More bad news about this place we call home.
Some 40 years ago, I told students studying historical geology and paleontology that we were most likely a cause of the sixth mass extinction event. “Yep. Look around. This is what a mass extinction event looks like unless it’s caused by a giant comet or asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere to strike the surface. Yep. Species have always come into and gone out of existence, but every so often a bunch die out in a relatively short period. This is one of those periods.”
Of course, others had noted the possibility that the modern human age was an Age of Extinction. Some even acted to prevent extinctions, thus the list of endangered animals and the reintroduction of wolves and bison into Yellowstone. To use an old and rarely heard expression from the textile industry, we humans don’t cotton to other species sharing our planet. Oh, we say we do want them around. It’s nice to see little bunnies and deer frolicking in the forest or lions lying in the zoo, but we have our needs; we have our priorities. And when it come to choosing between those needs and priorities and bunnies and deer, well, suffice it to say, “Run Bambi, run.” (“But not onto the highway”)
In January, 2022, Robert H. Cowie, Philippe Bouchet, and Benoit Fontaine published “The Sixth mass Extinction: Fact, fiction, or speculation?” * In their research they studied invertebrates, you know, critters like snails and slugs. And what they found speaks, as they say, volumes about the current state of extinction. Cowie and company estimate that over the last 500 years between 150,000 and 260,000 such mollusks have died out. Sure, there are the those well known critters like the Dodo and the Elephant Bird, the Wooly Mammoth, the zebra-like Quagga, the African Black Rhino, and the once superabundant Passenger Pigeon that kicked the bucket, but biodiversity includes all life-forms, including the lowly snails and slugs. The researchers place the blame on you, well, not just you, but all the critters like you because, they say, “humans are the only species able to manipulate the Earth on a grand scale, and they have allowed the current crisis to happen.”
And in a related article published within days of Cowie et al.’s research, Evan C. Fricke, Alejandro Ordonez, Haldre S. Rogers, and Jens-Christian Svenning noted a decline in long-distance seed dispersal as the result of “defaunation.” ** Because about half of plant species depend on animals for seed dispersal, the loss of animals affects where plants can grow. As some places cool and others warm, plants adapted to specific climate parameters survive only by growing elsewhere. Otherwise, like the animals they depended upon, they, too, go extinct.
Seems there’s bad news all around. If you aren’t worried about a persistent virus, you now have to concern yourself with decreased biodiversity. Should we all move to Mars where we haven’t as yet destroyed any life-forms? We could start over, mend our ways, not kill off whatever “passenger pigeons” we find there the way we killed some 3 to 5 billion such birds in North America in just a few hundred years.
Well, scratch that idea. Remember the announcement President Clinton made when the the meteorite AlH84001 was thought to have a trace of fossilized Martian life? Apparently, it doesn’t according to Andrew Steele. *** The organic molecules found in some Martian meteorites and the very tiny “fossil” found in the Allan Hills meteorite that made the news in a press conference, appear now to be the product of abiotic synthesis. It’s not life that was there and became extinct. It’s organic chemistry in a marriage between water and minerals. If there ever was life on Mars that became extinct, we still have to find evidence for it. So, when humans get to the Red Planet, they won’t have another ecology to destroy.
Is that the good news?
*Biological Reviews; open access, online: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12816 Accessed January 13, 2022.
**The effects of defamation on plants’ capacity to track climate change. Science, Vol. 375, No 6577., 13 Jan 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abk3510. Online at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk3510. Accessed January 13, 2022.
***Phys.Org. Carnegie Institution for Science. Online at https://phys.org/news/2022-01-martian-meteorite-materials-biological-geochemical.html. Accessed January 13, 2022.
Some 40 years ago, I told students studying historical geology and paleontology that we were most likely a cause of the sixth mass extinction event. “Yep. Look around. This is what a mass extinction event looks like unless it’s caused by a giant comet or asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere to strike the surface. Yep. Species have always come into and gone out of existence, but every so often a bunch die out in a relatively short period. This is one of those periods.”
Of course, others had noted the possibility that the modern human age was an Age of Extinction. Some even acted to prevent extinctions, thus the list of endangered animals and the reintroduction of wolves and bison into Yellowstone. To use an old and rarely heard expression from the textile industry, we humans don’t cotton to other species sharing our planet. Oh, we say we do want them around. It’s nice to see little bunnies and deer frolicking in the forest or lions lying in the zoo, but we have our needs; we have our priorities. And when it come to choosing between those needs and priorities and bunnies and deer, well, suffice it to say, “Run Bambi, run.” (“But not onto the highway”)
In January, 2022, Robert H. Cowie, Philippe Bouchet, and Benoit Fontaine published “The Sixth mass Extinction: Fact, fiction, or speculation?” * In their research they studied invertebrates, you know, critters like snails and slugs. And what they found speaks, as they say, volumes about the current state of extinction. Cowie and company estimate that over the last 500 years between 150,000 and 260,000 such mollusks have died out. Sure, there are the those well known critters like the Dodo and the Elephant Bird, the Wooly Mammoth, the zebra-like Quagga, the African Black Rhino, and the once superabundant Passenger Pigeon that kicked the bucket, but biodiversity includes all life-forms, including the lowly snails and slugs. The researchers place the blame on you, well, not just you, but all the critters like you because, they say, “humans are the only species able to manipulate the Earth on a grand scale, and they have allowed the current crisis to happen.”
And in a related article published within days of Cowie et al.’s research, Evan C. Fricke, Alejandro Ordonez, Haldre S. Rogers, and Jens-Christian Svenning noted a decline in long-distance seed dispersal as the result of “defaunation.” ** Because about half of plant species depend on animals for seed dispersal, the loss of animals affects where plants can grow. As some places cool and others warm, plants adapted to specific climate parameters survive only by growing elsewhere. Otherwise, like the animals they depended upon, they, too, go extinct.
Seems there’s bad news all around. If you aren’t worried about a persistent virus, you now have to concern yourself with decreased biodiversity. Should we all move to Mars where we haven’t as yet destroyed any life-forms? We could start over, mend our ways, not kill off whatever “passenger pigeons” we find there the way we killed some 3 to 5 billion such birds in North America in just a few hundred years.
Well, scratch that idea. Remember the announcement President Clinton made when the the meteorite AlH84001 was thought to have a trace of fossilized Martian life? Apparently, it doesn’t according to Andrew Steele. *** The organic molecules found in some Martian meteorites and the very tiny “fossil” found in the Allan Hills meteorite that made the news in a press conference, appear now to be the product of abiotic synthesis. It’s not life that was there and became extinct. It’s organic chemistry in a marriage between water and minerals. If there ever was life on Mars that became extinct, we still have to find evidence for it. So, when humans get to the Red Planet, they won’t have another ecology to destroy.
Is that the good news?
*Biological Reviews; open access, online: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12816 Accessed January 13, 2022.
**The effects of defamation on plants’ capacity to track climate change. Science, Vol. 375, No 6577., 13 Jan 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abk3510. Online at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk3510. Accessed January 13, 2022.
***Phys.Org. Carnegie Institution for Science. Online at https://phys.org/news/2022-01-martian-meteorite-materials-biological-geochemical.html. Accessed January 13, 2022.
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