Low
The overwhelming majority of life on Earth. Harmless to humans, and frequently far more interesting for it.
Przewalski's Horse
The wild horse with 66 chromosomes, gone from the wild and then put back.
Purple Sea Urchin
A spiny kelp grazer with five teeth in a ring, whose massed feeding fronts can strip a whole kelp forest.
Pygmy Marmoset
The world's smallest monkey, small enough to fit in a human hand, gouges holes in tree bark and laps up the sap that puddles inside.
Quokka
A Western Australian wallaby with three kinds of colour cone, a permanent grin, and no fear of tourists.
Rainbow Trout
A stream fish whose sex is set by a Y-chromosome gene unrelated to any known sex-differentiating gene.
Red Abalone
A one-shell snail relative that clamps onto rock with a muscular foot and builds mother-of-pearl 3000-fold tougher than the mineral it is mostly made of.
Red Fox
Fluffy white-tipped tail, a pounce that may be aimed using Earth's magnetic field, and an omnivore's habit of eating whatever is available.
Red King Crab
A spiny crab that can reach 24 pounds and a 5-foot leg span, and can only grow by shedding its shell.
Red Kite
A deeply forked tail it steers with, relatively weak talons that keep it mostly on carrion, and an astonishing comeback in the UK.
Red Panda
Ringed bushy tail, false thumb wrist bone, and bamboo-eating acrobats in high Himalayan forests.
Red Squirrel
Double-jointed canopy acrobat that cracks a nut in seconds and buries seeds that may grow into trees.
Red-Eared Slider
Whether a slider hatches male or female depends on how warm its nest was.
Red-Eyed Tree Frog
A neon-green rainforest sleeper whose flash of scarlet eyes and bright flanks may give a predator pause long enough to escape.
Red-Lipped Batfish
A Galápagos batfish whose genus walks the seabed on modified fins.
Red-Tailed Hawk
The copper-tailed hawk whose cry voices bald eagles in TV ads.
Resplendent Quetzal
A cloud forest trogon revered by pre-Columbian cultures, whose males grow iridescent tail plumes up to 90 centimeters long.
Ring-Tailed Lemur
Black-and-white ringed tail, yoga-pose sun worship, and wrist gland scent wars.
Ringed Caecilian
A legless burrower about 40 cm long whose newborns eat their mother's skin and drink milk from her vent.
Rock Dove
A cliff bird turned city bird, fed on "pigeon milk" as a chick, and in its trained homing form able to find its way back to the loft from far away.
Rock Hyrax
A stub-tailed, rabbit-like rock climber with singing males, whose closest living relatives are elephants and manatees.
Roseate Spoonbill
The pink wader that hunts by touch, swinging a slightly open spoon-shaped bill through the shallows and snapping it shut when it contacts prey.
Ross Seal
The least-studied of Antarctica's ice-breeding seals, a loner with enormous eyes that often dives past 300 metres.
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
A metabolic dynamo that can beat its wings more than 50 times a second and cross the Gulf of Mexico in a single non-stop flight.
Sacred Scarab
A very large dung roller that shapes droppings into balls and holds heat in its thorax in flight.