Deep-sea mining threatens more than half of the molluscs reliant on hydrothermal vents on the seabed, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said Thursday.
IUCN said 62 percent of endemic hydrothermal vent molluscs – 125 out of 201 species known worldwide – "are at risk of extinction due to deep-sea mining for valuable minerals", in an update to its Red List of Threatened Species.
The Red List – which assigns threat levels ranging from "least concern" to "extinct" – includes 175,909 species, up from 172,620 in the previous edition.
It has 49,505 listed as threatened with extinction, up from 48,646 last time.
Found only at depths down to 5,000 metres below sea level, around vents spewing water that can exceed 450C, the threatened molluscs include snails, limpets, mussels, clams and chitons.
Many of them have only been discovered in the past 10 years, "and already face extinction due to human disturbance of their habitat", said IUCN.
The Swiss-based organisation said exploration of the seabed created sediment plumes that smothered the animals, affected their ability to absorb nutrients.
These molluscs "are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups, at a critical moment for their future", said Julia Sigwart from the IUCN mollusc specialist group.
She underlined that IUCN voted in 2021 for a moratorium on deep-sea mining unless the marine environment is effectively protected.
"Life on Earth has adapted to survive in the most hostile and unusual habitats, such as deep-sea molluscs that live around extremely hot vents," warned IUCN chief Grethel Aguilar.
"Now as pressures on biodiversity mount across the planet, even the creatures with the most ingenious survival strategies are under threat."
Desert rain frog
The organisation also shone a light on the desert rain frog, a species popular on social media, which burrows itself into the sand.
It has been moved from the "near threatened" to "vulnerable" – one step worse on the scale – owing to diamond mining and energy infrastructure developments along the west coast of South Africa and Namibia.
Without conservation action, the population is expected to decline by 20 percent in the next decade, it added.
Meanwhile the status of Australia's numbat – a small marsupial also known as the banded anteater – has improved from "endangered" to "near threatened".
There are now thought to between 2,000 and 3,000 of the animals, up from just a few hundred in the 1970s, thanks to captive breeding and protection measures.
"Long-term, strategic and collaborative conservation effort works," insisted John Woinarski, the co-chair of IUCN's Australasian marsupial and Monotreme specialist group.
"Without it, invasive cats and foxes will continue to drive Australia's small marsupials and native rodents to extinction." – AFP
