Fading Out of Focus

I was doing a field trip talk for a group of elementary school students once, when we stopped at the front of our red wolf habitat.  I had the students, not the teachers and chaperones, just the kids - count themselves off, then had them stand together in a clump.  Then, I asked the class to imagine if there were only that many people left in the entire world.

That, I explained, was the situation for the red wolf just a few years ago.  Their numbers were ranked in the low double digits... and seemed to be falling.

It's one thing to tell people how few members of a species are left in the world.  It's another entirely to find a way to show them.  One cool visual representation which I just found was this series of pictures of endangered animals.  Each consists of as many pixels as there are individuals left in the world.  I'd love to see zoos posting these on their graphics to really help drive home how rare many of our animals are.  (Not that numbers is the only determining factory in how endangered a species is - some animals have low numbers for a variety of reasons and may be in safer condition that a more "common" species - it's really trajectory that counts).  

Still, some of these images are haunting.  And many are only likely to get blurrier in the future.

I'm glad that they didn't even try vaquita.  It would just be a few gray dots.