Mass Extinction Of Species Has Begun

[ramonmercado]

Mass extinction of species has begun

On March 9, world-renowned environmentalist Professor Norman Myers will deliver a lecture at Macquarie University in Sydney, announcing the beginnings of the largest mass extinction in 65 million years and discussing what can be done to prevent it.

Myers argues that we are destroying the Earth’s biodiversity so rapidly that we are witnessing the opening phase of a mass extinction of species, one of only six such events in the Earth’s entire history.

Moreover, a grandscale loss of species will not be the full story, Myers says. The current biotic crisis is grossly depleting the capacity of evolution to generate replacement species within a period of less than five million years. The ecological costs and hence the economic costs could prove to be profound for a period of at least 20 times longer than humans have been humans.

Fortunately there is some better news in the form of a conservation strategy that prioritises “biodiversity hotspots” - areas with exceptional concentrations of species found nowhere else and facing exceptional threat of habitat destruction. Some 33 such hotspots - including two in Australia - contain the last remaining habitats of at least half of Earth’s land surface. We could safeguard the hotspots for as little as $1 billion per year. To put this sum into perspective, recall that the commercial value of plant-based medicines and pharmaceuticals totals at least $60 billion per year.

Professor Norman Myers is a visiting fellow of the Green College at Oxford University. He has been a senior advisor to organisations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the US White House, scientific academies in a dozen countries, and numerous Japanese corporations. Myers has publicised his work in more than 250 scholarly papers, plus 300 popular articles and 17 books (sales of these books, over one million copies).

In the late 1980s, Myers controversially estimated the rate of species extinction to be 50 species per day, compared to the “natural” extinction rate of roughly one species every 3-5 years. Although his findings were severely criticised at first, most scientists have eventually come to accept them.

Professor Norman Myers’ 2006 tour on biodiversity conservation is supported by Humane Society International’s ‘Extinction Denied’ program and the Australian Government.

Source: Macquarie University



http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=11151

 

[crunchy5]

It's not looking good is it, lets hope some funding body comes up with the dosh :cry:

 

[Mythopoeika]

Last year and this year, I have noticed far fewer birds and insects than there used to be here in the UK. I remember my childhood - there were always birds in the garden, and the air buzzed with insects. The grass was filled with grasshoppers and other creatures.
These days, it's quite scary - almost every garden is quiet. With the loss of insects, many other species will die out.
I suggest that everybody in the world allows their gardens to return to the wild, so that at least there may be somewhere where insects and birds can be safe from pesticides.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

It's not looking good is it, lets hope some funding body comes up with the dosh :cry:

Maybe they could use the bundles of notes for mulch, but what would they use for water?

 

[ramonmercado]

Trees at risk of extinction.

At least 30% of the world's tree species face extinction in the wild, according to a new assessment.

They range from well-known oaks and magnolias to tropical timber trees. Experts say 17,500 tree species are at risk - twice the number of threatened mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles combined.

Conservation groups are calling for urgent protection efforts amid threats such as deforestation, logging and climate change.

"We have nearly 60,000 tree species on the planet, and for the first time we now know which of these species are in need of conservation action, what are the greatest threats to them and where they are," said Dr Malin Rivers of the charity Botanic Gardens Conservation International in Kew, London.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58394215

 

[RaM]

I have noticed a lot less sparrows but everything else seem to be doing ok
we now see birds that we never saw when kids and the rivers are much cleaner.
We are seeing less starlings but that is likely due to campaign to cut there numbers
due to the mess they were making.
If you go into our front garden the lavender and other bushes are humming with
bees butterfly's and moths.
But I suppose it depends on were you look.

 

[Nosmo King]

I have noticed a lot less sparrows but everything else seem to be doing ok
we now see birds that we never saw when kids and the rivers are much cleaner.
We are seeing less starlings but that is likely due to campaign to cut there numbers
due to the mess they were making.
If you go into our front garden the lavender and other bushes are humming with
bees butterfly's and moths.
But I suppose it depends on were you look.

Up until a few years ago I would barely see a sparrow, but in the last couple of years I have loads of them in my garden, as well as loads of starlings, great tits, blue tits, jackdaw, blackbirds, magpies and big fat clumsy wood pigeons. Lots of swifts, red kites, buzzards, peregrine's and seagulls about too.

 

[sdoig]

Up until a few years ago I would barely see a sparrow, but in the last couple of years I have loads of them in my garden, as well as loads of starlings, great tits, blue tits, jackdaw, blackbirds, magpies and big fat clumsy wood pigeons. Lots of swifts, red kites, buzzards, peregrine's and seagulls about too.

Garden birds are doing better. (more wild patches, far more people feeding them etc)

Farmland birds, not so much.

 

[Kondoru]

Some species are increasing, some are in decline.

