'Lost shark' possibly extinct, dolphin threatened -Red List

* Recently discovered shark may be extinct
* IUCN says frog decline is "drastic"
* European bison population recovering

By Emma Farge
GENEVA, Dec 10 (Reuters) - A shark only just formally
discovered might already be extinct - a fate no shark has yet
suffered in the human era - while an Amazon river dolphin has
become endangered, a Red List of species in trouble showed on
Thursday.
More than a quarter of the 128,918 animal, plant and fungi
species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) in its update are now threatened with extinction.
The latest list has 31 new extinctions including several frogs
and more than a dozen freshwater fish.
"This really shows that the world is under huge pressure,"
Craig Hilton-Taylor, Red List Unit Head told Reuters.
"The idea of the Red List is to try to draw attention to
species and stop them from going extinct but sometimes the
process goes too quickly."
The so-called "Lost shark" of the heavily fished South China
Sea was only formally discovered last year based on decades-old
specimens. But there have been no recent sightings and it has
not shown up in five targeted surveys, prompting IUCN to list it
as "Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct)".
Sharks have historically proven to be robust, surviving on
the planet for hundreds of millions of years, even persisting
through mass extinction events such as the asteroid strike
believed to have wiped out most dinosaurs.
Dr. Will White, an Ichthyologist at CSIRO's Australian
National Fish Collection who named the "Lost shark" said this
might be the first shark extinction in human times.
"Unfortunately what makes a species a great survivor in the
natural world doesn't equate to making them great survivors
against man," White told Reuters.
The IUCN which works with thousands of scientists tends to
be conservative on extinctions, since declaring them can spell
an end to any remaining protection efforts. Thus, species it
calls "possibly extinct" often already are.
The organisation also moved an Amazon dolphin with a pinkish
belly called the Tucuxi to its endangered list, meaning that all
of the world's freshwater dolphins are now threatened since the
others were already endangered.
Hazards include dams, pollution and gillnets - vast curtains
of fishing nets that dangle in the current, it said.
IUCN described the decline in frog populations in Central
and South America as "drastic". It cited a disease caused by the
frog chytrid fungus which scientists link to climate change.
On a positive note, IUCN said that European bison
populations had grown more than threefold since 2003 to 6,200 in
2019 thanks to conservation efforts and bumped it up one
category to "vulnerable".
The bison were decimated by hungry armies in World War One
in current-day Poland and Belarus, and vanished from the wild in
the aftermath before being reintroduced.
Another success story is the Barndoor skate - a large, flat
fish resembling a ray - that jumped three categories from
"endangered" to "least concern".
"There are glimmers of hope, little stories that show us
what can be done," said the IUCN's Hilton-Taylor.
"We know what to do, we know what species are threatened. It
is just a question of ramping up efforts."