Survey Finds "Bleak Picture" for World's Mammals

[bcbm]

Survey Finds 'Bleak Picture' for World's Mammals


By Juliet Eilperin (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/email/juliet+eilperin/)
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 6, 2008; 10:38 AM


BARCELONA -- A quarter of the world's wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here this morning.


The new assessment -- which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries five years to complete -- paints "a bleak picture," leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996.


"Mammals are definitely declining, and the driving factors are habitat destruction and over-harvesting," said Jan Schipper, the paper's lead author and the IUCN's global mammals assessment coordinator.
The researchers concluded that 25 percent of the mammal species for which they had sufficient data are threatened with extinction, but Schipper added the figure could be as high as 36 percent because information on some species is so scarce.

More... (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/06/AR2008100600641.html?hpid=moreheadlines)

[MarxSchmarx]

What do you take away from this?

I think what wasn't elaborated upon in the article was the potential that mammals are "canaries in the coal mine", so-called "indicator species" for the shape of things to come. This I think is very distressing and needs to be taken seriously. I'm sure the original authors paid lip service to this, but they probably didn't follow it up.


Personally, for better or for worse, alarmist articles like this are designed to pull on people's heartstrings rather than provide insight into the state of global conservation efforts. Moreover, I think they are problematic, because people get fired up over primates and big cats but when they realize conservation efforts go to understory shrubs and beetles they feel cheated.


This isn't to say that mammalian conservation is unimportant, or that such research isn't valuable. Far from it. It's just that the journalistic representation of this work, and how the scientists are pitching it, isn't very well thought out.

Furthermore, as far as the scientific merits are concerned, I remain agnostic. Most mammalian extinctions won't really affect how most ecosystems function. Moreover, I personally don't find them very interesting, as rodents make up the bulk of mammal "species", and the only reason they are so "speciose" is because their rapid reproductive rates are conducive to divergence. Thus, such species-level comparisons (as opposed to, say, trophic level comparisons) are uninformative and, I would argue, scientifically uninteresting.

As for "Over-harvesting"?

This affects maybe 1~2% of mammals. What the hell am I going to do with the pelt of the Nova Scotian kangaroo rat?

In all seriousness, habitat destruction, sure, but what organism isn't affected by habitat destruction?