On the Termination of Species
By: W. Wayt Gibbs
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- Ecologists’ warnings of an ongoing mass extinction are being challenged by skeptics and largely ignored by politicians
- Robert M. May, a University of Oxford zoologist, served as chief scientific adviser to the British government, his latest estimate of the extinction rate—the pace at which species vanish—accelerated during the past 100 years to roughly 1,000 times what it was before humans showed up
- Their bias toward mammals, birds and fish—when most of the diversity of life lies elsewhere—undermines scientists’ ability to predict reliably the scope and consequences of biodiversity loss
- It also raises troubling questions about the high-priority “hotspots” that environmental groups are scrambling to identify and preserve
- Eminent ecologists warn that humans are causing a mass extinction event of a severity not seen since the age of dinosaurs came to an end 65 million years ago
- Models based on the speed of tropical deforestation or on the growth of endangered species lists predict rising extinction rates
- In the face of uncertainty about the decline of biodiversity and its economic value, scientists are debating whether rare species should be the focus of conservation
- Suggestions say we should first try to save relatively pristine—and inexpensive—land where evolution can progress unaffected by human activity
- May's claim that humans appear to be causing a cataclysm of extinctions more severe than any since the one that erased the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may shock those who haven’t followed the biodiversity issue
- Wilson cites current estimates that between 1 and 10 percent of species are extinguished every decade, at least 27,000 a year
- A 1998 survey of biologists, 70 percent said they believed that a mass extinction is in progress; a third of them expected to lose 20 to 50 percent of the world’s species within 30 years
- Lomborg suggests, project an extinction rate of 0.15 percent of species per decade, “not a catastrophe but a problem—one of many that mankind still needs to solve.”
- How severe is the extinction crisis? That depends in large part on how many species there are altogether. The greater the number, the more species will die out every year from natural causes and the more new ones will naturally appear
- We need to know three things: the natural extinction rate, the current rate and whether the pace of extinction is steady or changing
- According to paleontologist David M. Raup (then at the University of Chicago), who published some of the figures May and Wilson relied on, their calculations are seriously flawed by three false assumptions
- One is that species of plants, mammals, insects, marine invertebrates and other groups all exist for about the same time. In fact, the typical survival time appears to vary among groups by a factor of 10 or more, with mammal species among the least durable
- Second, they assume that all organisms have an equal chance of making it into the fossil record. But paleontologists estimate that fewer than 4 percent of all species that ever lived are preserved as fossils
- The third problem is that May and Wilson use an average life span when they should use a median
- Over the past 200 years, Regan figures, the rate of loss among mammal species has been some 120 times higher than natural
- Taxonomists have named approximately 1.8 million species, but biologists know almost nothing about most of them, especially the insects, nematodes and crustaceans that dominate the animal kingdom
- Generally speaking, as the area of habitat falls, the number of species living in it drops proportionally by the third root to the sixth root
- When you eliminate 90 percent of the habitat, the number of species falls by half
- The species-area theory predicts that a 50 percent reduction should knock out 16 percent of the endemic species
- The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recently estimated that from 1990 to 2000 the world’s forest cover dropped at an average annual rate of 0.2 percent
- The international conservation organization IUCN keeps “Red Lists” of organisms suspected to be extinct in the wild
- Biologists have some good theoretical reasons to fear that even if mass extinction hasn’t begun yet, collapse is imminent
Like species in the past and the ones that exist today are soon entering the fate of what happened long ago in the dinosaur age. The mass extinction is a large issue and many ecologists and scientists alike are warning us with caution that humans are unaware and ignoring on their part to help alleviate the damage they cause on the environment in which many species depend on for survival and how we also need them too to survive. When we first came to existence on this planet and as well as in the long run, we have made a serious impact on the rate of which species are vanishing more than 1000 times than what it was 100 years ago. While many are disappearing, we face the struggle to keep up in identifying species that we have lost and important ones that we need to protect by figuring out what to preserve. Knowing that we increase the extinction rate rapidly and what species are vulnerable to extinction, it raises alarms on the fact that we need to take the initiative to end this madness. If we don't start now, the possibility of 20 to 50 percent of species lost may happen in the future according to what biologists say.
I never knew how fast our species are going away and seeing how human inhabiting the planet arises complex issues is something that really gets to me. The accumulation of all the damages we done and its severity to the environment for species that needs it comes out to be very large. We have finally reached the point where we cannot continue this as it has become extremely worse. Our society is becoming more and more materialistic and we often take these precious things for granted and we don't realize that we harm our surroundings. We pay more attention to what we have rather than the species that are endangered or on the path to extinction. All in all, the respect for human race itself and to mother nature is far disconnected and efforts must be done to prevent as much as possible of many species from disappearance. We all live in a beautiful world and we only got one so why not make the best of it while we can for the current generation and the generations of the future.