Are Humans the main reason of Animal’s Extinction?
According to the world counts website, around 100K species gets extinct every year. And so far, more than 50K species already got demised this year. The current rate of extinction has become 10k times to the average historical extinction rate. And humans are believed to be the main reason of their extinction.
As per the debate.org, 77% people agree that the humans are the cause of species demise and other 23% don’t agree with that fact. They believed that extinction is inevitable whether it’s done by humans or a meteor. Even humans are believed to be extinct one day. But do you really think that human made extinction was inevitable?
A research paper by a journalist named April Reese, from Townville, Australia, got published in Science Magazine. The journalist agrees with the fact that human is the real cause of species extinction. She thinks that the islands extinction could be stopped.
She writes, “Where humans tread, extinction follows.” She also gives an example of extinct flight-less bird Moa or Dinornithidae, from New Zealand. According to her, Polynesians arrived in New Zealand some 700 years ago and the reason in the demise of many creatures including Moa.
In another example, on the island of Cyprus, a cache of dwarf hippo bone found in Akrotiri site some 20 years ago by an 11-year-old boy. Bone analyzation suggests that the species got extinct some 12,000 years before, just after the humans arrived.
For humans, it’s a very and dry place which made them kill hippos. Also, you need not big tools to kill the hippos.
Not every species related to animals or birds but some are also related to Homo sapiens. Some 100k year ago, on the island of Flores already had human inhabitant: the hobbit or Homo floresiensis.
Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist from the University of Bergen in Norway, has excavated animal bones from Liang Bua cave, where the hobbit was found. At the conference, she reported finding fossils of 2-meter-tall storks, dwarf elephants, cavenging birds, giant lizards and other animals in the same geologic layer that yielded the hobbit. A few of them later got vanished. Climate change could be another reason than hunting.
Monkeys are big, easy to find can be seen anywhere. In Sri Lanka, Patrick Roberts analyzed the animals’ bones between 3000 to 36000 years old. He found three species of monkeys — the toque macaque, gray langur, and purple-faced leaf monkey — 70% to 80% population got killed by humans.
The famous Mauritius bird Dodo believed to be extinct by sailors. There are many more animals and birds species which extinction caused by humans. All these facts conclude that humans played a big part for these big losses.
There are many species which are the edge of extinction. Many doing of humans are suffering land as well as marine animals. The deforestation is become a cause of many unknown species. Some tragic accidents hurt humans as well as marine life. Like, Deepwater horizon oil spill disturbed more than 8000 species of marine life. Or more than 5 million hectares of forest cut downed or burned globally this year.
There are many animals on the edge of extinction. Within the next 15 to 40 years it is likely that the following animals will become extinct: polar bear, chimpanzee, elephant, snow leopard, tiger, mountain gorilla, orangutan, giant panda, rhino, and the koala bear. Unfortunately, these are just a few of many…,