Wish I Was Lion, But Big Cats Are Threatened By The Sixth Extinction
More signs that the sixth mass extinction is upon us, and being caused by us, this time based on the decline of the world’s lions. This article by Chris Mooney at The Washington Post highlights a truly alarming statistic: In the past 60 years, thanks to hunting, elimination of prey animals, and habitat loss, lion populations have been reduced from ~500,000 to less than 35,000. That’s more than a 90% decline!
What will it take for us to notice, and to actually do something about it? This question has been on my mind a lot lately. Problems like extinction and climate change, while rapid in the “eyes” of the Earth, are frustratingly gradual to us short-sighted humans. Incidentally, if Earth did have eyes, they’d be attached to this “face”.
Mass extinctions don’t happen the way many might think, with species being extinguished – poof– just like that, like some sort of faunal rapture. On the scale of human lifespans, extinctions are drawn out, species usually fade with a fizzle, not a bang. That’s still lightning quick in terms of geologic and evolutionary time. The Anthropocene extinction and climate change are creeping, glacial threats, powerful enough to reshape the planet, but so slowly as to be imperceptible.
Most of the time, anyway. Berkeley biologist Anthony Barnosky is quoted in Chris’ article as saying ”We have killed about 50 percent of the world’s vertebrate wildlife in just the past 40 years. We’ve killed half the numbers of individuals. We’ve fished 90 percent of the fish out of the seas.” I’d say that’s pretty “perceptible”, wouldn’t you?
Unfortunately, it’s not just Earth’s Best Species™ like lions and pandas that are threatened. Amphibians, marine life, and plants are in even greater danger, and for some reason it’s hard for people to care as much about a clam or a salamander as they do a mighty predator, despite the fact that both are important members of Earth’s ecosystems. I mean, I can imagine a world without pandas. But a world without, say, honeybees? Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck summed up that scenario way back in 1901 (emphasis mine):
You will probably more than once have seen her fluttering about the bushes, in a deserted corner of your garden, without realizing that you were carelessly watching the venerable ancestor to whom we probably owe most of our flowers and fruits (for it is actually estimated that more than a hundred thousand varieties of plants would disappear if the bees did not visit them), and possibly even our civilization, for in these mysteries all things intertwine.
The point is, when it comes to the cathedral of nature, the keystone isn’t always at the top of the arch.
If you’d like to learn more about the coming (or more likely, current) Sixth Mass Extinction, check out this video:
Also check out Mass Extinction: Life At The Brink, a series airing this week on the Smithsonian Channel (details and airtimes here).
(Lion image via Wikipedia/fortherock)