Weeks ago, BBC posted an article, saying that the "disappeared species" on the earth are only the tip of the iceberg. In the future, species on the earth will become extinct at a faster speed.
Read the article in depth, the data inside directly shocked me. In the past century, there have been nearly one million species of animals and plants endangered on the earth!
Millions of creatures are facing extinction, as if proclaiming: the sixth mass extinction has really begun...
It has been already hard to see wild animals in our lives now, let alone those endangered species. When we suddenly hear about endangered and extinct species, the first impression is the ancient creature such as mammoth and Steller's Sea Cow.
But in fact, specie’s extinction never stops happening. Right now, many species in our lives are facing difficult conditions for survival.
At the beginning of 2020, Australia's national treasure platypus has been declared locally extinct.
In my impression, a cheetah should be galloping in the wilderness. However, because of illegal purchase and captivity by the rich in the Middle East, there are fewer than 7,000 cheetahs in the world. If no action is taken, its extinction will be just a matter of time.
Even the corals that have survived the mass extinction more than 60 million years ago, are discovered by scientists that they once again show the behavior of "refuge".
With the continuous expansion of the scope of human activities in recent decades, as well as acts of stealing and hunting driven by interests, more and more species are under survival threat.
Data has proved that human activities have accelerated the extinction of wild animals. The speed has become more than 100-1000 times higher than the normal extinction rate. For this reason, many wild animals have disappeared from the earth prematurely.
Scientists has bluntly said that, in the next few decades, there will be 550 species directly extinct.
The latest research points out that humans are almost entirely responsible for the extinction of mammals in the past few decades. If we take no protective measures, those animals that are already endangered will become extinct at a faster rate in the future.
In other words, humans are the chief culprit leading to the extinction of animals.
In August 2018, Sudan, the last male Sumatran rhinoceros left the world, which also meant that the Sumatran rhinoceros was extinct on the earth.
The Sumatran rhino once lived in the grasslands of central and eastern Africa. At one time, there were 2,000 Sumatran rhinos eating grass leisurely on the grasslands. But after just 40 years, researchers have been unable to find any one of them in the wild. It is inseparable from the slaughter of humans.
I don’t know when the magical effect of rhino horn has spread in Asian countries. There are rumors that the rhino horn can be aphrodisiac if ground into powder and eaten, or decorations made of rhino horn are more luxury... Once the rumors spread, the market is almost synchronously opened, so the predators blinded by greed began to hunt rhinos.
Although a rhino without horns can still survive, it’s forced to be a "disabled" rhino, who will face a lot of difficulties to survive independently in the wild.
And Sudan, who was caught in the zoo to please mankind since it was a child, had escaped decades of massacre by hunters. But it didn't escape the fate of being targeted by predators after becoming an adult. After all, the older its age was, the more valuable the horns would be, let alone it was one of the few remaining Sumatran rhinos in the world!
In fact, in recent decades, we have heard the cry of too many animals. Some animals have even changed the evolutionary direction engraved in their genes, in order to adapt to human rules.
The African elephant, which is also valuable because of its "tooth", is another vivid example of human numbness.
Like rhinos, ivory is also considered to have miraculous effects in some countries, such as curing all diseases, warding off evil spirits, and being a symbol of aristocratic status.
A beautifully carved ivory can sell for at least $30,000.
Therefore, elephants have been hunted and killed by humans: almost every 15 minutes, an elephant is killed.
For elephants, ivories are used to dig food, tear down trees and attract the opposite sex, but in the eyes of humans, they are equivalent to money. In Africa, poachers have been hunting for elephants’ complete and thick tusks. The older and stronger an elephant is, the more favored it is by poachers.
Because of the special skull structure of elephants, ivory cannot be stripped off alone. If the poacher wants a complete ivory, he needs to cut off the entire face of the elephant and remove the meat and fur bit by bit. None of the elephants that met poachers could survive.
