Bee on Wet Orange Dahlia wallpaper
New Study Has Bad News for Mammals: One in Four Faces Extinction
Conservationists have taken the first detailed look at the world’s mammals in more than a decade, and the news isn’t good.
“Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide,” the team led by Jan Schipper of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland, concluded.
“We estimate that one in four species is threatened with extinction and that the population of one in two is declining,” the researchers said in a report to be published Friday in the journal Science. The findings were being released Monday at the IUCN meeting in Barcelona, Spain.
“I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children,” Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview.
“How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world’s mammals,” said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report.
“Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live,” added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. “We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives.”
The IUCN describes itself as the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network. It is made up of more than 1,000 government and nongovernment organizations and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries. The research for the report took five years and involved more than 1,700 scientists around the world.
The report updates the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species, which overall includes 44,838 species, of which 16,928 are threatened with extinction. Of these, 3,246 are in the highest category of threat, critically endangered, 4,770 are endangered and 8,912 are vulnerable to extinction. The IUCN estimated that 76 mammal species have gone extinct since 1500.
While the new report estimated that one-in-four mammals is threatened with extinction, the actual numbers listed were 1,141 out of 5,487 species. That comes out to 20.8 percent, closer to one in five.
However, the researchers noted that there were several hundred species about which they don’t have enough data to classify. They believe that the lack of information about those animals indicates that they exist in such small numbers that many could be endangered, raising the total to 25 percent or higher, Smith explained.
Because they need larger home ranges the larger mammals, including our relatives the apes and monkeys face a bleaker future then smaller animals. Habitat loss like deforestation is dominating factor in the decline of many species Illegal hunting and trading of rare animals are also factors threatening species, and climate change is affecting species in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
Space rock found on collision course with Earth
For the first time, astronomers have found an object on a certain collision course with Earth. Fortunately, it is so small it is not expected to cause any damage, burning up in the atmosphere somewhere above northern Sudan in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. It may, however, produce a brilliant ‘shooting star’.
The space rock, dubbed 2008 TC3, was first spotted on Monday in a survey by the Mt Lemmon Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.
Scientists seemed to imply there would be a predictable spike in the number of people claiming to see weird stuff going on in our atmosphere as the space rock shattered. Good to know that our ability to see and predict these things will give us enough time to either call Bruce Willis to the rescue or say goodbye to each other if a big enough rock heads our way.
John’s statements on how he would finance his changes to health care have changed several times. McCain to Finance Health Care Plan With Medicare Cuts
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