Will Humans Go Extinct?

The short answer, according to palaeontologist evolutionary biologist and Nicholas Longrich, is yes.

Everything goes extinct eventually. Fossil records prove that.

Longrich, a senior lecturer at the University of Bath, studies dinosaur fossils for a living. He’s curious about how and why the world is the way it. His specialty is macro-evolution — evolutionary patterns and processes, and the way they play out on a big-picture scale.

Longrich is intrigued by the idea that macro-evolution is more than just a series of micro-evolutions. The more complex evolution is, the longer it takes to evolve. The process of evolution itself has evolved, Longrich insists.

Despite headlines warning of imminent extinction for Homo sapiens, the truth is human beings will survive long after most other species have vanished, he believes.

There’s just one catch, he noted in an op-ed piece for The Conversation late last year.

Imminent extinction, whether by asteroid, climate catastrophe or any other means,, is not going to happen.

Or, if it does, it won’t play out the way most people expect.

Human beings are a strange species, Longrich says. Organisms that adapt to different climates fare better than specialized organisms during (relatively) localized catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and droughts.

Highly specialized mammals — mammals uniquely adapted to their habitat, like polar bears, penguins and pandas — are vulnerable to disruptions in the food chain.

Red foxes, which have adapted to different habitats and have expansive, and expanding, home ranges, are doing well. Arctic foxes, which are specifically suited to Arctic conditions, are not faring so well. Red foxes are bigger and stronger than Arctic foxes, and kill them when they can, because evolution has conditioned predators to see other predators as competition for food.

Humans are generalists when it comes to food. We’re carnivores, herbivores, piscivores and omnivores, depending on opportunity and circumstance.

Just because an academic makes a speculative, if reasoned, argument based on a lifelong study of biological evolution doesn’t make it true, but Longrich makes some intriguing points.

“Natural selection has created an animal capable of intelligent design, one that doesn’t blindly adapt to the environment, but constantly reshapes it to its needs,” he wrote.

Climate change can — and already is — affecting the entire planet, but Homo sapiens may yet find a way to adapt that doesn’t involve, say, Elon Musk spiriting who he considers the best and brightest into space, like something out of a 1950s science-fiction film.

So far, Longrich says, we’ve escaped every trap we’ve set for ourselves. For now.

‘I have seen the future, but I have no ideas what it looks like.’

https://theconversation.com/will-humans-go-extinct-for-all-the-existential-threats-well-likely-be-here-for-a-very-long-time-135327

David Attenborough: ‘I Don’t Have Long Left’

David Attenborough turns 95 in May, and he’s the first to admit he hasn’t much time left. 

He will leave the natural world in worse shape than when he first touched on it in his groundbreaking natural history series Life on Earth, all those years ago, in 1979. He was solemn, subdued and philosophical in a poignant 60 Minutes profile late last fall, on the eve of his personal witness statement A Life on Our Planet for Netflix.

“Even the biggest and most awful things that humanity has done pale into insignificance when you think of what could be around the corner,” he said quietly. “There could be whole areas of the world where people can no longer live.”

Attenborough witnessed the changes with his own eyes during his research for Our Planet. He visited many of the same wild spaces he first visited for Life on Earth for BBC’s Natural History Unit, more than 40 years ago now.

“Coral reef is one of the most dramatic, beautiful and complex manifestations of life you can find anywhere.

“But during my last trip it was like a cemetery — all the coral reef had died. Because of the rising temperature and acidity.

“We live in a finite world. We depend on the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat and every lung-full of air that we breathe.

“If it wasn’t for the natural world the would be depleted of oxygen tomorrow. If there were no trees, we would suffocate.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has proved to be a mixed blessing.

“People who have never listened to a bird’s song are suddenly thrilled, excited and inspired by the natural world. They realize they are a part of it. By saving nature, we are saving ourselves.”

There are moments, during those quiet times when he’s on his own and thinks back on his half-a-century’s worth of natural history programming, when he wonders if he had any effect.

“My generation is no great example for understanding. We have done terrible things.”

There is a glimmer of hope, though, he said, and it has come from an unlikely source: The younger generation, as represented by an 18-year-old from Sweden. The 94-year-old and the 18-year-old have become united in a common cause.

What Greta Thunberg has achieved in her short life on planet Earth has been remarkable, he told BBC’s Radio 4 last fall.

