Question: How would you try to save an endangered species?

Becky Thomas answered on 11 Jun 2018:

Great question, but a tricky one to answer and every case would be different. The first thing you would to do though is to understand the ecology and biology of that species. You’d need to study it in the field to see where it lives, what it eats, how many young it has and when. You’d also need to figure out what was causing it’s decline (e.g. hunting, or pollution, or climate change… or many other causes) otherwise you’d never be able to help it. In some cases species have been brought into captivity to try to save them (this has happened with some frog species in the past few years), but this wouldn’t work with all species. Sometimes you need to try to reduce the threat (e.g. reduce hunting pressure) and then hope that they recover over time. The biggest problem is that so many species are endangered or threatened with extinction, and we need more scientists to try to help to stop this (so I hope you’ll consider this as a future career!)