3/10/2024 0 Comments Scientists report 1 that creatures“It’s happening faster than organisms can respond evolutionarily,” Wagner said. This quickening pace should be cause for alarm, according to David Wagner, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, who was not involved with the report. Rapid deteriorationĮxtinctions have occurred throughout the planet’s history, but the report found that human actions threaten more species now than ever before, with the global rate of species extinction over the past 50 years already “at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.” “The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” Josef Settele, the report’s co-chair, said in a statement. A subspecies of the Javan rhino went extinct in 2011, and the western black rhino and northern white rhino are extinct in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The last known animal of this subspecies, a giant tortoise nicknamed Lonesome George, died at the Galapagos National Park in Ecuador in 2012. Since the 16th century, humans have driven at least 680 vertebrate species to extinction, including the Pinta Island tortoise. Based on these proportions, the researchers estimated that approximately 1 million animal and plant species could die out, many “within decades.” The report, which did not list individual species, found that 25 percent of mammals, more than 40 percent of amphibian species, nearly 33 percent of sharks and 25 percent of plant groups are threatened with extinction. “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” he said in a statement. Robert Watson, the panel’s chair and a professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., said evidence collected over the past five decades from roughly 15,000 scientific and government studies paints “an ominous picture.”
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