When is a protected butterfly no longer protected? The answer seems to be when it gets in the way of big business interests, or so a recent case in the USA indicates. The US Fish and Wildlife Service decided in mid-March that part of a mountain containing federally protected butterflies could be bulldozed as long as other areas were maintained in perpetuity for conservation purposes.

The series of IUCN Red Data Books on mammals, birds and reptiles is familiar to many people interested in conservation. The latest publication breaks new ground, being the first volume on animals without backbones, the invertebrates. Of all living things, the invertebrates have received least attention from conservationists, perhaps because they are often inconspicuous or poorly known. Governments and international organisations generally take an interest only in those relatively few species considered to be man’s enemies, the pests and disease carriers. The usefulness to man of many invertebrates is rarely emphasised, yet shrimps and lobsters are the bases of important fisheries, many invertebrates have potential medical use, and others, like earthworms and pollinating insects, play vital ecological roles. Conservation organisations also give the group a low priority, perhaps worried that the pandaloving public will withdraw its support if donations are seen to go to spiders, snails and other lowly animals.

In 1977£78 the Royal Geographical Society sent one of the largest expeditions it has ever mounted to Sarawak to study and survey the newly gazetted Gunung Mulu National Park. The expedition was carried out with the full cooperation of the Sarawak Government particularly the Forest Department under whose care the National Parks in Sarawak reside. Over a period of 15 months 115 scientists spent 10,000 man-days in this wonderfully rich area: over 2500 plants have been identified, 60 mammals, including the world's smallest, Savi's pygmy shrew, over 260 birds, including all Borneo's eight hornbill species, and 320 fish. Insects may number 12,000 species and fungi over 8000.

The Barbary macaque Macaca sylvanus has been listed in the IUCN Red Data Book since 1975. This monkey is the only African non-human primate found north of the Sahara and the only member of its genus found outside Asia. It originally ranged throughout most of North Africa but its present and restricted distribution is the result of centuries of human interference and incursions into the once widespread primaeval habitats where it was common. It is now confined to a few pockets in Morocco and Algeria where it is threatened by further habitat destruction as well as hunting.

In April 1982 Israeli conservationists released a test herd of Asiatic wild ass Equus hemionus into the central Negev Desert basin of Makhtesh Ramon as the first step in restoring this species into the wild. The five males are being closely monitored to determine how well they adjust to their freedom and if no serious problems are encountered they will be joined by females.

The long-sought decision made by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1982 to ban all commercial whaling after 1985 does not mean that conservationists can relax, confident of a safe future for the whales. The IWC was a source of anger or despair for conservationists for the first three decades of its existence according to Dr Sidney Holt who here describes its successes and failures, its reforms and near break-ups. It could, even now, if the 1982 decision is not upheld, preside over the near extinction of Bryde's and minke whales as it did of the blue and humpback whales. Dr Holt is hopeful for the future but insists that we must take the current threats to whales and seals seriously: pollution of several kinds; the unsound basis of scientific advice; commercial fisheries that regard some cetaceans as pests; and the utilitarianism that governs so many of our dealings with the natural world. He makes a plea for the preservation of these animals, not for their direct use to us as a source of food or foreign exchange, but because ‘they can gently and profoundly please us and help us know ourselves’. The following is a shortened version of the author's address to the Society at its AGM in October 1982; Dr Holt is Vice-Chairman for marine matters of IUCN's SSC, Marine Consultant to the ffPS and scientific adviser to the Seychelles delegations to IWC and CITES.

In the half million hectares of the remote El Tuparro National Park, on the Venezuelan frontier, the abundant wildlife includes the Orinoco crocodile and a good population of the endangered giant otter. Hitherto access to the park has been poor, and the only people are a few settlers and Indians hunting with bows and arrows, but new roads are bringing in both new settlers and vehicle drivers with guns.

