HideShark list
These animals are listed by the IUCN as Endangered or Critically Endangered — at high or extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. Some are still falling fast; a few, like the blue whale and green sea turtle, are slowly climbing back under protection.
Critically Endangered — about 10 left
The world’s smallest and most endangered marine mammal, a shy porpoise found only in the northern Gulf of California. It drowns in gillnets set illegally for the totoaba fish, whose swim bladder sells for a fortune in China.
Full vaquita guide →Critically Endangered — a few hundred to ~1,000 wild
The salamander that never grows up survives only in the polluted canals of Mexico City, even as hundreds of thousands live in aquariums worldwide.
Full axolotl guide →Critically Endangered — declining fast
Poaching for bushmeat, logging, and repeated Ebola outbreaks have killed roughly a third of all gorillas in recent decades.
Full western gorilla guide →Endangered — ~1,400 breeding adults
The world’s largest lizard is confined to five small Indonesian islands, with climate-driven sea-level rise projected to shrink its habitat further.
Full komodo dragon guide →Endangered — 3,700–5,600 wild
Down about 95% over the last century to habitat loss and poaching, though tight protection has recently lifted numbers in India, Nepal, and Russia.
Full tiger guide →Endangered (savanna) / Critically Endangered (forest)
A wave of ivory poaching plus habitat loss and conflict with farms has kept the overall population falling.
Full african elephant guide →Endangered — ~170,000–300,000
Our close relative is hit by the bushmeat trade, forest clearance, and human diseases, with the western subspecies down roughly 80%.
Full chimpanzee guide →Endangered — more than half lost in 75 years
Slow-growing and slow to mature, the biggest fish in the sea is cut down by fishing, ship strikes, and net entanglement.
Full whale shark guide →Endangered — recovering from ~99% loss
Whaling nearly wiped out the largest animal ever. Numbers are climbing slowly, but ship strikes and a warming ocean threaten the rebound.
Full blue whale guide →Endangered — many nesting beaches now increasing
Decades of beach protection and turtle-safe fishing gear have allowed populations in Hawaii, Costa Rica, and Australia to grow.
Full green sea turtle guide →Vulnerable — down-listed from Endangered in 2016
Reserves and habitat corridors lifted wild numbers by about 17% in a decade, but the population is still small and fragmented.
Full giant panda guide →Critically Endangered — down more than 80%
Prized for its large fins and physiologically fragile on the line, the biggest hammerhead has collapsed across most of its range and often dies even after release.
Full great hammerhead shark guide →Endangered — fewer than 10,000 left
The last member of its own family is squeezed by Himalayan forest loss, poaching for fur, capture for the pet trade, and distemper caught from village dogs.
Full red panda guide →Critically Endangered — ~650 breeding adults
The long-snouted, fish-eating crocodilian of India and Nepal was reduced to a few hundred animals by dams, sand mining, and fishing nets. Head-start releases are slowly rebuilding it.
Full gharial guide →Critically Endangered — likely under 500 left
The "living fossil" fish, thought extinct for 66 million years until 1938, grows slowly, has a five-year pregnancy, and lives at just a few deep sites — so accidental net capture is enough to threaten it.
Full coelacanth guide →Critically Endangered — ~55,000, down over 50% in 60 years
The largest tree-dwelling animal breeds only once every 6–8 years, so it cannot recover from the clearing of Borneo’s rainforest for oil palm, logging, and fire.
Full bornean orangutan guide →Critically Endangered — most trafficked wild mammal
All eight species are threatened. Millions have been poached in a decade for scales (plain keratin) used in traditional medicine and for meat, with seizures measured in tonnes.
Full pangolin guide →Critically Endangered — around 250, every bird named
The flightless night parrot froze instead of fleeing when cats and stoats reached New Zealand. It fell to about 50 birds in the 1990s; intensive island management has slowly rebuilt it past 240.
Full kakapo guide →Endangered — a few thousand, range down 90%+
The densest fur of any land mammal made it the target of a fur trade that killed tens of millions in a century. Wild colonies never recovered and are now squeezed by mining and grazing.
Full chinchilla guide →Endangered — around 6,600 left
Africa’s most efficient pack hunter needs vast territories, so it collapses wherever land is fenced or fragmented. Snares, road kills, persecution, and diseases from domestic dogs do the rest.
