Extinction Rates May Be Faster Than Thought

photo by karin widemann

The Guardian out of London covered a frightening article this week from Nature entitled “Extinction risk depends strongly on factors contributing to stochasticity.” by Brett Melbourne and Alan Hastings, which suggests that existing models for wildlife extinction rates may be terribly flawed and severely underestimating the vulnerability of those populations.

Since those faulty models are the basis for much of the law and policy concerning their protection, it would seem to be a potentially fatal flaw.

The gist of the article, which was published in the current issue of Nature, is that “only with the full stochastic model can the relative importance of environmental and demographic variability, and therefore extinction risk, be correctly determined from data.”

Their assertion is that, in many cases, wildlife biologists have not yet been able to assemble full profiles of the stochastic pressures affecting wild populations and that it has contributed to recent surprises, such as the sudden disappearance of the Yangtze river dolphin and the demolition of a western gorilla subspecies by viral outbreak.

The paper in Nature is a very interesting read, and the Guardian’s coverage was very interesting. The Guardian article can be found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/02/climatechange.endangeredspecies