Deforestation in the Amazon is Threatening the Pink Dolphin with Extinction

Pink dolphins are not the same dolphins that you would see in the ocean; they have special adaptations to their habitat. In fact, river dolphins are only distantly related to sea dolphins. The Amazon River pink dolphins conform the largest population of river dolphins in existence.
The river dolphins are among the most endangered species of all the world's cetaceans. Pink dolphins have been listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a "vulnerable species-threatened" and recently was moved to "endangered species-threatened"

These friendly and social creatures have been living for centuries in the Amazon and its tributaries, but the accelerated destruction of the Amazon basin have put them in a every time more dangerous situation.

The raise in contaminant levels of mercury have caused and increased number of deaths among pink dolphins, especially near gold mines where mercury is used as part of the gold mining process.

Tthe increase of traffic also threatens these creatures as they are curious by nature and they sometime approach to vessels where they are easily hurt by the sharp propellers.

Additionally, the noise produced by engines and motors and the sound pollution caused by them, has been considered to produce a disorienting phenomenon in their navigations systems, causing the death of many pink dolphins.

Nowhere on earth is the threat of biological impoverishment because of deforestation greater than in the Amazon Basin of South America. The Amazon supports approximately 300 million hectares of tropical forest, the largest single area of tropical forest communities in the world. Estimates of global biodiversity point to the tropics as the source of 50 to 90% of all species on Earth; the richest forests often support over 300 tree species per hectare, approximately the same number of tree species in all of North America.

Deforestation of the Amazon has surged in recent months and is likely to rise in 2008 for the first time in four years, a senior Brazilian government scientist said on Wednesday.

The rise raises questions over Brazil's assertion that its environmental policies are effectively protecting the world's biggest rain forest, whose destruction is a major source of carbon emissions that drive global warming. Environmentalists are concerned about deforestation rates in the Amazon not only because they threaten one of the world's great treasures of biodiversity, but also because of the rainforests' function as the Earth's "lungs" and as a "carbon sink" that helps slow global warming.

Two new studies on global warming released earlier this week found that the Greenland ice sheet was likely to disappear, causing a 23-foot rise in sea level, within several hundred years unless carbon emissions were sharply reduced. Climate change caused by those emissions will reduce annual rainfall along the West Coast of the United States by as much as 30 percent by the year 2050, causing severe water shortages throughout the region.

The major culprits behind deforestation in the Amazon region include cattle-ranching, soybean farming, and subsistence agriculture, as well as logging, according to recent studies. Brazil's growing success as an exporter of beef and non-genetically modified soybeans may be the single greatest factor in the doubling of average annual deforestation over the last several years compared to the previous decade.

According to a report previewed earlier this week by the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the number of cattle in the Amazon has more than doubled--from 26 million in 1990 to 57 million in 2002. The report, 'Hamburger Connection Fuels Amazon Destruction,' showed that the overwhelming majority of new cattle are concentrated in the Amazon states of Mato Grosso, Para, and Rondonia--which were also the states with the great deforestation over the past two years.

"This research provides the first substantial data to support recent speculation about the role international demand for Brazilian beef is playing in Brazil's skyrocketing deforestation rate," David Kaimowitz, CIFOR's director, told the Science and Development Network. "Cattle ranchers are making mincemeat out of Brazil's Amazon rainforests."

Brazilian beef exports have exploded as a result of fears of mad cow disease in other beef-exporting nations.

New research confirms that avoiding deforestation can play a key role in reducing future greenhouse gas concentrations. Scientists report in the journal Science that tropical deforestation releases 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon each year into the atmosphere. Tropical deforestation presently accounts for roughly one-fifth of the global emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important human-derived greenhouse gas