Full african wild dog guide →Endangered — one small Colombian forest
The most toxic animal on Earth has no defence against deforestation. Its entire range is a shrinking patch of Chocó rainforest being cleared for logging, farming, and mining.
Full golden poison frog guide →Critically Endangered — down to 22 in 1987
The whole species was taken into captivity to save it. Over 300 now fly free in the American West, but lead poisoning from ammunition fragments still stops the wild population from sustaining itself.
Full california condor guide →Endangered — declining across its range
This reef ray is caught deliberately and as bycatch across the tropics, its gill plates feeding the same trade that threatens sharks and mantas, and it produces only a few pups every couple of years.
Full spotted eagle ray guide →Critically Endangered — down 80%+ in three generations
Hunted for centuries for the "tortoiseshell" of its patterned scutes — Japan alone processed around two million — and still hit by egg poaching, bycatch, and the collapse of the reefs it grazes.
Full hawksbill sea turtle guide →Endangered as a family — the Yangtze giant is down to one male
Half of the leathery-shelled softshell species are threatened. The Asian giants have been eaten and farmed to the brink, and the Yangtze giant softshell — the largest of all freshwater turtles — is effectively extinct in the wild after the last known female died during a breeding attempt in 2019.
Full softshell turtle guide →Endangered — North Atlantic stock overfished
The fastest shark reproduces so slowly — females breed at nearly 20, then rest for years between litters — that longline bycatch and the fin and meat trade have driven steep global declines.
Full shortfin mako shark guide →Critically Endangered — nearly gone from the wild
The largest amphibian on Earth is farmed by the million for luxury food, yet wild surveys across huge areas now find almost none. Releases have spread disease, and the "species" is really several, at least one likely already extinct in the wild.
Full chinese giant salamander guide →Critically Endangered — recruitment down ~90–98% since 1980
Born in the Sargasso Sea and grown in Europe’s rivers, the eel is blocked by dams and turbines, hit by an introduced parasite and pollutants, and drained of its wetlands — while a vast illegal trade smuggles baby glass eels to Asian farms.
Full european eel guide →Endangered — 40,000–50,000 wild, ~60% in India
Asia’s forests have been carved into fragments too small for herds, forcing elephants onto farmland; the resulting conflict kills hundreds of elephants and hundreds of people every year, on top of poaching for ivory, skin, and calves.
Full asian elephant guide →Critically Endangered — gone from most of 90+ countries
Sawfishes are the most threatened family of marine fish. The toothed snout snags in every kind of net, and the fins, saw, meat, and oil are all traded. Northern Australia is the last real stronghold.
Full largetooth sawfish guide →Endangered — 10,000–50,000, in one country
One of our two closest relatives lives only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in a region long affected by conflict. Bushmeat hunting and forest loss drive the decline, and females breed only once every five years.
Full bonobo guide →Endangered — a 120-million-year-old lineage
A bloated, burrowing frog found only in India’s Western Ghats, and the sole survivor of a branch that split from all other frogs before the dinosaurs died out. Plantations, dams, and stream loss are shrinking its tiny range.
Full purple frog guide →Endangered — perhaps 1,000–5,000 left
The Amazon’s "river wolf" was hunted almost to extinction for its pelt and is now squeezed by forest clearance, gold-mining mercury that poisons its fish, overfishing, and dams. It is already extinct in Argentina.
Full giant otter guide →Critically Endangered — down 80%+ in three generations
A fully aquatic frog that breathes through baggy skin folds and lives only in one high Andean lake. Untreated sewage and mining pollution cause mass die-offs, and thousands are pulled from the lake to be blended into "frog juice."
Full titicaca water frog guide →Vulnerable — wild numbers down ~40% in decades
Wild Rangifer is collapsing across the Arctic. A warming climate creates rain-on-snow ice crusts that seal away the lichen, insect harassment worsens, and roads and mines fragment the vast ranges the herds need. Some herds have crashed by over 90%.
Full reindeer / caribou guide →Critically Endangered — natural spawning has nearly stopped
The largest river fish and the source of the priciest caviar. Overfishing hit a species that matures at 15–20 years and spawns every few years, then dams cut it off from its breeding rivers. The Caspian population now survives mostly on hatchery releases.
