Gone: a look at extinction over the past decade
A survey of twelve species lost to extinction over the past ten years.
By Jeremy Hance
www.mongabay.com
January 03, 2010 No one can say with any certainty how many species went extinct from 2000-2009. Because no one knows if the world’s species number 3 million or 30 million, it is impossible to guess how many known species—let alone unknown—may have vanished recently. Species in tropical forests and the world’s oceans are notoriously under-surveyed leaving gaping holes where species can vanish taking all of their secrets—even knowledge of their existence—with them. It is also difficult to know when a species is truly gone. Some species reappear after they were thought to be extinct for decades, sometimes even centuries. Officially, species are usually not considered “extinct” until ample time passes without a sighting, for example, fifty years. Still, with many biologists and conservationists warning that we are in the midst of a human-caused mass extinction which may prove even larger than the demise of the dinosaurs, it is important to recognize likely vanished species before we know for certain they are gone, if only to remind ourselves of our impact and our failures. Scientists have announced a number of likely extinctions (as well as extinctions in the wild) over the past ten years and here we look at twelve. The Yangtze River, extinction hotspot: The most publicized extinction over the past decade is the baiji, also known as the Yangtze River Dolphin. While the baiji’s evolution goes back 20 million years, it couldn’t survive China’s great development boom. A combination of dams, boat traffic, pollution, overfishing, and electro-fishing led to the species demise giving the baiji the dubious title of the first marine mammal to go extinct since the 1950s. The dolphin was a character in Chinese myths and was colloquially known as the ‘Yangtze River Goddess’, but none of this could save it from an economic juggernaut. But the baiji is not alone, another denizen of Yangtze may have vanished recently. …
