USTRALIA AND OUR close neighbour Indonesia have been warned they are ranked among the top three countries in the world for numbers of has drawn upon data from the Red List of Threatened Species, maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), to create a ranking of those nations with the highest number of threatened species. Although the perils facing Australia’s animals are well known (see , AG 171), this new perspective reinforces how diabolical the situation is on a world stage. Loss of habitat is the major issue facing the fauna of both Australia and Indonesia. Numbers of threatened species in Australia are high across all major vertebrate groups – mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians – as well as molluscs. But our insect numbers (statistic includes all other invertebrate species) topped the world, with 412 species at risk in Australia, compared with 347 in each of the USA and the Philippines (which rank second and 10th respectively) for total number of threatened species.
