Extinction is forever, said the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization some decades ago.
Today, extinction is no longer a buzzword. It is already the rule rather an exception.
In the latest Red List of International Union for the Conservation and Nature (IUCN), which was released last September, it was reported that an additional 26,000 species are threatened with extinction today – out of the 27% of all assessed species around the world.
Currently, about 1.8 million species of plants and animals, both large and microscopic, are known to science. Some scientists claim that the actual number is greater by a factor of at least 10.
Of the number of species threatened with extinction, 41% are amphibians, 5% mammals, 34% conifers, 13% birds, 31% sharks and manta rays, 33% corals and 27% selected crustaceans.
Why am I interested with extinction? There are many reasons but one this is sure: I won several awards on the subject. The first time was when I bagged the second prize in the Science and Technology Journalism Awards from the Philippine Press Institute for a five-series on the country’s vanishing wildlife species.
The second time was for my article on dwindling fish supply, which earned me a trophy from the Globe Media Excellence Awards given by the telephone company. My two-part series on Davao’s endangered species (Philippine Eagle and waling-waling) got me a Sarihay Award (from two words, “sari-saring buhay,” Tagalog term for biodiversity) from the Foundation of Philippine Environment.
When I came to the United States recently, one of the magazines I bought was Popular Science which tried to explain 100 mysteries of science.
“What caused the extinction of megafauna?” That was one of the mysteries being tried to decipher.
If you are still wondering what megafauna is, it refers to “any animal weighing more than 100 pounds.” Examples include glyptodons, huge armadillo-like mammals the size of a Volkswagen Beetle; ground sloths weighing up to 9,000 pounds and reaching 20 feet in length; and megalodons, 50-foot sea creatures that would have dwarfed the largest great white shark (remember the movie, Meg).
Scientists came up with two theories why megafauna, which thrived for millions of years, vanished from our planet: human intervention (overhunting, that is) and climate change (which is the current buzzword among environmentalists).
“Archaeologist K. Kris Hirst offers a more likely scenario for the extinction of megafauna – that combined forces are responsible,” the magazine explained. “Animals that were not able to adapt to Earth’s changing, colder temperature died out. Additionally, colder air may have pushed human populations to migrate, upsetting the predator-prey balance. Easy targets were killed off, or the presence of new pathogens led to extinctions.”
Another question: “Can we clone extinct animals?”
This inquiry reminds me of the movie, Jurassic Park. “It’s looking more and more likely that scientists will be able to resurrect some lost members of the animal kingdom through cloning,” the magazine said.
Forget dinosaurs – it is not first on the list. The most likely: mammoth. “Mammoths are unusually good candidates for resurrection,” it said. “Although they have been extinct for thousands of years, their northerly habitat means that numerous mammoth bodies have been found entombed in ice.”
Although freezing damages DNA, “Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology has developed a technique for salvaging viable DNA from long-frozen mice. The mammoth team has adapted this method to extract undamaged nuclei from mammoth egg cells.”
Scientists say, however, there’s a lot of work still to do!
Now, let’s talk about human beings. “Will disease drive us all to extinction?” the magazine asked.
“Scientists attempt to determine the extinction-threatening effects of disease by first studying its role in historical extinctions,” the magazine said. “But proving that infectious disease is responsible for past extinctions is tricky business. After all, the extinct species is not at hand for scientific investigation. Additionally, even if a pathogen or parasite were discovered in a disappearing population, it would not prove that the pathogen itself was responsible for the decline.”
Now hear this! “Emerging diseases such as Ebola, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and H1N1 influenza have wreaked worldwide societal havoc and resulted in tens of millions of deaths. Reemerging infectious diseases, which appear in new places or in drug-resistant strains, also pose a significant threat to human life. Among these diseases are dengue virus, West Nile virus, and even cholera, which affects 3 to 5 million each year and causes more than 100,000 deaths annually – despite the existence of a safe and effective vaccine.”
