Lessons from the Dodo: Workshop on extinct and endangered species by Leaps and Bounds

Even though we are unaware of the total number of species that exist on this planet, we do know that human activity is soon pushing our biodiversity in a corner, inducing high extinction rates.

Last month, the students at the E-Base learnt about the realities of the state of our biodiversity. Starting off with a quick introduction to what animal populations are and how they are calculated, the students went on to learn what exactly the IUCN conservation status is about. The students teamed up to play a game where they all got chances to classify animals in India into the status they believed each of them fell under, some of them from the forest of Pench too! By the end of that entertaining session, terms like ‘least concern’ and ‘critically endangered’ no longer sounded alien to them!

Students classifying animals into different conservation statuses.

Now that they were familiarized with the conservation statuses and their calculations, it was down to answering the most common question each of them had in mind- why some species are going extinct while the others flourish in the same forest- the answer of which lies in the fact of the interconnectedness of our ecosystem. The students learned just how human actions, even the ones considered by them to be insignificant, affect our environment, and eventually our animals and their chances of survival.

Understanding the reasons for extinction of animals.

As all E-Base workshops concentrate on solutions and not the problems, this time too, students learnt about conservation efforts around the world and even small individual actions that they could take to help the conservation effort.

On a trail to understand the interconnection of the tiger and snake in a forest.