Birdwatchers have noticed the skies are particularly lacking swifts this year, a summer migrant that is declining at an increasing rate – 51% over 20 years but 25% in the five years to 2015.
Swifts are usually seen in 38% of the bird sightings logged with the British Trust for Ornithology in early June. This year they account for just 31%.
Our creepy crawlies may have unsettling looks but they lie at the foot of a wildlife food chain that makes them vitally important to the makeup and nature of the countryside. They are “the little things that run the world” according to the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, who once observed:
“If all humankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
Time is running out in the tropics: Researchers warn of global biodiversity collapse
dohboi wrote:
How about where you live?
Humanity Has Killed 83% of All Wild Mammals and Half of All Plants: Study
Bird Species Collapse in the Mojave, Driven by Climate Change
Animals are going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 faster than you’d expect if no humans lived on Earth.
Sixty percent of primate species, our closest relatives on the tree of life, are threatened with extinction.
At least half of the world’s killer whale populations are doomed to extinction due to toxic and persistent pollution of the oceans, according to a major new study.
Although the poisonous chemicals, PCBs, have been banned for decades, they are still leaking into the seas. They become concentrated up the food chain; as a result, killer whales, the top predators, are the most contaminated animals on the planet. Worse, their fat-rich milk passes on very high doses to their newborn calves.
PCB concentrations found in killer whales can be 100 times safe levels and severely damage reproductive organs, cause cancer and damage the immune system. The new research analysed the prospects for killer whale populations over the next century and found those offshore from industrialised nations could vanish as soon as 30-50 years.
Among those most at risk are the UK’s last pod, where a recent death revealed one of the highest PCB levels ever recorded. Others off Gibraltar, Japan and Brazil and in the north-east Pacific are also in great danger. Killer whales are one of the most widespread mammals on earth but have already been lost in the North Sea, around Spain and many other places.
The new research, published in the journal Science, examined PCB contamination in 351 killer whales, the largest analysis yet. The scientists then took existing data on how PCBs affect calf survival and immune systems in whales and used this to model how populations will fare in the future.
“Populations of Japan, Brazil, Northeast Pacific, Strait of Gibraltar, and the United Kingdom are all tending toward complete collapse,” they concluded.
Until they were recognized as highly toxic and carcinogenic, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were once used widely. Their production was banned in the United States in 1978, though they are still produced globally and persist in the environment. Persistent organic compounds, like PCBs, magnify across trophic levels, and thus apex predators are particularly susceptible to their ill effects. Desforges et al. looked at the continuing impact of PCBs on one of the largest marine predators, the killer whale. Using globally available data, the authors found high concentrations of PCBs within killer whale tissues. These are likely to precipitate declines across killer whale populations, particularly those that feed at high trophic levels and are the closest to industrialized areas.
Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.
The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.“We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” ... “If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.”
- Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF
“This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is,” he said. “This is actually now jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not a ‘nice to have’ – it is our life-support system.”
“We are rapidly running out of time,” said Prof Johan Rockström, a global sustainability expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “Only by addressing both ecosystems and climate do we stand a chance of safeguarding a stable planet for humanity’s future on Earth.”
... "Earth is losing biodiversity at a rate seen only during mass extinctions"
Measured by weight, or biomass, wild animals today only account for four percent of mammals on Earth, with humans (36 percent) and livestock (60 percent) making up the rest.
“We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it.”
... "A century ago, only 15 per cent of the Earth's surface was used by humans to grow crops and raise livestock," he said.
"Today, more than 77 per cent of land—excluding Antarctica—and 87 per cent of the ocean has been modified by the direct effects of human activities.
"It might be hard to believe, but between 1993 and 2009, an area of terrestrial wilderness larger than India—a staggering 3.3 million square kilometres—was lost to human settlement, farming, mining and other pressures.
"And in the ocean, the only regions that are free of industrial fishing, pollution and shipping are almost completely confined to the polar regions.
I find much of that assertion to be incredible. The wilderness of the world is not destroyed by just one road through it's center and the shipping lanes in the ocean have been long establish as are the productive fishing grounds. Those grounds are being over fished but there is no point in expanding to the rest of the oceans area as most of it has always been pretty barren to begin with.vox_mundi wrote:... "A century ago, only 15 per cent of the Earth's surface was used by humans to grow crops and raise livestock," he said.
"Today, more than 77 per cent of land—excluding Antarctica—and 87 per cent of the ocean has been modified by the direct effects of human activities.
"It might be hard to believe, but between 1993 and 2009, an area of terrestrial wilderness larger than India—a staggering 3.3 million square kilometres—was lost to human settlement, farming, mining and other pressures.
"And in the ocean, the only regions that are free of industrial fishing, pollution and shipping are almost completely confined to the polar regions.
vtsnowedin wrote:I find much of that assertion to be incredible. The wilderness of the world is not destroyed by just one road ...
Foreign trawlers and an expanding fishmeal industry are increasingly threatening the livelihood of Senegalese fishermen, forcing many to migrate to Europe, writes the BBC's Alfonso Daniels.
Mor Ndiaye, 34, has lived all his life in St Louis, a bustling fishing town in northern Senegal. Its sandy streets are crammed with children and roaming goats. Life here was good until a few years ago when everything changed."The fish just vanished, what can we do? We used to catch enough fish in a day or two. Now we need to go out at sea for weeks to catch the same amount.
Fish caught here - mainly sardinella and other so-called pelagic or open sea fish migrating up and down the coast - have provided up to 75% of the protein consumed by millions of people in Senegal and across Africa's interior in countries like Burkina Faso and Mali.
But decades of mainly European and Asian trawlers scouring its coastline have meant that its waters have been overfished."Our national dish is thieboudienne: rice with fish. We cannot live without fish. I don't know what we're going to do."
... "The Senegalese were replaced with mainly Chinese and Turks who now catch the fish being processed by fishmeal plants, mostly owned by the Chinese and Russians," Alassane Samba, a former director of Senegal's oceanic research institute, tells me.
The fishmeal, a kind of powdered protein, is used for animal feed, exported mainly to China to feed other fish and livestock.... "Mauritania is protecting its waters not for its people, but for foreigners."
Last year, almost half of Mauritania's fish catch was processed into fishmeal, according to the government
An international team recently mapped intact ocean ecosystems, complementing a 2016 project charting remaining terrestrial wilderness.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07183-6
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