Dear EarthTalk: What is the population status of Africa’s large mammals, such as elephants, lions, rhinos, and hippos? Are they all headed for extinction?

--Elias Corey, Seattle, WA

Overall, the variety and abundance of wildlife in Africa, as elsewhere around the world, is shrinking fast as human population grows and encroaches ever more on once wild and pristine landscapes. While illegal hunting (known in Africa as “poaching”) still runs rampant despite government crackdowns, the spread of logging and agriculture contributes even more to the decline of many species of large mammals.

African Wildlife Killed for Products

The population of the continent’s biggest mammal, the African elephant, has declined by more than 99 percent since the 1930s, when as many as 10 million of the great creatures roamed free there. At last count, biologists estimated that only about 600,000 elephants are left in all of Africa.

Elephant populations are thriving in areas of southern Africa, thanks to massive government conservation efforts, including a ban on the ivory trade as part of the 144-nation strong Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which limits trade in wild animals and their parts and accords varying degrees of protection to more than 33,000 species of plants and wildlife.

Ban on African Ivory Helps Elephants, Hurts Hippos

Africa’s hippopotamus population is also suffering, partly because of the very ban on ivory. Bullied out of the ivory trade, many African poachers have turned to hippo teeth, which measure as long as 24 inches and have become a valuable substitute for ivory.

A 2003 census of the hippos of Virunga National Park in the African Republic of Congo, for example, found only 1,300 animals, down from an estimated 29,000 in a previous count three decades earlier. In neighboring Burundi, another recent census found that two thirds of that country’s hippo population—some 200 animals—had disappeared in just a five-year period.

As for rhinos, only 10,000

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