conservationArticle Free Pass
- The pathology of extinction
- Rates of natural and present-day species extinction
- How many species are there?
- Calculating background extinction rates
- Recent extinction rates
- Calculating relative rates of extinction
- Predicting future rates of extinction
- Factors that cause extinction
- Which species are most vulnerable to extinction?
- Rates of natural and present-day species extinction
- Preventing the loss of biodiversity
Recent extinction rates
To what extent has modern human activity increased extinction rates above the background rate? This discussion presents five well-known case histories of recent extinctions. From them, some general features can be deduced about recent extinctions that also provide clues to the future.
Polynesians reached such remote Pacific islands as the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, and Easter Island—Earth’s last habitable areas for settlement—within the past 2,000 years. Over that period they left unambiguous evidence that their activity caused many species of birds to become extinct. The bones of many species persist into, but not through, archaeological layers that also contain evidence of human presence. No species is known to have disappeared in the longer intervals before first contact. The Polynesian settlers likely ate the large, probably unwary, and often flightless species. They also introduced pigs and rats to islands far too remote to have acquired native land mammals (see invasive species). The rats also would have found the native birds, their eggs, and their young to be easy pickings, and the pigs would have destroyed the ground cover of the forests. With only Stone Age technology, the settlers may have exterminated as many as 2,000 bird species, some 17 percent of the world total. Locally, they often exterminated all the bird species they encountered.
In the Hawaiian Islands, for example, scientists have described 43 species only from their bones, a number that has increased as new extinct species have been discovered. Because bird bones are fragile and easily destroyed, all the extinct species may never be found. Nevertheless, the number that remain unknown can be calculated.
Suppose that every Hawaiian bird species that survived to be collected by naturalists since the 1800s were also found as bones. In that case, one would say that the bone record is complete. On the other hand, if only half the species that survived to modern times were also known from bones, one would know that the record is half complete. If this second case were true, then, by extension, only half the species that became extinct by modern times should be known from bones. Half turns out to be about right—scientists have estimated 40 unknown species, for a total number of extinctions of 83.
The British explorer James Cook found the Hawaiian Islands and their Polynesian settlers in 1778. With the peace that followed Great Britain’s defeat of France in 1815, Cook’s descriptions of whaling opportunities in the region led to increasing contact with Europe and North America. New colonists not only depleted the whales but also introduced cattle and goats to the islands for food. Like pigs, these alien herbivores destroyed native plants and greatly reduced natural habitats. Naturalists of the time described 18 bird species that did not survive this onslaught, so the total count of extinctions rises to 101. This still is an underestimate, because the 19th-century naturalists missed some species. On Molokai, for example, they recorded hearing a rail, but there is no specimen of it.
On the Hawaiian Islands today there remain a dozen species that are so extremely rare that the chances of saving them are poor; some may already be extinct. Another dozen species are rare and have uncertain futures. Of the estimated 136 bird species that lived on the islands before human settlement, only 11 are common enough to suggest that their future is secure.
If such estimates are expanded across the eastern Pacific, it will appear that the Polynesians exterminated 500–1,000 species of birds. But it is also possible to take a different approach, one that considers what species should occur on every island in the group. Rails, for example, seem very adept at reaching even such remote islands as Henderson and Lisianski. Where scientists have searched for bird bones, they have found fossil rails. It seems likely that every sufficiently large island probably housed a unique species of rail. Most of these islands, but not the Hawaiian Islands, which were likely too remote, also housed unique species of doves and parrots, most of which are now extinct. Even before small-bodied species are counted, such studies suggest that Polynesians exterminated at least 1,000 species of birds. Some scientists put the number at 2,000 or even more.
The Polynesian and European colonizations of the Pacific exterminated species other than birds, of course. The Hawaiian Islands have 980 native plants. Of these, 84 are now extinct, and another 133 have wild populations that number fewer than 100 individuals each. It may never be known how many other species were exterminated as the Polynesians cleared land for their crops and likely burned dry forests.
In the 20th century, misguided individuals on a number of the Pacific islands introduced an African land snail, Achatina fulica, for food. It became a pest. So, like the song about the old woman who swallowed a fly, and then a spider to catch it, and so forth, a predatory snail, Euglandina rosea, was released to control the Achatina. The predatory snail preferred native Achatinella and Partula snails instead, driving many species to extinction.
There is nothing special about the islands of the Pacific that makes their animals and plants prone to extinction. The most famous recent extinction of all, the extermination of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) by humans and their introduced animals, was one of 33 species of birds, 30 species of land snails, and 11 species of reptiles lost from Mauritius, Rodrigues, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean in the past three centuries. Over the same period, St. Helena and Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean lost 36 species of land snails as a result of human activity. These island extinctions raise an obvious question: Are extinctions predominantly on islands and not continents? Although the disappearance of island species does demonstrate a pattern of sensitivity to becoming extinct, the next example shows the answer to the question above to be “no.”
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