1,300 species of Pacific Island birds went extinct, study estimates

S

Surroundx

Well-Known Member
A new study released on Monday blames the extinction of an estimated 1,300 bird species native to the Pacific Islands on the arrival of humans to the area nearly 4,000 years ago.

The study, conducted by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), examined fossils from 41 islands and used a new technique to gauge how many animals they do not have fossils for in order to come up with the number 1,300, according to Tim Blackburn, professor and director of the ZSL's Institute of Zoology.

Source: New Study Estimates 1,300 Species of Pacific Island Birds Were Wiped Out When Humans Arrived : news : Nature World News
 
I find it sad to think of all these amazing large island birds that are no longer around.
 
I envisage a planet covered with megalopolises that all merge in millions of square kilometres of man-made structures, with no room for any wildlife except rats and roaches. Agent Smith was spot on when he said that we were like a virus: we move in to an area, consume all the resources and multiply.
 
Magnitude and variation of prehistoric bird extinctions in the Pacific

Abstract

The largest extinction event in the Holocene occurred on Pacific islands, where Late Quaternary fossils reveal the loss of thousands of bird populations following human colonization of the region. However, gaps in the fossil record mean that considerable uncertainty surrounds the magnitude and pattern of these extinctions. We use a Bayesian mark-recapture approach to model gaps in the fossil record and to quantify losses of nonpasserine landbirds on 41 Pacific islands. Two-thirds of the populations on these islands went extinct in the period between first human arrival and European contact, with extinction rates linked to island and species characteristics that increased susceptibility to hunting and habitat destruction. We calculate that human colonization of remote Pacific islands caused the global extinction of close to 1,000 species of nonpasserine landbird alone; nonpasserine seabird and passerine extinctions will add to this total.

Source: Magnitude and variation of prehistoric bird extinctions in the Pacific
 
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