In the long run, elephants have to completely change their genes in order to survive. Look at the elephants in Africa today. For fear of being killed, 98% of female elephants in some areas have no tusks. Even for the elephants with tusks, their tusks are only half the size in comparison with the last century.
The tusk that evolved over millions of years have degenerated back in a few hundred years. What an irony to these behemoths.
On the other hand, in addition to the threat of human activities, some other species have to change their original habits due to changes of climate and environment.
For example, polar bears’ living conditions have also been worse in recent years.
In June of this year, the temperature of the Arctic Circle once again broke the record and reached 38°C. Coupled with the burning of Siberian wildfires, a large amount of carbon dioxide accelerated global warming, which directly led to the melting of ice and permafrost in the Arctic Circle.
As the temperature continues to rise and Arctic sea ice melts, polar bears are forced to adapt to the new environment.
In order to hunt down their prey, they have to travel longer distances. Many polar bears are exhausted and die on the road. Even if the prey is finally caught, there is no ice layer thick enough to store food.
Polar bears, which have faced increasing difficulties to catch food, are giving up their original eating habits and are starting to search for food on land.
They begin to sneak to the birds' nests. When the birds fly away to find food, they will eat the eggs laid by the birds.
Last December, 56 bony polar bears broke into the Russian village of Ryrkaypiy for food.
In the past five years, they often went to the village to find something to eat. They almost used the village as a food supply area, so that the indigenous people in the village were disturbed and began to consider leaving their homes and moving to a safer place.
They went into the building to find food.
Even after dusk, these behemoths would not leave. Local residents said, "When they pass under your window at night, you will feel very creepy."
They also dug through the trash to find what smelled or looked like food, and stuffed it into their mouths whether it was harmful or not.
In order to adapt to the current living environment, the polar bears have changed their food category from sea lions to bird eggs and garbage... Even so, the polar bears still cannot find enough food, what should they do?
Some media report that polar bears have been forced to start eating their own kind.
I can't help feeling panic. A few years later, what else can they eat?
Recent studies have found that with the increase in ocean temperature and human overfishing, there are fewer and fewer biological species in the sea, and the food is simply not enough to meet the needs of large marine organisms. Dolphins, sharks and other large marine organisms may already be facing famine.
We can also often see news like "whales are so hungry that their stomachs are full of plastic garbage, eventually stranded and die on the beach."
Now, almost all species on the planet are forcing themselves to accelerate their adaptation to the environment, because once they fall behind, there is only one option, extinction.
"There is almost no time left." say the scientists, "With the extinction of each species, we have irreversibly lost part of the earth's natural history."
Perhaps in recent years, we have heard so much news of the extinction of species that many people no longer think the extinction of animals is a rare event.
The fact now is that, in only the last two years, many creatures have left this earth permanently:
In January 2019, George, the last Hawaiian Land Snail (Achatinella apexfulva), bid farewell to the world forever.
In February, the Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola) on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia disappeared from the earth, because its habitat was flooded due to climate warming.
Just in January 2020, China’s Yangtze River White Sturgeon (Psephurus gladius) also quietly left the world.
Everything in this world is interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The extinction of one species may not have any direct impact on us. The extinction of dozens of species may not endanger our lives, but what if hundreds of species go extinct?
If humans do not pay enough attention to the living environment of animals, and eventually all animals in the world disappear, then humans definitely will not have the ability to survive.
I don’t know if you still remember the koala crying for help in the wild fire at the end of 2019. The picture is too heartbreaking.
This koala finally left the world. There were billions of animals affected by wildfires in Australia, including mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, as well as large insects like butterflies.
Because of this wildfire, the koala in Australia was once considered "functionally extinct."
But in 2020, mankind has experienced more than a wildfire. Viruses, floods, typhoons, extreme high temperatures... Human's "torture" of the earth in the past centuries have been gradually reflected in the climate and every living thing on the earth.
Today, scientists have sounded the alarm for us. What we should do in the next 5 to 10 years is what everyone of us needs to think about.
