By Rebecca Flisser (‘27)
Polar Bears. Giant Pandas. African Elephants. These are only a few of the many endangered and vulnerable species in our world. Soon enough, all of these organisms will be extinct, and if this happens, our food webs will be irreparably damaged. Imagine removing grass from a food chain of rabbits, snakes, and hawks. If the grass gets removed, the population of rabbits would go down dramatically because they have nothing to eat. This will then affect the snakes, making their population also go down because there are not enough rabbits. That will then affect the hawks, and their population would go down too because there are not enough snakes. Although this is a simple example of what will happen if a species is removed from its ecosystem, the effects are drastic. As a school, we need to act now if we want to save the world’s creatures.
Critically endangered species are a specific group of creatures that are at extreme risk of extinction but are not yet extinct or extinct in the wild. An example of a critically endangered species is the Amur Leopard or Panthera Pardus Orientalis. Poached (hunted) for their beautiful coats, there are only 84 known individuals left. These leopard’s coats have been sold for 500 to 1000 dollars, but you cannot put a price on these creatures’ lives. These beautiful animals are important culturally, economically, and ecologically. They are predators to species of deer, so if they go extinct, there will be a terrible change to the food web.
We, as Fieldston students and faculty, can help the Amur Leopards and so many other endangered species by symbolically adopting them. Adopting an animal through organizations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) means that the animal lives at the sanctuary you adopted it from, but you pay for its needs, like food and medicine. This gesture of kindness will help save an innocent life, and it will help make a difference in our world. Maybe we will be able to protect an entire species from extinction.
