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The Ili Pika Is Really Cute, and Really Close to Becoming Extinct

New photos might finally encourage people to care enough to support conservation efforts for the nearly-extinct animal.
​Image courtesy of Weidong Li

​New photos of the Ili pika—a small, tailless mammal native to northwest China—have emerged for the first time in over two decades. Given the excite​ment that pictures of the cute, round-eared critter has elicited, perhaps people will finally start to care enough to support conservation efforts for the nearly-extinct animal.

Conservationist Weidong Li first discovered the Ili pika in 1983 while on an expedition to study natural resources in China's Tianshan mountain range, according to Andrew Smith, a conservationist and biologist who has worked with Li for decades. Li managed to capture the little creature—Ili pika only grow to be about 8 inches long—and bring it to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1985, he captured two more specimen to confirm that the Ili was indeed a unique species of pika, pub​lished his findings in the journal Acta Zoologica Sinica, and named the species himself.

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Even today, Li is the only researcher in the world studying the mammal.

"He's the only person. He's the go-to guy," Smith said. "He's the only one, except for some of his assistants this year, to ever see an Ili pika alive."

Image courtesy of Weidong Li

Image courtesy of Weidong Li

Li did a few preliminary studies in the early 1990s, estimating there to be about 2,000 Ili pikas living in the mountains, but couldn't return until 2002 to observe the pika. Smith, who is also a chair at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Species, explained it is difficult for Li to tabs on the Ili population both because of its remote mountain habitat and a lack of funding for his conservation work.

"He was doing other tasks in his day job, because we all have day jobs, and he basically couldn't work on the species for about 10 years," Smith told me. "When he went back, he worked really hard and he could only find evidence of the pikas in about half of the sites that they had previously been found."

Smith said the pikas leave very obvious signs where they're living, such as easily-identifiable skat and tracks in the snow. But Li and his volunteers could only find evidence at six of the 14 sites where pikas were found a decade earlier, and they were no longer living in the area where Li first discovered the species. They didn't see any live pikas at all.

Smith and Li published the resul​ts of these surveys in the journal Oryx and, based on the dramatic decline, recommended the pika's IUCN Red List status to be changed from vulnerable to endangered. In 2008, the change was ​made.

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Last summer, Li took a team of volunteers back up to the mountains to do a new survey and, while setting up camera traps, spotted a pika in the rock face. Li was able to snap the photos that have been making the rounds online—the first images of the species in over 20 years. But while Smith said Li was excited to see a live Ili pika once again, the results of the survey were dismal: Li estimates there are fewer than 1,000 Ili pikas left in the wild.

Smith—who works closely with Li but has not been on an expedition to see the Ili pika himself—told me when they first saw that the population was declining, he and Li thought disease might be a factor, but they found no evidence.

"I think it's a combination of climate change and people," Smith explained, though he noted this was only a hypothesis. "The pikas run up to the tops of plateaus and forage. Those plateaus were not occupied 20 or 30 years ago. Now, because of overpopulation, the pastoralists have moved into these places."

Along with people come dogs, Smith said, which may be preying on the pikas and further contributing to the declining numbers.

Climate change has also altered the pika's habitat. Rising temperatures have caused the once permanent snow on the mountain to melt, forcing the pikas to higher altitudes, Li told C​NN. He's hoping to get funding and attention to establish a conservation area around the Ili pika's habitat to protect the few pikas that remain before they're gone. Smith said he hoped the striking images would help that cause.

"It's just absolutely adorable. It's really one of the flashiest pikas," Smith said. "It's a pretty incredible animal."