In this day and age many of us, as a people, focus on many public issues such as climate change and how that affects us as a general populace. Many believe that such an issue is a hoax, but indeed many publicly known issues such as climate change and land encroachment in turn affect the way that many of us live and the environments we live in today. All such issues not only affect us, but the habitats of the world and all of its contained species. According to Miller and Harley (2013), all animal's habitat and living environments include both living and nonliving characteristics with massive effects on all animal lives (p. 90). Due to the fact that an animal is affected by both living and nonliving things, it has a greater chance of becoming endangered simply because as a population we have such an amazing effect on the earth especially in today's day and The increase in species that have been added to the list of endangered animals is significant and worth an in-depth look from everyone. Sadly, such species as the snowy owl, hippopotamus, manatees, duck time -billed platypus, and orca whales have all been added to the list of endangered animals. The purpose of this paper is to inform the reader of the most important characteristics pertaining to each of the individual five animals chosen. For each animal the following things will be discussed: the important relation between the distribution of the animals, each individual specific adaptation to the respective environments, causes of the population decline, what has been done to protect the species, interesting information pertaining to the animals, and any other research done to better the knowledge of the given species. To successfully preserve the biodiversity of the earth, we must better understand the species specifically as well as all the different phenomena endangering the animals. As the World Wildlife Fund (2014) notes on their webpage; Our Work: WWF's mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on Earth.
