50 Fun Facts About Biodiversity

Which wild cat is so inbred that unrelated animals can accept each other's skin grafts?

Cheetah numbers crashed about 12,000 years ago, and the survivors' descendants are so alike that a skin graft from a stranger heals like the animal's own.

Which fruit's top export variety, Gros Michel, was ruined by a fungus and replaced by the Cavendish?

Banana plants of one variety are clones raised from suckers, so near-identical Gros Michel plantations fell together in the 1950s. The Cavendish is cloned the same way.

Which insects, whose front wings form hard cases, make up about one in four known animal species?

Beetles number about 400,000 described species, and new ones are found so often that the true total may be as high as two million.

Which country dug a vault into an Arctic mountain to store backup copies of the world's crop seeds?

Norway paid for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008 some 130 metres inside a sandstone mountain on the island of Spitsbergen.

Which habitats cover under 0.1% of the ocean yet house at least a quarter of all marine species?

Coral reefs are built by colonies of tiny animals called polyps, and their crowded variety has earned them the nickname rainforests of the sea.

Which North American bird, once billions strong, vanished when the last one, Martha, died in 1914?

Passenger pigeon flocks were shot and sold as cheap meat on a massive scale, and Martha, the last known bird, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

The flightless dodo, last reliably sighted in 1662, lived only on which Indian Ocean island?

Mauritius was the dodo's only home, and within a lifetime of Dutch sailors first recording the bird in 1598, hunting and introduced animals had wiped it out.

Which animal, modelled on London Zoo's Chi Chi, has been the World Wildlife Fund's logo since 1961?

Giant panda Chi Chi had moved from Beijing to London in 1958, and the naturalist Peter Scott designed the logo from sketches of the animal.

Ireland's Great Famine was deepened by reliance on a single variety, the Lumper, of which crop?

Potato fields planted with near-identical Lumpers had little defence when blight arrived in the 1840s, and about a million people died.

Tiny biting midges are the natural pollinators of the tree that gives us which food?

Chocolate begins with cacao flowers, which are pollinated by midges of the genus Forcipomyia, and the flies set more fruit than artificial pollination does.

Biodiversity has three levels: ecosystems, species and which third kind, found within one species?

Genetic diversity is the variety of genes inside one species, and conserving it means protecting many separate populations rather than a single group.

What word describes a species, like Australia's koala, that lives wild in only one region?

Endemic species are confined to one defined place, so a plant or animal that is native somewhere but also lives elsewhere does not qualify.

Which building term names a species, like the sea otter, whose loss can collapse an ecosystem?

Keystone species are named after the stone at the top of an arch, which bears the least pressure of any yet brings the whole arch down if it is removed.

Which term describes an introduced species, like the cane toad, that harms its new environment?

Invasive is the label for the cane toad, which was brought to Australia to control an insect pest of sugar cane and then spread across the north.

Species counts tend to rise toward which line, a pattern called the latitudinal diversity gradient?

The equator runs through the warm, highly productive zone where diversity peaks, and the pattern holds for land animals and sea creatures alike.

On which island, adrift since splitting from India in the dinosaur era, are all lemurs native?

Madagascar has been isolated for so long that about 90% of its plants and animals are found nowhere else, every lemur species among them.

Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island tortoise, died in 2012 in which Pacific archipelago?

Galápagos Islands rangers never found another Pinta tortoise after George was first spotted in 1971, so his kind ended with him.

Which predator, wiped out of Yellowstone National Park by 1926, was released there again in 1995?

Gray wolf packs returned when 14 animals captured in Canada were released from pens in the Lamar Valley, ending almost 70 years without a resident pack in the park.

Which Swedish naturalist devised two-part Latin names, such as Homo sapiens, for living things?

Linnaeus first applied such names consistently in his 1753 book Species Plantarum, which remains the official starting point for naming plants.

Which animals, ravaged by the chytrid skin fungus, are the most threatened class of vertebrates?

Amphibians have about 41% of their species at risk, and the chytrid disease alone has been linked to declines in at least 500 of them.

What name did ecologist Norman Myers give regions rich in unique species but fast losing habitat?

Hotspots must hold at least 1,500 plant species found nowhere else and have lost 70% of their original vegetation. Together they cover only about 2.5% of Earth's land surface.

Which Harvard ant specialist edited the 1988 volume BioDiversity, which popularised the new word?

E. O. Wilson credited the word itself to Walter G. Rosen, who coined it while organising the 1986 national forum that the book grew out of.

Which island nation, whose only native land mammals are bats, evolved flightless birds like the kakapo and moa?

New Zealand had no land mammals except bats when people arrived, so birds filled their roles on the ground, and the moa were hunted out within two centuries of settlement.

Which Siberian lake, the oldest and deepest on Earth, has a freshwater seal found nowhere else?

Lake Baikal is 25 to 30 million years old and holds over a fifth of the world's fresh surface water, more than all the North American Great Lakes combined.

Blue agave, the tequila plant, is pollinated in the wild by long-nosed species of which animal?

Bat pollination is skipped on tequila farms, where growers cut off the flower stalk and replant shoots instead, leaving the crop short of variety.

Which farming practice, seen in vast unbroken fields of wheat or maize, invites pests and disease?

