~Jazcal

I have never written a journal here ever and there are many reasons for that. But there are greater things in this world than the feelings or trials that one person experiences in a day.

The Bramble Cay melomys is now considered to be the first mammal to have gone extinct due to climate change. Make no mistake, this is not the first species to have gone extinct due to climate change and it won't be the last at the current rate. One could make the argument that it was natural, the species couldn't evolve to the changing environment in which they lived and went extinct accordingly. But it is important to remember that adaptation varies from individual to individual and evolution of a selected for adaptation takes generations to occur and become prevalent in the whole species. Which simply means that one individual with a specific trait needs to have lots of offspring, and those offspring have lots of offspring and so on and so forth. Additionally, natural selection (AKA a big collection of factors and forces that benefit certain traits to be more successful in producing offspring also known as "selecting for" even though the forces are random and happenstance) must continue to select for the given trait in the line of offspring (Mason, 2013, p. 403).

Now with a minor in evolutionary biology, you can understand this: a lot of the extinct species that have perished in recent years have short generation times like insects, birds, and now rodents. If animals with short generation times (and therefore having the potential to evolve faster than animals with longer generation times) are going extinct, then how can we expect the larger animals (which typically have longer generation times) (Holliday, 2005, p. 151) that we all know and love to evolve and survive this rapidly changing world ? Scientists predict the rate of extinctions to increase if something isn't done soon, not decrease. 2018 was a year of extinction forecasts of larger mammals, Northern White Rhinos are on their way out, several bird species are gone, amphibians as a whole are struggling worldwide, and as of my count today, an estimated 40 red wolves remain in the wild here in the United States (Rice, 2018), that's not even going into insects, reptiles, plants and fish that I am sure have species who are in just as dire of situations.

Shifting gears, those who are biologists out there reading this will understand this as well, the loss of the smaller, base feeding level animals can have a huge effect further up the feeding chain to be simply put. Animals who relied on the Bramble Cay melomys as their food source (I haven't done any research to know whether there are or not but as an example) now have to lean on other food sources to fill in their dietary needs. In rare cases that often occur on island populations or specialist populations, there is no alternative food source that can sustain the upper level predators (or herbivores in the case of plant extinctions). This will lead to the predator's extinction as well. This is a simple predator-prey relationship and there are a plethora of other "what if's?" that biologists worry about too such as pest populations now being allowed to grow unchecked by natural predators and what havoc they will cause, no native species left to compete with invasive species that might cause a lot of harm to the environment are a couple of others to consider when losing any species to extinction.

I encourage anyone who reads this and either disagrees with me or doesn't understand something to do their research! There are hundreds of articles out there on extinction, scientific predictions, what the Bramble Cay melomys is, and so on. Be good researchers, don't cheat yourselves with only one source. One scientist isn't the end all be all even though we like to think it sometimes. Read (or at least read the abstracts of) multiple scholarly articles (Google Scholar is your friend!), or news articles (Journalists do the hard part, but you should still skim their sources/ check their facts). Finally it's okay to be mad, upset, still confused but curious; but it's not okay to be uninformed because looking at things another way is uncomfortable.

I certainly hope with all my heart, that we as people are just really horrible at finding things and that everything we thought was extinct reappears on the other side of this global crisis that is descending rapidly into humanity's lap.

References:
Holiday, R. (2005). Aging and the extinction of large animals. Biogerontology, 6, 151-156. DOI 10.1007/s10522-005-3458-6
Mason, K., Loso, J., & Singer, S.R. (2013). General Biology 1&2 (BIOL 191&192). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Rice, D. (2018). These species went extinct in 2018. More may be doomed to follow in 2019. USA Today. Retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news.....18/2450121002/.