A Spix’s #macaw perches in a tree in a breeding facility in Curaçá, eastern #Brazil. The species is clinging to life: declared #extinct in the wild, it now mainly persists in protected habitats, although Brazil hopes to re-establish a wild population before long.
"Bishop’s story, from birth to presumed death, shows the extreme danger facing right #whales, which could be #extinct in three decades if they continue to disappear at the present rate.
"“As we watch this #species go #extinct one by one, the solution sits idle in the hands of the administration”...
this year, a dead female turned up off #Virginia with a dislocated spine, a calf was discovered in #Georgia with head lacerations, & a young female was found — again in Georgia — with a fractured skull. All the injuries are consistent with vessel strikes.
While not as well known as its cousin, the dodo, the Rodrigues solitaire is also quite important when talking about Holocene extinctions. Just like the dodo it was hunted by Europeans, while domesticated mammals introduced to the island went after its eggs, until the last one of them died in the mid 18th century.
@Smithsonianmag reports: "Researchers studying the 160-year-old fur of a dog named Mutton in the Smithsonian collections found that the Indigenous breed existed for at least 5,000 years before European colonizers eradicated it."
Twenty-one creatures were just removed from the #EndangeredSpecies List last year for the worst possible reason: They're officially #extinct.
Once found across much of America, these birds, bats, fish and mussels are now gone forever. Their loss is a wake-up call for us to do all we can to protect Earth's #biodiversity -- from the grizzly on the ridgeline to the butterfly in our backyard.
A Tearful Farewell to the 21 Species We Declared #Extinct in 2023
“I thought about how I would grieve for a friend.”
Many of these #species had not been seen in decades. But the announcement was a sobering reminder that the #ClimateCrisis crisis and #habitat#destruction are accelerating an #extinction crisis that threatens 2 million species
“It’s a horrible tragedy,” said the ecologist and author Carl Safina. “And I think it is a breach of our #moral guardrails.”
Quite simply: As human population grows and our footprint expands, more human habitat means less habitat for endangered species. Pile on invasive species (like domestic cats) and climate change and native species don't stand a chance.
But the author almost entirely misses Section 7 in their word-fluffed up article, where critical habitat is defined as off-limit to developers. But developers rule in #hawaii
We estimated the proportion of species that have gone #extinct in #Singapore including those that went extinct before we had a chance to discover them (#DarkExtinctions).
These numbers correct previous #extinctions over-estimates, and two statistical methods are presented, including a quick one that comes with an #R package.
"The American #Buffalo, a new two-part, four-hour series, takes viewers on a journey through more than 10,000 years of North American history and across some of the continent’s most iconic landscapes, tracing the animal’s evolution, its significance to the #IndigenousPeople and landscape of the #GreatPlains, its near extinction, and the efforts to bring the magnificent mammals back from the brink.
"For thousands of generations, buffalo (species #bison bison) have evolved alongside #IndigenousPeople who relied on them for food and shelter, and, in exchange for killing them, revered the animal. The stories of Native people anchor the series, including the #Kiowa, #Comanche, and #Cheyenne of the Southern Plains; the #Lakota, #Salish, #Kootenai, #Mandan-#Hidatsa, and #Blackfeet from the Northern Plains; and others."
@DoomsdaysCW Watched #AmericanBuffalo by #KenBurns last night and it makes me mad enough that I want to go back in time and hunt down whomever created the perverse incentives to #extinct the Buffalo.
Check out the Buffalo Field Campaign for Current efforts the preserve the Yellowstone Buffalo and their habitat around the park.