WOULD the animal have made it into the ark? That鈥檚 the kind of question conservationists have been asking when it comes to the thorny issue of picking which threatened species to save.
Kerstin Zander of the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, and her colleagues looked at conserving cattle 鈥� the species with the most number of breeds to have gone extinct. They turned to an approach first outlined by economist Martin Weitzman at Harvard University.
In the 1990s, Weitzman devised a formula for prioritising species for conservation. This considers the cost of saving a species, how useful or genetically diverse it is, and the increase in its chance of survival if chosen.
Advertisement
Zander鈥檚 team applied the formula to the Borana breeds of east Africa. They found that the cattle would be best preserved by saving the Ethiopian breed, rather than those in Somalia and Kenya (Ecological Economics, ). That鈥檚 partly because the Ethiopian cattle are at most risk of extinction, but also because herders were willing to work towards conservation.
鈥淏orana cattle would be best preserved by saving the Ethiopian breed: herders want to conserve it鈥�
The aim is to figure out where money would make a difference, says co-author Karin Holm-Muller of the University of Bonn in Germany. 鈥淚f a cattle breed is not at risk, or if there is no chance of changing anything, don鈥檛 put money into it.鈥�
