“Australia already has the worst record in the world for conserving its beautiful and unusual wildlife,” says the UK’s Independent in what’s already become a gloomy week for the world’s fauna and flora — and it’s still only Tuesday here in California.
Some 40% of all the mammal species that have become extinct over the past 200 years, says writer Kathy Marks, were Australian. Now, it appears, climate change threatens a whole bunch more antipodean mammals — as well as frogs, turtles, finches and more.
Elsewhere, we learn that bats are suffering a terrible die-off in the Eastern USA, for a reason yet to be identified.
Frogs, meanwhile, have long been known to be under tremendous environmental pressure. Some are now disputing the idea that Global Warming is the trigger, the NY Times reports today. But even if that’s so, it does seem that the virus that causing much of the distress to frogs is spread by humans.
Finally, lovers of common Britain’s wildflowers — often otherwise known as weeds — are lamenting their diminishing presence in the nation’s fields and woods. Intensive (i.e. in-organic) farming practices get the blame here.
Dynamic change is a part of nature. Even large die-offs and population surges are common (think locusts, gypsy moths, squid). But that’s not to defend our fooling with a system we hardly understand — a point likely to be brought painfully home to anyone on America’s East Coast bitten by a bug that a now-dead bat ought to have been snacking on this summer.
EarthQuaker 