We are animal lovers and our main concern is the extinction of species and the loss of biodiversity. So we thought of a way to raise awareness about these dangers, we came up with the idea of naming our bikini and swimsuit models and explaining with an attached card why the bikini you just bought is so named.
In 2019 we started the brand and our first collection was called Awareness, introducing 3 models: the Leatherback bikini, the Mäui Dolphin swimsuit and the Posidonia bikini.
In 2020 we continued naming the models in the same direction, and 3 more models were added: the Blue Whale bikini, the Rhino Rays bikini and the Sydney Seahorse bikini.
We always search information about this topic in the IUCN Red List to have the updated world wide information.
the SYDNEY SEAHORSE
Approximately 50 species of seahorses are found worldwide and Australian waters are home to at least 17 of them.
Seahorses are beautiful sea creatures with some remarkable adaptations, including a hard bony armor on the body, a prehensile tail (which can be used for attachment), binocular vision and excellent camouflage that causes them to change color depending on the habitat for feeding or courtship.
However, they are threatened worldwide, largely by over-exploitation for traditional Chinese medicine, unintentional capture in fish trawls and loss of natural habitats such as seagrasses, mangroves or coral reefs.
The BLUE WHALE
The Blue Whale is the largest known animal that has ever inhabited the Earth. These majestic marine mammals dominate the oceans with their 30 meters in length and up to 180 tons in weight.
Found in all the world's oceans, Blue Whales usually live alone or in pairs, although they can occasionally be seen in small groups. They usually spend the summer feeding in polar waters, to carry out prolonged migrations towards the equator as winter arrives.
Currently, Blue Whales are classified as an endangered species on the World Conservation Union's Red List due to trawling, plastic intake and marine debris.
The RHINO RAYS
Rhino Rays live in shallow tropical waters from the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans to the Eastern Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.
They especially like sandy seabeds, seagrass beds and estuaries, as they can lie in ambushes covered with sand waiting for their prey to pass. Named for its unique wedge shape, this fish is closely related to sharks.
Collectively known as Rhino Rays, this family has 16 species and includes the aptly named wedge fish and the giant guitar fish. Right now they are the most vulnerable marine families in the world! In fact, one of their species, the Mauritanian False Ray (Rhynchorhina mauritaniensis) is very close to extinction, having suffered a population decline of over 80% in the last 45 years due to marine pollution, trawling and plastic waste.
Why is it so important for us to protect species?
Healthy ecosystems depend on plant and animal species as their foundations. When a species becomes endangered, it is a sign that the ecosystem is slowly falling apart. Each species that is lost triggers the loss of other species within its ecosystem. Humans depend on healthy ecosystems to purify our environment. Without healthy forests, grasslands, rivers, oceans and other ecosystems, we will not have clean air, water, or land.
If we allow our environment to become contaminated, we risk our own health.
What's the point in saving endangered species?
In the 1990s biologists started outlining all the ways animals and plants benefit us just by being there. These benefits, which most of us take for granted, are called "ecosystem services".
Some of these services are obvious. For instance, there are plants and animals that we eat. Meanwhile, photosynthetic plankton in the sea, and green plants, provide us with the oxygen we breathe.
Coral reefs support a rich variety of beautiful organisms (Credit: Brandon Cole/NPL)
These are quite direct, but sometimes the services provided can be more subtle. Pollinating insects like bumblebees are an obvious example.
Many of our crop plants rely on these insects to produce seeds, and would not survive – let alone provide us with food – without them. This is why the decline in pollinating insects has provoked so much concern.
To understand how much we rely on ecosystem services, imagine a world where humans are the only species – perhaps in a spaceship far from Earth.
There are no plants releasing oxygen, so you have to engineer a way to make it yourself. So straight away you need a chemical processing plant on board your ship. That same plant will have to make water too.
There is also nothing to eat, so you must artificially make food. You could synthesise chemicals like sugars and fats, but making it appetising would be extremely hard. As of 2015, we can't even make an artificial burger that everyone finds convincing.
Let's not even get started on the microorganisms living in your gut, many of which are beneficial. The point is that, while we could in theory do all these things artificially, it would be very difficult. It is far easier to let the existing wildlife do them for us.
The scale of these ecosystem services, when you add them up, turns out to be extraordinarily large.
In 1997, ecologist Robert Costanza and his colleagues estimated that the biosphere provides services worth around $33 trillion a year. For comparison, they noted that the entire global economy at the time produced around $18 trillion a year.
Five years later, the team took the argument a step further by asking how much we would gain by conserving biodiversity. They concluded that the benefits would outweigh the costs by a factor of 100. In other words, conserving nature is a staggeringly good investment.
By contrast, letting species decline and go extinct looks like a bad move. A 2010 study concluded that unchecked species loss would wipe 18% off global economic output by 2050.
You may perhaps be feeling that all this talk of economics and growth is strange. It's all rather cold and heartless, without any of the love for the natural world that we were talking about earlier. Well, many environmentalists feel the same way.
Read the article here:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150715-why-save-an-endangered-species
