When climate change is discussed, most predictions don’t go past 100 years, yet one recently published study in Nature explores the next 22 centuries in what they believe may be a future mass extinction.
Recently there have been steep declines in many species, and many scientists worry that we are in the middle of a mass extinction. If all species currently threatened actually go extinct, the sixth mass extinction will arrive, however this could take anywhere between 200 to 22,000 years to occur.
Mammals are one class of animal scientists at the University of California at Berkley are studying in order to understand mass extinctions. Mammals are a well-studied and well represented group in the fossil record going back 65 million years. Biologists estimate that within the past 500 years, 80 out of 5,570 mammal species have gone extinct.
Bats are the latest class of animals scientists are worried about. The number of bat deaths nationwide associated with the white-nose syndrome (WNS) is unprecedented in recent history. The disease is spreading fast with a high mortality rate, wiping out over 70% of bat populations in 16 states and 3 Canadian provinces.
The first step in conservation is identification, and researchers are taking steps to identify bat populations in Ohio. State and federal wildlife biologists recently surveyed several mine sites in Ohio to assess bat populations and conduct surveillance for WNS. They documented over 1,300 bats hibernating at the Lawrence County mine, with several samples collected from this mine testing positive for WNS. Locally researchers spent several nights last summer catching bats at Oak Openings Preserve Metropark outside of Toledo. They identified eight species of bats, none testing positive for WNS.
Studying mass extinctions is not very precise. No one can positively say whether a mass extinction occurred over a year, a decade, or over 10,000 years. Without this knowledge, scientists have no scale to measure the significance of the impact we are currently having. A mass extinction is defined as a time when the Earth loses 75% of its species in a geologically short period of time. There have been 5 mass extinctions in the past 540 million years.
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