From moose to wolverines, animals are interwoven into the Canadian consciousness. A walk through many of our cities reveals buildings whose decorative medallions salute our iconic species. The beaver, whose pelts drew Europeans to the New World, is on our nickel. The caribou graces our quarter. And everyone earns and spends the Loon.
Yet this vast diversity of species, like the rest of Canada's natural wealth, cannot be taken for granted. Since European settlers first arrived, hunting and dwindling habitat have increased the pressure on our fauna.
That being said, the past four centuries have not been a total catastrophe for Canada's native species.
Conservation has restored several threatened populations, including the marten, beaver, grey whale and Pacific sea otter, to health. Other species, like the coyote, have proved so resilient that problems with them -- especially in cities -- involve too many critters, not too few. At last report, Toronto's dominant species was probably the raccoon.
Still, threats to our animals persist -- some of them hidden. Only this spring, new scientific analyses revealed geographic "hot spots" where various species, not previously considered to be at risk, are in fact on the brink of endangerment.
While these hot spots range from Tasmania to Russia, the biggest "risk-of-risk" regions on Earth lie in Canada's Arctic and sub-Arctic. Animals such as caribou and musk ox, long believed to exist in such large numbers as to be unassailable, may be in a more precarious position than thought. How could these apparently robust species be at risk?
A paperpublished recently in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences contained a latent-risk assessment that includes such factors as the animals' range, size, reproduction habits and maturation times.
Of all these variables, the most critical is an animal's size. "Conservation biologists have always known that large-bodied mammals are at greater risk of extinction," says Georgina Mace, one of the paper's authors.
"Now [that] we understand the mechanisms [of extinction], we are able to tailor conservation programs dependent on size," says Dr. Mace, of the Institute of Zoology, the research division of the Zoological Society of London.
For small mammals, the Canadian Sierra Club says, the best approach is to conserve habitat. "Without a home, species do not survive," it notes.
Yet even this motherhood statement has to be qualified, the Institute of Zoology cautions. "Large mammals . . . need a more complex conservation strategy, which takes into account their biology in combination with the external threats they face," the institute says in a recent news release.
Conservation biologists are still developing measures to keep risk-of-risk populations off the World Conservation Union's dreaded Red List of endangered species. Vertebrates make up 10 per cent of all animals sampled, including the white Siberian tiger and the saw-whet owl of British Columbia. By definition, these species face imminent extinction.
Suggestions to protect risk-of-risk animals include monitoring populations and covering them under national species-protection laws.
Yet the question must be asked: Why bother at all? Wouldn't it be simpler to wait until Canada's northern species creep onto the Red List before taking action to protect them?
No, says Thomas Brooks of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science in Washington, D.C., one of the risk-assessment paper's scientific referees.
"Pro-active solutions are cheaper and easier," he says. "It's widely recognized among conservation practitioners that wherever we have the opportunity, we should get ahead of the curve and implement pro-active conservation measures."
The "curve" to which Dr. Brooks refers is an "extinction graph" that shows the yearly number of species extinctions around the world. If the same number of species died out every year, the graph would be a straight line. But its slope is steadily increasing -- and it is now as steep as a ski hill.
