As we enter the Anthropocene , we are stick out on the edge of the Earth ’s sixth great extinction . Studiesearlier this yearrevealed that we are currently experiencing extinction rates 100 times higher than what would have been wait if we did n’t exist . And yet since the 1980s , according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ( IUCN ) Red List , only 799 ( a simple 0.04 % ) of the major planet ’s 1.9 million know metal money have so far been wiped out .
This low routine , accord to source of anew studylooking at spheric extinction rates , is often used by skeptics to query whether we are insert a global experimental extinction event at all . But there is a preconception from the IUCN . They broadly speaking run to pore on the groups that are well documented – in other words bird and mammalian – drop the invertebrates that calculate for 99 % of animals that live on this planet . When these are take into account , the research worker found that the real number of species to have gone extinct since the 1980sis somewhere in the region of a staggering 130,000 . The finding have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
“ We showed , based on extrapolation from a random sampling of land snail species from all over the world , and via two independent approaches , that we may already have lost 7 percentage – 130,000 extinctions – of all the animal species on Earth,”explainedRobert Cowie , research prof at thePacific Biosciences Research Centerand coauthor of two study looking into invertebrate biodiversity and extinguishing .
Thesecond study , bring out in Conservation Biology , looked specifically at the extinctions occurring in Hawaii . While it ’s well known that the species of birds in Hawaii have taken a monolithic smash , as is often the case with island residential area as they are less resilient to change , there had been no real looking at at the catastrophic loss to the rest of the biodiversity . The invertebrate communities on the island are known to be spectacularly various and indigenous , so Cowie and his squad focused on these .
Specifically , they looked at a massively various group of land snails , from the family Amastridae . To date there have been 325 metal money recorded in Hawaii since the 1600s , and yet the team were only able to witness evidence from modern surveys and criminal record that 15 were still be on the islands . They reckon that the quenching pace might be as gamey as 14 % of the fauna per decade , with this figure increase over clock time . These spectacular determination , from both subject , far outmatch the numbers reported by the IUCN Red List , often the go - to publication for preservation biologists .
Considering that it ’s thought around75%of our agricultural plants are pollinated by insects , it ’s worry that they seem to be so pretermit . These study therefore highlight a very genuine need to let in invertebrates in all future extermination rate approximation .