Just like it always has been, I expect

 

[Ogdred Weary]

A couple of years ago I read a comment on a subreddit where the poster had just done a long car journey back (a couple of days) to the town they grew up in through farming belt country and had had very few if any bugs splattered on their car. The person could recall their dad having to stop every so often to clean the dead bugs off the windscreen.

At that point I realised it hadn't seen dead insects on cars for years, possibly decades. They were common in the 80s, I remember my dad using the widescreen wipers every now and then to clean them off and you would frequently see parked cars covered in them. I think I must have still seen them into the 90s but can't recall seeing any post 2000.

I've seen the term the "windshield/windscreen effect" referred to in regards to this by scientists as an indicator of insect collapse. And I had noticed flying insects coming into the house lower dramatically in recent years, though it seemed to pick up in 2019/2020, not sure about this year. I think the EU banned nicotinoids in 2017/2018 so I don't know if it relates to that or is just coincidence, we have since left the EU and I believe the ban has been overturned.

There have been numerous studies that show insect numbers in decline, one I think from Germany, showed some species in some areas had declined by 85%. Apparently bird numbers are in decline too, which makes complete sense as insects make up a large percentage of their diet. as has been posted above insects are an important part of the food chain, and if their numbers drop precipitously then, frankly, we're fucked.

Climate change gets all the focus and can be lightening road for politics but environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity are probably even more significant, as clever as we think we are, we are still dependent on the rest of the biosphere to survive, significant changes to that will mean significant changes for us.

 

[Xanatic*]

As a kid, when trying to throw out something at a garbage can in the summer in a park, there would usually be a swarm of wasps attracted by all the ice cream wrappings and other sugary stuff inside. That is something I don't see anymore.

 

[Ogdred Weary]

As a kid, when trying to throw out something at a garbage can in the summer in a park, there would usually be a swarm of wasps attracted by all the ice cream wrappings and other sugary stuff inside. That is something I don't see anymore.

Wasps would frequently haunt bins and harass picnics as a kid, I can't recall the last time I saw this. I rarely see wasps at all now, bees and bumble bees more commonly but still less than I used to, the latter are often on the floor, looking unhealthy when they aren't actually dead.

 

[Mythopoeika]

It's definitely caused by insecticide and the type of farming that thinks a hedgerow is a bad thing.
New thinking required.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Newly published research indicates the current increase in toxic algal / bacterial blooms bears a disturbing similarity to earlier periods - especially the known mass extinctions, and most especially the End Permian Extinction (aka The Great Dying).

A Warning Sign of a Mass Extinction Event Is on the Rise, Scientists Say

f you live near a freshwater river or lake, odds are good that you have seen warning signs about harmful algal and bacterial blooms posted on its shores. Alarmingly, a new study reports that these blooms may be early indicators of an ongoing ecological disaster, caused by humans, that eerily parallels the worst extinction event in Earth’s history.

Some 251 million years ago, the end-Permian event (EPE), popularly known as the “Great Dying,” wiped out nearly 90 percent of species on Earth, making it the most severe loss of life in our planet’s history. ...

Ominous parallels of that upheaval are now showing up on Earth, according to a team led by Chris Mays, a postdoctoral researcher and palaeobotanist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. The researchers found that toxic algal and bacterial blooms during the Great Dying are similar to a recent microbial proliferation in modern lakes and rivers—a trend that has been linked to human activities such as greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon dioxide), deforestation, and soil loss. ...

The repeated correlation of these blooms with mass extinction events is “a disconcerting signal for future environmental change,” report the researchers in a study published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications. Indeed, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest we are currently in the midst of yet another mass extinction event ...

FULL STORY: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvz...xtinction-event-is-on-the-rise-scientists-say

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

---

Mays, C., McLoughlin, S., Frank, T.D. et al.
Lethal microbial blooms delayed freshwater ecosystem recovery following the end-Permian extinction.
Nat Commun 12, 5511 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25711-3

Abstract
Harmful algal and bacterial blooms linked to deforestation, soil loss and global warming are increasingly frequent in lakes and rivers. We demonstrate that climate changes and deforestation can drive recurrent microbial blooms, inhibiting the recovery of freshwater ecosystems for hundreds of millennia. From the stratigraphic successions of the Sydney Basin, Australia, our fossil, sedimentary and geochemical data reveal bloom events following forest ecosystem collapse during the most severe mass extinction in Earth’s history, the end-Permian event (EPE; c. 252.2 Ma). Microbial communities proliferated in lowland fresh and brackish waterbodies, with algal concentrations typical of modern blooms. These initiated before any trace of post-extinction recovery vegetation but recurred episodically for >100 kyrs. During the following 3 Myrs, algae and bacteria thrived within short-lived, poorly-oxygenated, and likely toxic lakes and rivers. Comparisons to global deep-time records indicate that microbial blooms are persistent freshwater ecological stressors during warming-driven extinction events.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25711-3