If you’re a conservationist, you are probably aware of the Red List of threatened species that is produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). I have posted about it numerous times. You can search the blog for those posts. Just enter IUCN in either search tool.
If you are a supporter of fish conservation, you probably also know about the fish preservation program called Conservation, Awareness, Recognition and Responsibility, Encouragement and Education, and Support and Sharing…or CARES for short. So, how does the IUCN Red List relate to CARES? The CARES risk classifications page explains. As a keeper of CARES cichlid species, this subject is important to me.
CARES utilizes the Red List classifications and, in fact, may defer to those classifications as its own. This is where dependence upon the Red List for decision making and, subsequent, dependence on CARES classifications can become problematic.
In my previous post about the IUCN, I lamented the fact that some Red List data is woefully out-of-date. A friend of mine and fellow hobbyist, Peter George, recently posted on his own site that the Red List is not only out-of-date but grossly inaccurate.
If you want more information about his views on the Red List, specifically with respect to African cichlids, check out his post The Sixteen Year Silence: Why the IUCN has not updated African cichlids since 2010.