Full beluga sturgeon guide →Critically Endangered — perhaps 68–150 wild adults
One of the smallest, shyest crocodilians, squeezed out of the lower Yangtze wetlands by rice paddies and cities. It survives in a few farm ponds and reintroduction sites — while over 20,000 live in breeding centres.
Full chinese alligator guide →Endangered — locally extinct across much of the Sahel
The third-largest tortoise on Earth is vanishing from the wild to overgrazing, desertification, the pet trade, and hunting — even as millions of "sulcatas" live in captivity, where they routinely outlive their owners.
Full african spurred tortoise guide →Critically Endangered — a few square kilometres of habitat
A coin-sized, brilliant-orange Madagascan frog — the island’s independent version of a poison dart frog — that breeds in fewer than ten forest ponds, all being cleared for farms, charcoal, and mining.
Full golden mantella guide →Vulnerable — the most abundant sea turtle, still declining
The turtle behind the arribada mass nesting is the commonest sea turtle, yet it is still falling — drowned as bycatch in trawls and nets, its eggs and adults harvested, its beaches lost. Some populations have already collapsed.
Full olive ridley sea turtle guide →Critically Endangered — a "rhino ray" collapsing across its range
A harmless, shark-shaped ray of shallow tropical coasts. Its large fins fetch top prices as "white fin" for shark-fin soup, making it a target as well as bycatch. Guitarfish and wedgefish are the most threatened marine fish family after the sawfishes.
Full giant guitarfish guide →Critically Endangered — one canyon system in Madagascar
A thumbnail-sized burrowing frog, painted white, black, red, and green, that also climbs sheer sandstone. Its ~100 km² of canyon habitat is degraded by grazing, fire, and erosion, and its colours made it a pet-trade target.
Full malagasy rainbow frog guide →Endangered — fewer than ~1,000 mature individuals
A striped, termite-eating marsupial, once found across southern Australia, now down to a few pockets of Western Australian woodland after introduced foxes and cats. Fenced reintroductions are slowly rebuilding it.
Full numbat guide →Endangered — ~1,000–2,000, in one country
A near-flightless grey forest bird found only in New Caledonia. It froze rather than fled when dogs, cats, and pigs arrived; sustained predator control since the 1980s has turned the decline around, but it stays dependent on it.
Full kagu guide →Critically Endangered — the first marine fish ever so listed
A fish that walks the seabed on hand-shaped fins, found only in one Tasmanian estuary. It cannot disperse, its eggs hatch straight into walking juveniles, and an invasive seastar eats both the eggs and the sea squirts they are laid on.
Full spotted handfish guide →Endangered — more than halved in three generations
A two-metre reef fish, slow-growing, naturally rare, and sex-changing so that fishing out the big males can leave a population unable to breed. It is among the most valuable fish in the Hong Kong live-seafood trade, sometimes caught with reef-killing cyanide.
Full humphead wrasse guide →Endangered — a single pup every 2–3 years
A smaller relative of the manta with one of the lowest breeding rates of any fish. It is caught for its gill plates (sold as a tonic in southern China) and killed in huge numbers as tuna-net bycatch.
Full spinetail devil ray guide →Endangered — down 50%+ in three generations
A canopy acrobat that needs large intact forest, breeds only every ~3 years, and is a favoured hunting target for its size. Forest clearance and the pet trade (infants taken after shooting the mother) drive the decline.
Full spider monkey guide →Critically Endangered — fewer than 50 wild adults
A yellow-and-black alpine frog from one small area of the Australian Alps, with almost no resistance to the amphibian chytrid fungus. It survives mainly as several thousand frogs in zoo breeding programmes, released back into disease-proofed bogs.
Full southern corroboree frog guide →Vulnerable — a primary-rainforest specialist
The longest viper on Earth needs large tracts of undisturbed lowland rainforest, occurs at naturally low densities, and breeds slowly. It is one of the first snakes to vanish from logged or fragmented forest, and is killed on sight.
Full bushmaster guide →Critically Endangered — poached for its solid casque
Uplisted straight from Near Threatened to Critically Endangered in 2015 after demand for "hornbill ivory" exploded. Killing one breeding male dooms the whole family sealed in the nest, and its lowland forest is being logged for oil palm.