Monoculture makes planting and harvesting efficient, but when every plant is alike a disease can spread rapidly across large areas.

Which geological period ended with the Great Dying, the most severe mass extinction on record?

Permian seas lost about 81% of their species in the event, which was also the greatest known mass extinction of insects.

Which Pulitzer-winning book by Elizabeth Kolbert argues that humans are causing a mass die-off?

The Sixth Extinction grew out of a New Yorker article of almost the same name, and it sets today's losses beside the great die-offs in the fossil record.

Which period's 'explosion' saw nearly every major animal group first appear in the fossil record?

Cambrian fossils appear so abruptly that Charles Darwin listed the lack of earlier ones among the main difficulties for his theory of evolution.

In which city did the 1992 Earth Summit open the Convention on Biological Diversity for signing?

Rio de Janeiro's summit opened the UN climate convention for signature as well, making one June meeting the birthplace of two major environmental treaties.

CITES, a 1973 treaty covering over 40,000 species, protects wildlife by regulating which activity?

International trade in listed plants and animals needs permits and certificates, and the treaty grew out of a 1963 resolution by members of the IUCN.

On the IUCN Red List, which is the lowest of the three threatened categories, below Endangered?

Vulnerable means a species faces a high risk of extinction in the wild over the medium term, and more than 10,000 species carry the label.

Which Canadian city is paired with China's Kunming in the name of a 2022 UN biodiversity deal?

Montreal, home of the UN biodiversity treaty's secretariat, stepped in as host after Kunming gave up the role, and the deal's best-known pledge is the 30 by 30 target.

Which fish was so overfished off Newfoundland that Canada halted the 500-year-old fishery in 1992?

Atlantic cod stocks there had fallen to about 1% of their historic level, and the ban put roughly 37,000 fishers and plant workers out of work.

Which North American bird had its last wild individuals caught for captive breeding by 1987, leaving none flying free?

California condor chicks bred in captivity were later released, and the birds again soar over the Grand Canyon on wings that span three metres.

Which fish, believed extinct since the age of dinosaurs, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?

Coelacanth fossils run out about 66 million years ago, and the living genus, Latimeria, honours Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who found the first specimen.

Which flightless northern seabird, the first bird to be called a penguin, died out in the 1840s?

Great auk down was in such demand that Europe's colonies were largely gone by the mid-1500s, and the last confirmed pair was killed off Iceland in 1844.

Which reptile, accidentally brought to Guam after World War II, wiped out most of its native birds?

Brown tree snake numbers boomed thanks to plentiful prey and a lack of predators, and Guam's snakes grow longer than those back home, reaching three metres.

Which naturalist mapped the boundary in Indonesia where Asian animals give way to Australasian ones?

Alfred Russel Wallace also hit on natural selection independently, and his 1858 paper on it was published alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's writings.

Which Latin phrase means conserving species outside their natural habitat, in zoos and seed banks?

Ex situ conservation can end with a return home, because plants and animals bred in human care are used for reintroduction into the wild.

Which Soviet botanist built the seed bank that starving staff guarded in the siege of Leningrad?

Nikolai Vavilov mapped the regions where crops were first domesticated, but he fell foul of Stalin's favourite Trofim Lysenko and died in prison in 1943.

Which Australian conifer was unknown to science until canyon explorers stumbled on a grove in 1994?

Wollemi pine trees were spotted by David Noble, whose group was searching a national park for new canyons, and the species was later named after him.

Which desert antelope, extinct in the wild by the 1970s, was bred in zoos and released in the 1980s?

Arabian oryx were last reported in the wild in 1972. Zoo-bred herds were released first in Oman, and in 2011 it became the first species to climb from extinct in the wild back to vulnerable.

Which domain of microbes, split from bacteria in 1977, was first seen in hot springs and salt lakes?

Archaea were set apart by Carl Woese and George Fox using ribosomal RNA sequences, the evidence behind the three-domain tree of living things.

A widely cited 2011 study estimated that Earth holds about how many species, most still unnamed?

8.7 million species was the estimate, yet only about 1.2 million had been catalogued, which left roughly 86% of them still awaiting a description.

Into which African lake was the Nile perch released in the 1950s, devastating its native fish?

Lake Victoria's native cichlids were the perch's first prey, and once they grew scarce the predator switched to eating mainly small shrimp and minnows.

Which biblical figure lends his name to species found alive long after being declared extinct?

Lazarus species are named after the man raised from the dead in the Gospel of John. Lord Howe Island's stick insect reappeared on a sea stack in 2001, about 80 years after it vanished.

Which crater, buried under Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, marks the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs?

Chicxulub was found by geophysicists prospecting for oil in the late 1970s, and the impact is blamed for wiping out 75% of plant and animal species.

Which American zoo created the first 'frozen zoo' in the 1970s to bank cells from endangered animals?

San Diego Zoo pathologist Kurt Benirschke began the collection before any technology existed to make use of it, trusting that science would catch up.

Which diversity index, borrowed from 1948 information theory, do ecologists use to compare habitats?

Shannon index maths was devised to measure entropy in strings of text. In ecology it gauges how hard it is to predict the species of a randomly picked individual.