Welcome to the next mass extinction event

[Bob Of Burleson]

Stanford biologist warns
of early stages of Earth's
6th mass extinction event

By Bjorn Carey
Stanford.edu

Elephants and other large animals face an increased risk of extinction in what Stanford Biology Professor Rodolfo Dirzo terms "defaunation."

The planet's current biodiversity, the product of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary trial and error, is the highest in the history of life. But it may be reaching a tipping point.

In a new review of scientific literature and analysis of data published in Science, an international team of scientists cautions that the loss and decline of animals is contributing to what appears to be the early days of the planet's sixth mass biological extinction event.

Since 1500, more than 320 terrestrial vertebrates have become extinct. Populations of the remaining species show a 25 percent average decline in abundance. The situation is similarly dire for invertebrate animal life.

And while previous extinctions have been driven by natural planetary transformations or catastrophic asteroid strikes, the current die-off can be associated to human activity, a situation that the lead author Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of biology at Stanford, designates an era of "Anthropocene defaunation."

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[Bob Of Burleson]

No returning to Eden:
researchers explore how to restore
species in a changing world

University of Otago

Reversing the increasing rate of global biodiversity losses may not be possible without embracing intensive, and sometimes controversial, forms of threatened species management, according to a University of Otago zoologist and colleagues writing in the leading international journal Science.

In a review article appearing in today’s edition, Professor Philip Seddon and his co-authors examine the growing role that ‘conservation translocation’, which is the movement and release of plants and animals to re-establish new populations, is playing in efforts to combat biodiversity loss.

The researchers write that the traditional goals of “having self-sustaining wildlife populations within pristine landscapes untouched by human influence” are “increasingly unobtainable”.

They instead suggest that creating ‘wildness’ rather than restoring ‘wilderness’ is the most practical way forward. This ‘rewilding’ approach may involve translocations to restore ecological processes, such as predator-prey interactions, within landscapes shared by humans and wildlife.

Reintroduction of species previously indigenous to an area has been the most widely applied type of translocation, but Professor Seddon says reviews of reintroduction outcomes have shown generally low levels of success.

. . .

Conservation introduction can also involve assisted colonisation, where species are moved outside their range to prevent extinction due to threats in their native habitat.

“Examples of this include moving native birds, such as kakapo to predator-free offshore islands to protect them from exotic predators in mainland habitat. Other such efforts include establishing a facial cancer-free colony of Tasmanian Devils on Maria Island off the coast of Tasmania.”

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[Grassman]

I thought ivory hunters were to blame?

[GFB]

None of the nonsense like global warming has shown to be of any interest to people, so time for the usual suspects to dream up some kind of "UBER doomsday"....yawn.

[BigTex]

How many species came and went before man showed up and invented global warming?

[GFB]

How many species came and went before man showed up and invented global warming?

Oh..zero..definitely..everything was going perfectly until we showed up.