Full helmeted hornbill guide →Endangered — a river giant that breeds slowly
One of the largest freshwater fish on Earth, hit by overfishing, bycatch, dams, sand mining, and pollution across Southeast Asia. It matures late and bears only a few pups, so losses are not easily replaced. The Mekong holds a key population.
Full giant freshwater stingray guide →From ~100 in 2002 to 2,000+ — the recovery to beat
Once the most endangered cat in the world, down to about 100 animals in two pockets of southern Spain after its rabbit prey collapsed. A vast captive-breeding, rabbit-recovery, and reintroduction effort has rebuilt it past 2,000 and it was downlisted to Vulnerable in 2024 — still fragile, but the model for pulling a carnivore back from the edge.
Full iberian lynx guide →Critically Endangered — extinct in the wild since ~2009
Panama's national animal, a bright yellow toad that waves its arms to signal over the roar of its streams. The chytrid fungus swept its range in the mid-2000s; it now survives only in about a dozen zoo assurance colonies, and cannot be released while the fungus persists.
Full panamanian golden frog guide →Endangered — down ~80% since the 1980s
Uganda's national bird, one of only two cranes that roost in trees. Its shallow nesting marshes are being drained and farmed across East Africa, and it is trapped in large numbers from the wild for the ornament and status-symbol trade.
Full grey crowned crane guide →Critically Endangered — fewer than 400 pairs
One of the largest eagles alive, needing 25–100 km² of old rainforest per pair and raising only one chick every two years. The Philippines has lost most of that forest to logging and farming, and eagles are shot, trapped, and poisoned on top of it.
Full philippine eagle guide →From ~200 in the 1970s to 4,800+ today
Confined to a sliver of Brazilian Atlantic Forest, this fist-sized monkey was nearly wiped out by deforestation and the pet trade. A coordinated international zoo breeding programme and habitat restoration have rebuilt the wild population more than twentyfold, one of the great primate conservation successes.
Full golden lion tamarin guide →Critically Endangered — still declining
A starburst-shelled tortoise endemic to a shrinking corner of southern Madagascar, capable of living over a century. Tens of thousands are poached each year for bushmeat and the international pet trade, with seizures of thousands of smuggled animals made at ports and airports.
Full radiated tortoise guide →Critically Endangered — one egg at a time
An East African tortoise with a flat, flexible, hole-riddled shell that lets it wedge into rock crevices instead of relying on armour. Prized for its strange shape, it was collected from the wild for the pet trade for decades, and with females laying only a single egg per clutch, stripped outcrops do not refill. It was moved to the strictest CITES protection in 2019.
Full pancake tortoise guide →Critically Endangered — down an estimated 80% or more
Famous for forming huge daytime schools near seamounts, a habit that makes it easy to target. Its fins are highly valued in the international fin trade, and slow reproduction means depleted populations recover very slowly.
Full scalloped hammerhead shark guide →Endangered — collapsed under historic overfishing
The largest flatfish in the world was fished so intensively through the 19th and 20th centuries that wild Atlantic stocks never recovered. Slow growth and late maturity in females mean most halibut sold today comes from aquaculture instead.
Full atlantic halibut guide →Critically Endangered — an estimated 90% lost since 2013
A metre-wide, 24-armed predator that was common in Pacific kelp forests from Alaska to Baja until a sea star wasting epidemic, worsened by a marine heatwave, wiped out around 90% of them and left it functionally gone south of Canada. Without it to control sea urchins, kelp forests collapsed into barrens along much of the coast. Captive breeding and reintroduction of disease-resistant stars have begun.
Full sunflower sea star guide →Endangered — only a few thousand adults left
The sole survivor of an ancient lizard family, confined to a handful of cool forest streams in southern China and northern Vietnam. Logging, dams, water pollution, and collection for the pet trade and traditional medicine have left it fragmented and still declining.
Full chinese crocodile lizard guide →Endangered — a hummingbird from one Peruvian valley
The male has only four tail feathers, two of them wire-like shafts tipped with iridescent blue discs he swings around his body in courtship. The whole species is confined to the Utcubamba valley in northern Peru, where its forest is being cleared for farmland.
