A Vanishing World?
What is the significance of Miss Waldron's red colobus?
A noisy, brightly coloured monkey living in the high-canopy rainforests of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Miss Waldron’s red colobus has the sad distinction of being the first documented primate to disappear from earth in over 200 years. The highly social monkey was declared extinct in 2000 in the October issue of Conservation Biology. Hunted for its meat and with its forest habitat fragmented from logging, this intelligent primate quietly disappeared. Scientists fear that the extinction of this black and red primate will likely be just the first of many large mammals to vanish from earth in the upcoming decades.
The loss of species, many not yet discovered, is an early warning system, an alarm bell telling us that pollution, deforestation, global warming, agriculture, urban sprawl and over-consumption are weakening the planet’s life support systems. The plight of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Estuary, the decline of songbirds in Canada’s boreal forests and the disappearance of the tiger salamander from Ontario’s wetlands are important ecological signals. Just as the canary in the coal mine warned miners of life-threatening gasses underground, the decline of species is warning us that the ecosystems of which they are part of are in trouble, and no longer capable of sustaining life which they have supported for millennia.
What do the Vancouver Island marmot, Javan tiger, Chinese river dolphin, Sumatran rhinoceros, Philippine eagle and Hawaiian crow have in common? They are all reluctant members of the Hundred Heartbeats Club, a club whose membership requires that less than 100 individuals of that species exist on earth. Created in 2000 by renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, the club is a sad testament to a devastating period of extinction that is sweeping the planet (1).
Vancouver Island Marmot Photo: Andrew Bryant
In the past, mass extinctions have been accompanied by cataclysmic natural environmental events such as a comet hitting the earth, which scientists believe triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Over millennia earth has gone through five waves of extinctions, each a reaction to “natural” environmental changes. On a global level, scientists estimate that the present “sixth wave of extinction” is 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than the “natural”, or background rate of extinction, and most troubling is that this staggering loss of biological diversity, the disappearance of thousands of animals and plants - and their intricate relationships with other ecosystem components - is solely the result of human activity (2).
"Give Nature half a chance, and it will take care of itself"
Dr. Mark Collins, Director on UNEP-WCMC
In 2002 the United Nations released a disturbing report, Global Environmental Outlook-3, which systematically verified the severity of the extinction crisis. The report found that 12% of birds and fully one quarter of mammals would disappear from earth within 30 years if this alarming trend was not reversed (3). Worldwide, species are vanishing because the places where they live, breed, forage and raise their young are disappearing. It is the loss and degradation of earth’s wetlands, forests, meadows, oceans, rivers and streams that is the overwhelming threat to wildlife. Globally, habitat loss is responsible for the plight of 89% of endangered birds, 83 % of endangered mammals and 91% of threatened plants. In just 30 years over a third of the natural world has been destroyed, and if current consumption patterns continue in less than five decades we will need the equivalent of two earths to support humanity (4).
