ends of the same species tell you both halves of the argument. The northern white is down to two females and a laboratory. The southern white went from twenty to fifteen thousand. Same animal, near enough. Different century, different decisions.

None of this is a natural process running its course. Every name on this list is on it because of choices, and a few of them have come off it for the same reason.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between endangered and critically endangered?

Critically endangered is the last rung before a species is gone from the wild. It means the assessment found an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future, judged on population size, rate of decline and range. Endangered is the rung below it. Very high risk, still a step back from the edge. Both sit above Vulnerable. All three together are what people mean by threatened.

How many species are threatened right now?

Tens of thousands, and the number climbs mostly because assessment coverage climbs. That is worth sitting with. A large share of the increase is not new species falling. It is species that were always falling and had never been looked at. Mammals and birds are assessed thoroughly. Insects, fungi and plants are barely assessed at all, and they are most of life on earth.

Why does everyone always talk about pandas and tigers?

Because they have faces. Conservation funding follows attention, and attention follows animals that look at you. It is called charismatic megafauna, and it is not a criticism so much as a fact about people. The Vaquita is a porpoise with maybe a handful left and almost nobody outside conservation could pick it out of a line up. Pull a few names off this list and count how many you have never heard of. That count is the real story.

Can I use this for a school project?

That is one of the reasons it is here. Pull one, then go and look up its assessment properly, because the page it gives you is a starting point and not a source. The interesting projects are almost never about the tiger.

What happens when the last one dies?

The rung is called Extinct, and the IUCN does not use it quickly. A species is only declared extinct after exhaustive surveys across its known range, at the right times, over a long enough window, have failed to find a single individual. Species have been declared extinct and then found again. So the list moves slowly at that end on purpose, because being wrong about it in either direction has a cost.

References

1. Pauly, D. (1995). Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 10(10), 430. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(00)89171-5
2. IUCN. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. https://www.iucnredlist.org/
3. IUCN. Red List Categories and Criteria. https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/categories-and-criteria
4. Ol Pejeta Conservancy. Northern White Rhino. https://www.olpejetaconservancy.org/wildlife/rhinos/northern-white-rhinos/
5. BioRescue. Advanced Assisted Reproduction Technologies for the Northern White Rhino. https://www.biorescue.org/en