Tag Archives: decline

Bringing Wild Mammals to the Classroom: The MammalWeb Program

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Image Credit: Lazy Daisie, CC BY-SA 3.0, Image Cropped

There’s a certain age you hit when you just can’t name your third favourite mammal anymore. I often quietly pray that the day my kid stops asking weird questions about animal snot never comes, but I know it’s probably not far off. That eagerness to learn at a young age, especially about animals, is what ecologist Sammy Mason has managed to tap into over the last two years of her PhD.

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Rethinking Extinction

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Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, 3 years before he passed away, rendering the species functionally extinct. But should species like this be the focus of our conservation efforts?

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, 3 years before he passed away, rendering the species functionally extinct. But should species like this be the focus of our conservation efforts? (Image Credit: Make it Kenya, Public Domain Mark 1.0, Image Cropped)

Last year saw the death of Sudan, the last known northern white rhinoceros in the world. The story went viral, with the usual bemoaning of the way humans treat our planet, followed shortly by the normal rush back into anonymity for the world’s biodiversity. We are currently part of the most dramatic mass extinction event that the planet has ever seen, and more of these stories crop up every year. But is it a problem that the alarm bells are only raised when a creature hits the critically endangered level? Do we need to start paying more attention to population declines before hey hit such low numbers? And how do we even prioritise conservation efforts?

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Biological Annihilation

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The sumatran orangutan, one of many species facing extinction in the earth's sixth mass extinction event

The sumatran orangutan, one of many species facing extinction in the earth’s sixth mass extinction event (Image Credit: Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines (2017) Ceballos et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1704949114

Guest Post by Jonatan Marquez

The Crux

The rate at which species and populations have been going extinct in the last couple of centuries has well and truly earned the title of the planet’s sixth mass extinction event. However, most people rarely realize the severity of the situation. Hearing about the loss of two vertebrate species a year or having the last of some far-off species die out doesn’t see to cause much concern in the general public.

A species extinction is always preceded by population declines and extinctions. Perhaps highlighting the state of natural communities at this level might put the severity of the situation in better context. For example, the Living Planet Index (LPI) estimates that between 1970 and 2012, wildlife abundance has decreased by 58%. This paper focuses on the state and trends of populations of vertebrates by analysing i) the proportion undergoing declines or shrinkages, ii) the global distribution of population reduction events and iii) the general scale of population declines among mammal populations.

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