Direct killing by humans pushing Earth’s biggest fauna toward extinction
At least 200 species of large animals are decreasing in number and more than 150 are under threat of extinction, according to new research that suggests humans' meat consumption habits are primarily to blame.
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Leatherback sea turtle [Credit: Oregon State University] |
"Direct harvest for human consumption of meat or body parts is the biggest danger to nearly all of the large species with threat data available," Ripple said. "Thus, minimizing the direct killing of these vertebrate animals is an important conservation tactic that might save many of these iconic species as well as all of the contributions they make to their ecosystems."
Ripple and colleagues in the College of Forestry were part of an international collaboration that built a list of megafauna based on body size and taxonomy -- qualifying for the list were species unusually large in comparison to other species in the same class.
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Whale shark [Credit: Oregon State University] |
"Those new thresholds extended the number and diversity of species included as megafauna, allowing for a broader analysis of the status and ecological effects of the world's largest vertebrate animals," Ripple said. "Megafauna species are more threatened and have a higher percentage of decreasing populations than all the rest of the vertebrate species together."
Over the past 500 years, as humans' ability to kill wildlife at a safe distance has become highly refined, 2 percent of megafauna species have gone extinct. For all sizes of vertebrates, the figure is 0.8 percent.
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African elephants [Credit: Oregon State University] |
Nine megafauna species have either gone extinct overall, or gone extinct in all wild habitats, in the past 250 years, including two species of giant tortoise, one of which disappeared in 2012, and two species of deer.
"In addition to intentional harvesting, a lot of land animals get accidentally caught in snares and traps, and the same is true of gillnets, trawls and longlines in aquatic systems," Ripple said. "And there's also habitat degradation to contend with. When taken together, these threats can have major negative cumulative effects on vertebrate species."
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Chinese giant salamander [Credit: Oregon State University] |
"Preserving the remaining megafauna is going to be difficult and complicated," Ripple said. "There will be economic arguments against it, as well as cultural and social obstacles. But if we don't consider, critique and adjust our behaviors, our heightened abilities as hunters may lead us to consume much of the last of the Earth's megafauna."
Collaborators included Christopher Wolf, Thomas Newsome and Matthew Betts of the College of Forestry, as well as researchers at the University of California Los Angeles and in Australia, Canada, Mexico and France.
Author: Steve Lundeberg | Source: Oregon State University. [February 06, 2019]
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