This is such depressing news from “Nature” that I just didn’t feel like posting it. I’ll have more depressing news about primates in a later post. BTW, the information for the letter-writing campaign to Congress to urge them to influence Rwandan President Kagame to end his support of the rebel Nkunda in Congo is behind the Wildlife Direct tab above.
The Guardian (U.K.) reports on a new study published in the journal “Nature” that indicates the model used for predicting species extinction is flawed, and we will lose important species much sooner than previously thought.
Endangered species could become extinct 100 times faster than previously thought, scientists warned yesterday in a bleak reassessment of the threats to global biodiversity. They say methods used to predict when species will die out are seriously flawed and dramatically underestimate the speed at which some will disappear.
The findings, presented in the journal Nature, suggest that animals such as the western gorilla, the Sumatran tiger and Malayan sun bear, the smallest of the bear family, may become extinct much sooner than conservationists had feared.
The researchers who presented the study are Assistant Professor Brett Melbourne of CU-Boulder and Professor Alan Hastings of the University of California, Davis. CU-Boulder’s press release reads:
Assistant Professor Brett Melbourne of CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department said current mathematical models used to determine extinction threat, or “red-listed” status, of species worldwide overlook random differences between individuals in a given population. Such differences, which include variations in male-to-female sex ratios as well as size or behavioral variations between individuals that can influence their survival rates and reproductive success, have an unexpectedly large effect on extinction risk calculations, according to the study.“When we apply our new mathematical model to species extinction rates, it shows that things are worse than we thought,” said Melbourne. “By accounting for random differences between individuals, extinction rates for endangered species can be orders of magnitude higher than conservation biologists have believed.”
You can read a blog post on the “Nature” Web site about this important new study and listen to a very good podcast, as well.
We are running out of time to change our ways, people. Sit up and pay attention.
s.
Filed under: endangered species, primates, wildlife conservation Tagged: | extinction, Mountain gorillas, sun bears
that is VERY depressing.