Full marvelous spatuletail guide →Endangered — fewer than 2,500 mature individuals
Asia's russet-red pack-hunting wild dog, once widespread from India to Indonesia, has been squeezed into fragments by forest loss, the collapse of its wild deer and pig prey, disease from village dogs, and persecution. It gets a fraction of the conservation attention given to the tigers it shares its forests with.
Full dhole guide →Critically Endangered — roughly 2,400 to 4,000 left, in two swamps
This small, agile, boldly speckled crocodile once ranged across Cuba and now clings on only in the Zapata and Lanier swamps. Illegal hunting for meat and interbreeding with the far more numerous American crocodile, which is genetically swamping the pure species, keep it among the most endangered crocodiles on Earth.
Full cuban crocodile guide →Critically Endangered — only a handful found per night of searching
A large, gilled relative of the axolotl that lives in one polluted Mexican highland lake and nowhere else. Sewage, siltation, water extraction, and introduced carp and tilapia have collapsed it, and a captive colony bred for generations by a convent of nuns is now one of its main safeguards.
Full lake patzcuaro salamander guide →Critically Endangered — wild numbers down about 80% in three generations
One of the largest freshwater fish on Earth, a three-metre grazer that migrates far up the Mekong to spawn. Mainstream dams now block those journeys, and with overfishing and habitat loss added on, only small numbers are encountered each year.
Full mekong giant catfish guide →Extinct in the Wild since 2009, now being bred back
A tiny toad that lived only in the spray of one Tanzanian waterfall until a dam cut the mist and chytrid fungus arrived. Around 500 were flown to US zoos just before the collapse, and tens of thousands of captive-bred toads have since been released into the gorge.
Full kihansi spray toad guide →Critically Endangered — a few thousand adults, in a few square kilometres
This rock-climbing frog lives only in a handful of fast streams on the slopes of Table Mountain, right above Cape Town. Reservoirs, thirsty invasive pines and wattles, too-frequent fire, and heavy foot traffic all reduce or foul the year-round flow its torrent tadpoles need.
Full table mountain ghost frog guide →Critically Endangered — low thousands, on a few small islands
A brilliant green, white-banded iguana of Fijian dry forest, most of it now on one sanctuary island, Yadua Taba. Fire and clearing have destroyed most of that forest, goats browse the regrowth, and rats, cats, and the invasive green iguana prey on or threaten to hybridise with it.
Full fiji crested iguana guide →Wild population: one bush on a sea stack
A hand-sized flightless phasmid eaten to extinction on Lord Howe Island by shipwreck rats, then rediscovered in 2001 as about 24 adults under a single shrub on Ball's Pyramid. It survives mainly in captive colonies bred from a handful of founders; a 2019 rat eradication has reopened the path home.
Full lord howe island stick insect guide →The largest amphibian on Earth, now all but gone from the wild
A flattened, skin-breathing river salamander that reached nearly two metres. Decades of harvesting for luxury food emptied the rivers, and a farming boom now threatens the last pure animals with genetic swamping from mixed farm stock. It was only recognised as a distinct species in 2019.
Full south china giant salamander guide →Critically Endangered — many spawning aggregations gone
Once the most important reef food fish in the Caribbean, the Nassau grouper gathers by the thousand at a few traditional reefs on the winter full moons to spawn. Fishing those predictable aggregations removed the breeding adults faster than they could be replaced, and dozens of sites no longer form.
Full nassau grouper guide →Down to a few hundred, almost all on one island
One of the largest frogs in the world, eaten to scarcity as a Caribbean delicacy, then hit by a volcano that buried half its range and by the chytrid fungus, which killed more than 85% of the survivors within months. It hangs on mainly through captive colonies and release trials on Montserrat.
Full mountain chicken frog guide →The whole species: one shrinking mountain forest
A candidate for the smallest reptile on Earth, described only in 2021 and known from a single patch of montane rainforest in northern Madagascar that is being cleared for farming. A species confined to one site with no known populations elsewhere is Critically Endangered almost by definition.
Full pygmy leaf chameleon guide →Critically Endangered, and the most distinct bird on many lists
A quail-like Australian grassland bird that is the sole survivor of an ancient lineage, so losing it would erase a whole branch of the bird family tree. Most of Australia's temperate native grassland has been ploughed or over-grazed, leaving only hundreds to low thousands of mature birds.
