Why is mammal extinction a problem

The IUCN hopes to raise the number of species assessments to , by It will be much shorter than the red one.

Habitat loss—driven primarily by human expansion as we develop land for housing, agriculture, and commerce—is the biggest threat facing most animal species, followed by hunting and fishing. Even when habitat is not lost entirely, it may be changed so much that animals cannot adapt.

Fences fragment a grassland or logging cuts through a forest , breaking up migration corridors; pollution renders a river toxic ; pesticides kill widely and indiscriminately. To those local threats one must increasingly add global ones: Trade, which spreads disease and invasive species from place to place, and climate change , which eventually will affect every species on Earth—starting with the animals that live on cool mountaintops or depend on polar ice. All of these threats lead, directly or indirectly, back to humans and our expanding footprint.

Most species face multiple threats. Some can adapt to us; others will vanish. If we lived in an ordinary time— time here being understood in the long, unhurried sense of a geologic epoch—it would be nearly impossible to watch a species vanish.

Such an event would occur too infrequently for a person to witness. Everywhere we look, species are winking out. Just in the past decade, two mammal species have gone extinct: a bat known as the Christmas Island pipistrelle and a rat, the Bramble Cay melomys. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists more than mammal species and subspecies as critically endangered.

In some cases, like the Sumatran rhino or the vaquita —a porpoise native to the Gulf of California—there are fewer than a hundred individuals left. In others, like the baiji also known as the Yangtze River dolphin , the species, though not yet officially declared extinct, has probably died out. And unfortunately, what goes for mammals goes for just about every other animal group: reptiles, amphibians , fish, even insects.

Extinction rates today are hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher than the background rate. The last mass extinction, which did in the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago , followed an asteroid impact. Today the cause of extinction seems more diffuse.

But trace all these back and you find yourself face-to-face with the same culprit. The great naturalist E. This time around, in other words, the asteroid is us. One way to think of a species, be it of ape or of ant, is as an answer to a puzzle: how to live on planet Earth. We are, in this sense, plundering a library—the library of life.

Instead of the Anthropocene, Wilson has dubbed the era we are entering the Eremozoic—the age of loneliness. Joel Sartore has been photographing animals for his Photo Ark project for 13 years. In an ever growing number of cases, animals housed in zoos or special breeding facilities are among the last remaining members of their species.

In some instances, they are the only members. He became the last known of his kind when a fungal disease swept through his native habitat and a captive-breeding program failed. Romeo, a Sehuencas water frog that lives at the natural history museum in Cochabamba, Bolivia, was likewise believed to be a sole survivor.

Scientists created an online dating profile for him. If we want to avert extinctions from our legacies we will need to direct conservation efforts most into areas carrying the highest debts.

But why should it matter to us if we have a few less species? The simple answer is that we are connected to and deeply dependent on other species. From pollination of our crops by bees , to carbon storage by our forests, and even the bacteria in our mouths , we rely upon biodiversity for our very existence.

We neglect this at our own peril. And of course there are equally justified arguments for keeping species based purely on their aesthetic and cultural importance, or for their own sake. Doom-and-gloom predictions tend to paralyse us, rather than jolting us into action.

So what can be done? There are wonderful examples of individuals and organisations working at both small and large scales to tackle and even sometimes turn back the tide of extinctions. There are also some compelling personal approaches, such as that of Alejandro Frid who is writing a series of letters to his daughter as a way of confronting the issues of climate change and biodiversity loss.

But what is urgently needed, of course, is radical change in society as a whole in the way it interacts with its environment. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Nobody knows how many species are being lost each year, nor the total number of species that exist.

What we have Why are species disappearing? Species loss is also compounded by: the ongoing growth of human populations and unsustainable consumer lifestyles increasing production of waste and pollutants urban development international conflict.