The sixth 'great extinction' is upon us, and we're to blame, study says
Digital Reporter
Sunday, December 14, 2014, 3:41 PM - The Earth has lost up to 90% of its species five times in the past 450 million years -- and now, it's happening again.
A study published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, reveals that a staggering 41% of all amphibians on the planet currentlly face extinction while 26% of mammal species and 13% of birds are also threatened.
Many of the world's species are already critically endangered and close to fully disappearing, including the Sumatran elephant, Amur leopard and mountain gorilla. But now it appears that animals currently rated as merely being endangered -- such as bonobos, bluefin tuna and logerhead turtles, for example -- face a similar fate.
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In each case, the finger of blame points mainly at human activities.
"Among the groups that can be assessed, amphibians stand out as the most imperilled: 41% face the threat of extinction, in part because of devastating epidemics caused by chytrid fungi," says Richard Monastersky in a cover story published on Nature.com. "Large fractions of mammals and birds face significant threats because of habitat loss and degradation, as well as activities such as hunting."
Authors point out that the loss of species, means a loss of pollinators -- which is a real problem since 75% of food crops rely on insects if they're going to thrive.
“Habitat destruction, pollution or overfishing either kills off wild creatures and plants or leaves them badly weakened,” said Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist at the World Monitoring Centre in Cambridge in an interview with The Guardian. “The trouble is that in coming decades, the additional threat of worsening climate change will become more and more pronounced and could then kill off these survivors.”
The problem, according to Nature, is exasperated because of major gaps in scientists' knowledge about the planets biodiversity.
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Studies that try to tally the number of species of animals, plants and fungi alive right now produce estimates that swing from less than 2 million to more than 50 million. The issue is that researchers have so far sampled only a sliver of Earth’s biodiversity, and most of the unknown groups inhabit small regions of the world, often in habitats that are rapidly being destroyed.
In the end, however, the data indicate that the world is heading mercilessly towards a mass extinction -- unsettlingly-named Anthropocene, or the age of the humans -- which is defined as one involving a loss of 75% of species or more. According to researchers, this could arrive in less than a hundred years or take a thousand, depending on extinction rates.
Source: Nature
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