The destruction of tropical forests is perhaps one of the most widely discussed conservation problems of our time. But still scientists know relatively little about the ecosystem as a whole and, more specifically, little about the effects of, for example, selective logging on other forest species. The author, investigating the response of primates to logging in West Malaysia, discovered that, although logging initially causes mortality, the populations of the species he studied all recovered rapidly if the forest was left to regenerate.

In Oryx, October 1981, Huang Chuchien described the serious plight of China’s endemic alligator which had disappeared from most of its historic range and had been listed as a First Class Protected Animal. Earlier that year the author had joined him and other scientists to make a more complete study of the animal, to which ffPS contributed £100. The results of the study suggest that the alligator will perhaps only continue to exist in the wild for a few more years. The main hope for their conservation lies in alligator farming.

Ladakh, a remote region of India lying between the Himalayas and Tibet, is ethnically and geographically distinct from the rest of the country. Because of its isolation, change came later to Ladakh than to other parts of the Himalayas, but recent years have seen the familiar pattern of social change, human population increase, tourism and rural development beginning to affect the environment. The authors, jointly and individually, made a series of visits to the area to investigate the status of the wildlife and to look at conservation measures.

The endemic marine iguanas of Galapagos are in severe danger of extinction on some islands. Predation by introduced cats, dogs, pigs and rats is one cause but the first findings of Andrew Laurie's three-year field study, which started in 1981, show that the situation is more complicated.

When the Monito gecko was first discovered in 1974 on Isla Monito in the Caribbean it was apparently threatened by introduced rats. In 1982 a survey by the authors showed that the species is indeed rare and is restricted to two small areas of the tiny island but further work is needed to establish the reasons; the rats are the most obvious, but as yet unproven, cause. Meanwhile the gecko has been listed as endangered by the USA. This alone will not help but it is a start in the conservation of the species.

In 1979 there was only one national park in the forested Amazon region of Brazil. In that year Brazil adopted a conservation plan for the Amazonian region, proposed in 1976 as part of a system of conservation units for the whole country. Since then a further four national parks and a number of biological reserves and ecological stations have been established. The plan, which gives priority to ecosystem protection, takes the geographic diversity of plant species into consideration but not that of the fauna. The authors examine the effectiveness of the plan in protecting the primate families Callitrichidae, Callimiconidae and Cebidae and suggest how it could be adapted by recognising the importance of rivers, which limit the distributions of many primate species and subspecies as well as those of many other mammals, birds and plants.

The wildlife of southern Sudan is profuse and diverse but its potential for tourism is scarcely developed. Its conservation is hampered by fuel shortages and the inaccessible nature of the country, and heavily armed poachers have slaughtered large numbers of elephants for ivory. The author, who visited the country in 1982, reports on the conservation work that is being carried out despite the problems.

Rodrigues, the smallest of the three Mascarene islands, is in immediate danger of losing most of its native vegetation due to the activities of man and introduced cattle and goats. The endemic fauna has mostly disappeared, leaving two endangered land birds and a fruit bat, and most of the plants may soon follow: seven native species are known only from five or fewer individuals. The author visited Rodrigues for two weeks in June and July 1982 with the Director of the Conservatoire Botanique of Stangalarch, Brest, France, in an effort to locate and propagate many of the rare species.

The Selous contains a wealth of animals but monitoring the populations is difficult because motorable tracks are few and aerial surveys are expensive. The author gained access to the heart of the reserve along its rivers and during a 12-day raft journey he recorded the large animals he saw. He was impressed by the pristine condition of the riverside habitat and he found no evidence of poaching there.

Mahogany ranks as one of the world's finest timbers and it will probably be commercially extinct by 1990. The dramatic decrease in trade of true mahogany as well as a switch to previously untapped resources since the early 1970s reflects a general pattern of over-exploitation of tropical rainforests. The lack of mahogany cultivation and a move into other, unrelated mahoganylike, primary rain forest hardwoods, such as meranti and red lauan, emphasises an inevitable and irreversible decline for many hardwood forests. The authors give a summary of historical and current trade patterns in mahogany as part of a pilot study initiated and sponsored by ffPS in 1982.