Earlier this month, Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands was identified as one of 20 locations around the world where it was predicted that mammal extinctions would be likely to occur in the coming decades.
Amazingly Tasmania and the islands in Bass Strait was the only area identified in Australia.
The study published in volume 103 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explained that these areas of greatest concern are sites having the highest species richness and now face ‘latent risk’ of declining abundance and possible extinction of several species of mammal.
As the authors explain, these locations are the sites where the mammal fauna ‘is still relatively unthreatened but has high inherent sensitivity to disturbance’.
They suggest that locations like Japan, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar are not highlighted in this study because their most extinction-prone mammal species have already disappeared. The authors’ also highlight the short-comings of concentrating conservation efforts on those species of mammals that have been assessed and nominated for threatened species listing.
[From Cardillo, M., et al (2006) Latent extinction risk and the future battlegrounds of mammal extinctions. Proceedings of the National acadey of Sciences 106: 4157-4161.]
‘The synergistic effects of the biology [of a species] with human impacts mean that some species are expected to decline much more rapidly toward extinction than others as the levels of disturbance increases. Hence, many species currently considered relatively safe could leapfrog other species on the extinction risk scale to become the most highly threatened in the next few decades’.
With the emergence of several significant diseases in our wildlife populations, the threats posed by feral invaders like cats and the continued use of the poison — 1080, Tasmania’s “last stronghold” status for species extinct on the Australian mainland is now in jeopardy.
The Bass Strait islands like King and Flinders Islands are the ones to watch for the first extinctions through human disturbance, habitat modification, persecution and disease.
A prominent Tasmanian businessman recently stated that there were too many threatened species … now I wonder what he meant by that? Would he care if Tasmania’s unique fauna ends up in a mainland zoo or a local menagerie and extinct in the wild?
You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone!
