Wildlife of the United Arab Emirates

The wildlife of the United Arab Emirates is the flora and fauna of the country on the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula and the southern end of the Persian Gulf.

The northern coast stretches for about 650 km (400 mi) along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf and largely consists of salt pans that extend inland.

One of these types is the sabkha, an area in which salty water has flooded the land shallowly and later evaporated, leaving crusty salt pans.

The mountains have a cooler, more temperate climate and here there is an abundance of Alpine flowers among the rocks, on slopes and in cracks, fissures and wadis.

[7] Jabal Hafeet and the nearby Wadi Tarabat are home to rare flora unique to the region, such as Acridocarpus orientalis.

The country is on the crossroads of two major migratory routes, one between the Palaearctic and Africa, the other between the Near East and the Indian subcontinent, and the migrants make use of the many types of habitat available.

About twenty to thirty percent of the world's Socotra cormorants, about 200,000 birds, breed in the United Arab Emirates, but they are under threat from fishermen who fear for their livelihoods.

[10] Waters of the Persian Gulf along Abu Dhabi holds the world's largest population of Indo-Pacific humpbacked dolphins.

[11][12][13] A large number of passerine birds breed in the deserts, salt flats, plains, dunes and mountains.

[10] Many of the large mammals found in the Arabian Peninsula were well-adapted to desert life in the harsh terrain, but were wiped out by human hunting in the last hundred years or so.

Hunting is now banned in the United Arab Emirates, but feral goats and donkeys are plentiful and graze indiscriminately, lessening the chance for the native gazelles to recover from their reduced population sizes.