After the killing of Zimbabwe's Cecil the lion, and another lion yesterday, I did some research and what I found out is a major, decisive condemnation of the human race. Humans' downward slide is alarmingly fast-paced and more outrageously impactful than I thought just few hours ago. No joking here, we humans need to be on the couch for lengthy and frequent therapy sessions to correct our idiocy and in-depth ignorance of the world around us, our planet and all of its creatures....We need to have it drilled into our psyche what animals mean to the planet and our collective human responsibility toward them.
Please read below two short recent scientific findings re:
- The 69 mammal species that have gone extinct over the past century, along with some 400 other types of vertebrates, including birds, fish, and amphibians, and
- The tens of thousands of African elephants slaughtered every year by poachers for the coveted ivory in their tusks.
Hussein
A man-made mass extinction?
Earth is on the verge of a mass extinction, the sixth of its kind in the planet’s 4.5 -billion–year history, and it’s all humanity’s fault. That is the troubling conclusion of a new study in the journal Science Advances, which found that over the past century,
69 mammal species have gone extinct, along with some 400 other types of vertebrates, including birds, fish, and amphibians. Such a loss would normally be expected over a period of 100,000 years. Within two generations, scientists say, 75 percent of the species we know today could be killed off. Earth has seen five previous mass die-offs—the last one, about 66 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs. But while those past extinctions were triggered by natural disasters, such as asteroid impacts or volcanic eruptions, scientists say this latest die-off is different. That’s because pollution, deforestation, and climate change resulting from human activity are what’s killing species now. Humanity would be hurt by such an epic loss of biodiversity, because we rely on the crucial ecological services provided by the planet’s animals and insects, such as crop pollination by bees. “People think nothing bad will come from species loss, because scientists can’t predict exactly how many need to go extinct before the world collapses,” study co-author Gerardo Ceballos tells CNN.com. “The problem is that our environment is like a brick wall. It will hold if you pull individual bricks, but eventually it takes just one to make it suddenly fall apart.”Saving elephants with dung
Every year,
poachers slaughter tens of thousands of African elephants for the precious ivory in their tusks. Authorities have long struggled to identify the hunters and smugglers behind the bloody international ivory trade, or pinpoint exactly where the elephants are being killed. But now, NPR.org reports, wildlife biologists have a new weapon to fight poaching: The pachyderms’ own droppings. Researchers analyzed DNA from dung samples collected over the course of 15 years to create population maps of elephants across Africa. The team then took DNA from ivory confiscated in Asia and Europe and compared it with genetic material from the dung to determine where the ivory originated. Surprisingly, nearly all of the ivory came from just two areas: Tridom, which spans part of Gabon, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic; and two game reserves in Tanzania and Mozambique. “By focusing on these major hot spots,” says the study’s leader, Sam Wasser, “we can stop a major portion of the killing.”
And here is an additional article outlining the possibility that African elephants could be extinct in wild within decades:
