Berkeley Scientists: World In ‘Mass Extinction Spasm’
August 13th, 2008Via: NBC11:
Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just the deaths of frogs and salamanders, University of California, Berkeley scientists said Tuesday.
Researchers said substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet, the scientists said in an online article this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“There’s no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now,” said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn’t. The fact that they’re cutting out now should be a lesson for us.”
New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species, scientists said.
Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events. There have been only five in our planet’s history, until now, scientists said.
The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is happening currently, is different from the past events.
“My feeling is that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens,” Wake said.
The study was co-authored by Wake and Vance Vredenburg, research associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University.
There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started, Wake said.
It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction.
It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.
No matter what the start date, data show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.
The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline, he said.
In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on in decline.
…
The Bay Area’s back yard provides a striking example, Wake said. He and his colleagues study amphibians in the Sierra Nevada, and the picture is grim there, as well.
“We have these great national parks here that are about as close as you can get to absolute preserves, and there have been really startling drops in amphibian populations there, too,” Wake said.
Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, five are threatened.
Wake and his colleagues observed that, for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as Yosemite National Park.
This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size.
Originally, frogs living atop the highest, most remote peaks seemed to thrive, but recently, they also declined.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
The canoe went over the waterfall 10,000 years ago when agrarianism took hold. It is hilarious to see civilized people finally realizing it now. The last words of primitive cultures are usually variations of, “Excuse me, but I think you’re making a big mistake.”
This wouldn’t bug me quite as much if there was actual effort expended to create and maintain self-sustaining off-world colonies in space.
I know space exploration and affiliated boosterism is kinda out of place here, and the net result of human expansion into space would not be any kind of paradise. We’d only translate all of our current problems, writ large, to the whole solar system instead of just one planet. We’d have all the same corruption, reckless industrial production and deeds of evil men.
But as a species, that seems like one of the few sane solutions to keep anything similar to modern civilization going. There’s at least a chance, however small, to keep humanity going despite environmental collapse, Global Thermonuclear War, asteroid impacts and all the other horribly unpleasant events and consequences that can befall our species.
If the canoe did go over the waterfall 10kya, then it seems that the only way to keep going is to get off this planet. But we aren’t. And that’s a bummer.