Vulnerable Species

Cacajao calvus

The bald uakari is a small Amazonian monkey best known for its strikingly bare, bright red face, found in seasonally-flooded forests along the Amazon and its tributaries.

Acinonyx jubatus

The cheetah is the fastest land animal on Earth, built for explosive short sprints across the open grasslands and semi-desert of Africa, with a small, remnant population also surviving in Iran. Its speed comes at a genetic cost: cheetahs went through a severe population bottleneck thousands of years ago, leaving today's cheetahs with unusually low genetic diversity, which makes the species more vulnerable to disease on top of the threats it already faces from habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict.

Dugong dugon

The dugong is a large marine mammal closely related to manatees, spending its entire life grazing on seagrass meadows in the shallow coastal waters of the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. It is the only strictly herbivorous marine mammal that lives exclusively in the sea, unlike manatees, which sometimes venture into freshwater rivers.

Tridacna gigas

The giant clam is the largest living bivalve mollusk in the world, capable of growing shells over a meter across and living for a century or more anchored to the same spot on a coral reef. Rather than actively hunting for food, it hosts millions of photosynthetic algae within its colorful mantle tissue, drawing most of its energy from sugars the algae produce using sunlight.

Ailuropoda melanoleuca

The giant panda is a bear native to a handful of mountain forest ranges in central China, primarily in Sichuan province, famous worldwide for a diet made up almost entirely of bamboo despite retaining the short digestive tract of a carnivore. Because that digestive system extracts relatively little energy from tough, fibrous bamboo, pandas must eat enormous quantities to survive, spending up to 12 hours a day feeding and consuming as much as 38kg of bamboo in a single day. Long a symbol of Chinese culture and a fixture of international 'panda diplomacy,' the species was reclassified from Endangered to Vulnerable by the IUCN in 2016 after decades of habitat protection and captive-breeding programs helped stabilize its wild population — one of conservation's clearer recent success stories, even as bamboo forest fragmentation remains an ongoing threat.

Hippopotamus amphibius

The hippopotamus is one of the largest land mammals, spending most of the day submerged in African rivers and lakes to keep its huge body cool.

Ophiophagus hannah

The king cobra is the world's longest venomous snake, found across the forests, bamboo thickets, and mangrove swamps of South and Southeast Asia, from India and southern China to the Philippines and Indonesia. It is unusual among snakes for building and guarding a nest for its eggs, and despite its size and reputation, it is a shy, diurnal hunter that generally avoids humans rather than confronting them.

Dermochelys coriacea

The leatherback is the largest sea turtle species in the world and the only one without a hard bony shell, ranging farther into cold water than any other reptile.

Panthera leo

The lion is one of the world's most recognizable big cats, known as the 'king of the jungle' despite living mainly on open savanna, and is the only cat species that lives in large social groups called prides.

Ursus maritimus

The polar bear is the largest land carnivore on Earth, superbly adapted to hunting seals across the sea ice of the Arctic Circle.

Setonix brachyurus

The quokka is a small macropod, part of the same broad family as kangaroos and wallabies, found in a few fragmented pockets on mainland southwest Australia and, in far greater numbers, on a handful of predator-free islands off Western Australia. It is widely nicknamed 'the world's happiest animal' online for a permanent smile-like expression created by the shape of its mouth, which has made it a popular subject for tourist selfies on Rottnest Island, its best-known stronghold. Despite that island abundance, quokkas are classified as Vulnerable overall, since introduced predators like foxes and cats have devastated the harder-to-protect mainland population over the past century.

Hippocampus kuda

The seahorse is one of the ocean's most distinctive fish, with an upright, horse-like body shape unlike almost any other fish species. Rather than swimming powerfully, it drifts through seagrass beds and coral reefs, anchoring itself in place with a flexible, prehensile tail wrapped around plant stems or coral.

Panthera uncia

The snow leopard is an elusive big cat adapted to life in the high, cold mountains of Central and South Asia — including the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, and ranges across roughly a dozen countries from Afghanistan to Mongolia — so rarely seen in the wild that it's often called the 'ghost of the mountains'.

Cephalopterus penduliger

The umbrellabird is a striking rainforest bird named for the umbrella-like crest of feathers that arches forward over its head, along with a long, inflatable wattle of feathered skin hanging from its throat. Males use both features in elaborate courtship displays, along with deep, booming calls that can carry through dense forest.

Ovis vignei

The urial is a wild sheep species native to the dry hills and mountains of Central and South Asia, recognized by the male's large curling horns.

Odobenus rosmarus

The walrus is a massive Arctic marine mammal easily identified by its long ivory tusks, thick blubber layer, and distinctive whiskered snout.

Bos grunniens

The yak is a large, long-haired bovine adapted to the extreme cold and thin air of the high Himalayan plateau, able to live at altitudes above 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) that few other large mammals can tolerate. Most yaks today are domesticated and have been kept for thousands of years across Tibet, Nepal, and the surrounding mountains as a source of milk, meat, wool, and transport, while small wild populations still survive on the remote Tibetan Plateau.