Full plains-wanderer guide →The rarest sea turtle; nearly all nesting on one beach
The smallest sea turtle, and the one that came closest to extinction. Egg collection and drowning in shrimp trawls cut its nesting from an estimated 40,000 females in a day in 1947 to a few hundred by the mid-1980s. A bi-national rescue rebuilt it into the thousands, then the recovery stalled after the 2010 Gulf oil spill.
Full kemp's ridley sea turtle guide →From 15 birds in 1941 to around 830 today
The tallest bird in North America fell to a single flock of about 15 as its wetlands were drained and it was shot on sight. Seventy years of captive breeding, costume-reared chicks, and even aircraft-led migration have rebuilt the wild Wood Buffalo to Aransas flock past 500, but every bird descends from those 15 survivors, so the species carries very little genetic diversity and still breeds too slowly for a fast recovery.
Full whooping crane guide →Critically Endangered — long stuck near 100 wild adults
One of the rarest frogs on Earth, and for years its entire wild population bred at a single Mississippi pond. It needs open, fire-swept longleaf pine forest with gopher tortoise burrows to hide in, beside shallow fish-free ponds, and almost none of that landscape survives. It is kept going by prescribed burning, hand-dug ponds, and zoo-reared tadpoles, and its plight reached the US Supreme Court in a 2018 fight over critical habitat.
Full dusky gopher frog guide →Critically Endangered — one of Asia's most threatened turtles
A bizarre turtle of cold Asian mountain streams, with a head too big to pull into its shell and a long tail it uses to climb boulders and waterfalls. It has been trapped in enormous numbers for the Chinese food and medicine trade and is one of the most expensive turtles in the international pet market, while its headwater streams are dammed and polluted. A slow-breeding animal in an accessible, shrinking habitat, it is now bred in captivity as a hedge against extinction.
Full big-headed turtle guide →Critically Endangered — around 100 to 260 fish, in one pool
The whole species lives in a single sunlit pool in a Nevada desert cavern, feeding and spawning on a rock shelf the size of a couple of table-tennis tables, the smallest natural range of any vertebrate. Groundwater pumping for farms nearly drained the shelf in the 1970s until a US Supreme Court ruling limited it, and the fish is now counted individually by divers twice a year, with a full-scale replica pool built nearby to hold a backup population.
Full devils hole pupfish guide →Critically Endangered — palm-sized, and North America's smallest turtle
A turtle small enough to sit in your hand, with a bright orange patch on each side of its neck, that lives only in shallow, sunny, spring-fed wet meadows in two separate pockets of the eastern United States. Its exact habitat is rare and shrinking, as bogs are drained or grow over with shrubs, and the turtle has been stripped from whole sites by poachers for the international pet trade. It matures at eight years, lays two to five eggs a year, and cannot cross dry land to recolonise, so a lost population is gone for good.
Full bog turtle guide →Endangered as a family — the Hainan gibbon is down to about 40
The small, tree-swinging "lesser apes" of Southeast Asia are the most threatened family of apes, with almost every species Endangered or Critically Endangered as rainforest is cleared for oil palm and rubber, cut into fragments too small to swing through, and gibbons are hunted and taken as pets. The Hainan gibbon of a single Chinese forest, at roughly 40 individuals in a handful of family groups, is the rarest ape and one of the rarest mammals on Earth.
Full gibbon guide →Critically Endangered — thought extinct, then found alive in 1980
Known only from fossil bones and presumed extinct for thousands of years after predators were introduced to its island, this tiny toad turned up alive in a remote Mallorcan mountain gorge in 1980, one of the most celebrated amphibian rediscoveries ever made. Confined to a handful of gorges and still threatened by introduced snakes, captive breeding has moved it from freefall toward a cautious recovery.
Full mallorcan midwife toad guide →It is the highest risk category on the IUCN Red List before Extinct in the Wild. It means a species faces an extremely high probability of extinction in the wild in the near future, based on population size, decline rate, and range.
The axolotl and the western gorilla are both Critically Endangered. The axolotl’s wild population may be only a few hundred animals in a single lake system, though it is abundant in captivity.
Yes. The blue whale, green sea turtle, and giant panda are all examples of species that were pushed to the brink and are now slowly increasing thanks to sustained legal protection and habitat work.