- Many scientists are beginning to be grateful that they won't be around to see many species disappear off of the Earth
- Extinction rates within the past 100 years have increased about 1,000 times more since humans appeared
- Biologists and conservationists tend to be biased towards mammals, birds, and fish when most biodiversity is elsewhere. Environmental groups are also working hard to find high-priority "hotspots"
- Three arguments are used to persuade politicians to care more about the environment, however none are compelling enough
- Some scientists believe that instead of endangered species or threatened hotspots, saving evolution is more important
- Many scientists before 2000 believed that a very very high number of species would go extinct by the year 2000. Ecologists’ warnings of an ongoing-mass extinction are being challenged by skeptics and largely ignored by politicians.
- It is hard to know how fast species are disappearing. Models based on the speed of tropical deforestation or on the growth of endangered species lists predict rising extinction rates. But biologists’ bias toward plants and vertebrates, which represent a minority of life, undermine these predictions. Because 90 percent of species do not yet have names, let alone censuses, they are impossible to verify.
- The IUCN has a list of animals thought to be extinct, 60/87 mammals and 33/92 freshwater fish were confirmed
- Credible guesses of how many species on Earth range from 5-15 million excluding microorganisms
- About 1.8 million species have been named however scientists know very little about them. Sometimes when one specie go extinct, they take other species with them.
- For every species falsely presumed absent, however, there may be hundreds or thousands that vanish unknown to science.
- Taxonomists have named approximately 1.8 million species, but biologists know almost nothing about most of them, especially the insects, nematodes and crustaceans that dominate the animal kingdom.
AUTHOR'S POINT:
Determining if there will be a mass extinction is the question throughout this article. There were many predictions and reasoning through what people thought how mass extinction would be. One prediction was that species lose their last member each year and one million will be extinct by 2000. Another prediction is that 15-20 percent would die off by 2000. To find when the mass extinction to happen, you have to find the natural extinction rate, current rate and whether the pace of extinction is steady or changing. Two people, Robert M. May and E.O Wilson had their own way of finding the current rate. Scientists used the idea of species-area relation, saying that as area of habitat falls, number of species living in it drop. Scientists believe the solution to preventing mass extinction is by saving evolution itself.
MY THOUGHTS:
I think that finding rates of extinction and the reason why is something all the scientists need to collaborate on. Scientists in this article are disagreeing with each other and are stating reasons why they're wrong, instead of finding the rates of extinction. This is why no one knows the current rate of extinction. I think finding the rate of extinction will help us big time in finding when mass extinction will happen. Reading this article helped me realize that extinction isn't happening at a high rate and a way to stop mass extinction and the rate in which species will become extinct is to preserve evolution.
So what?
Finding the current rate of extinction is hard to do, but if we do find it we can find when the next mass extinction will happen, predict the rate in which species will become extinct and how to protect the species.
What if...?
The current extinction rate is always changing? Will we be able to find out why it will always change and can we find a way to stop the changing rate?
Says Who?
W. Wayt Gibbs
Robert M. May- Oxford Zoologist
Ross D. E. MacPhee- curator of mammalogy
Kevin Higgins-Of University of Oregon
Woodruff-Ecologist at University of California at San Diego
What does this remind me of?
Playing strategy games with my friends since all we do is argue and point out the flaws in plans, which does not solve the problem or get anything done.