What she has done, he said, is “astonishing, and admirable.

“She has achieved things that many of us who have been working on it for 20-odd years have failed to achieve.”

Thunberg, guest host that week of BBC Radio’s Today program, insisted that wasn’t entirely true.

“I’m just a part of a very large group of people who have done it,” she said, in her clipped, accented English.

“And you are a part of that group, too,” she told Attenborough.

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Stop the (Game Farm) World, I Want to Get Off

Back in the days of slide film and SLR cameras that tended to freeze in the cold —  literally and figuratively — landing a sharp image of a bird in flight was a miracle, a past president of the North American Nature Photographers Association recalled to Audubon Magazine’s Ted Williams.

Williams was researching an exposé of fake wildlife photos, in which amateur photographers — and more than a few professionals — take wondrous photographs of sleek, well-fed, nearly-impossible-to-find animals like snow leopards and Siberian tigers in game farms, then pass the images off as wild captures.

Today, 10 years after that article first appeared, the practice is still widespread. Perception is everything after all, and we now live in a world where a sharp image of a snow leopard will no longer do: It must be a close-up with perfect focus on the eyes, and preferably a cub or two in tow, if it is to sell in the increasingly crowded, competitive field of wildlife magazines and nature documentaries.

The photo is beautiful, but is it right?

The issue isn’t just a question of semantics, but ethics. The wildlife game-farm industry isn’t regulated. And while game-farm models — from owls, eagles and wolves to bobcats, mountain lions and the more exotic big cats — may look healthy, the moment the paying clients leave, taking their cameras with them, the animals are locked away in small enclosures, cages even. They’re bred, bartered and treated like commodities, which to the brokers and others who ply the trade they are. The bottom line counts for everything, and the bottom line allows little room for sentimentality.

Interestingly, in 2020 and now into the  new year, the backlash is coming not so much from government regulation but rather growing awareness on the part of high-profile nature periodicials that value reputation and quality over turning a quick buck at the checkout counter.

Society is becoming more attuned to viewing captive animals as living, sentient beings that deserve a more fulfilling life than to be locked away in tiny enclosures for 22 hours a day, or more in some cases.

National Geographic, Audubon, Smithsonian and others will no longer run captive-animal photos, and will identify them in the caption on those rare occasions when an image seems to good to turn down. Other periodicals, and most if not of the major stock agencies, aren’t so fussy.

Most high-profile nature-photo competitions now require photographers to sign a form confirming their submission was taken in the wild but, again, not all photo competitions do. 

Sadly, there’s much in Williams’ article for Audubon that still holds true to this, 10 years after his exposé first appeared. Some issues never die, it seems, or even fade away.

The full article is well worth reading, and can be found here:

https://www.audubon.org/magazine/march-april-2010/phony-wildlife-photography-gives-warped-view

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Into the Wild: A New Leopard Marks Her New Spot in Mozambique’s Gongorosa National Park

It only took three years of bargaining and bureaucracy, form-filling and false starts — not to mention the added complication of a last-minute global pandemic —  but late last year park rangers at Mozambique’s Gongorosa National Park were finally able to release a 3½-year-old female leopard from South Africa back into the wild.

The leopard is believed to be just the second wild leopard in the entire park, which encompasses 4,000 square kms (1,500 sq mi) of acacia grasslands and montane forests at the southern end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley.

Park rangers identified a lone male leopard in the park in late 2018.

It’s entirely possible there are more leopards in Gongorosa, but conservationists have learned the hard way to underestimate rather than overestimate wildlife populations. The park, gazetted in 1960 after serving as a hunting reserve from 1920-1959, once supported one of the most dense wildlife populations on the entire continent, but as many as 95% of the park’s animals were wiped out during Mozambique’s protracted, bitter civil war between 1981-1994.

The post-war recovery period, backed in part by the African Development Bank with help from the European Union and International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), took longer than expected, as is often the case with former war zones.

It sounds like a tiny step, but it could in fact mark a giant leap. The leopard release was organized in part by American entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Gregory  Carr, founder of the Carr Foundation and president of the Gongorasa Restoration Project. Carr has formed a partnership with the Mozambique government to restore Gongorosa to its former glory, and has pledged USD $40 million over 30 years to promote the park as a source of tourist income for local communities.

The Covid-19 pandemic is doing the tourism industry no favours, of course, but in keeping with the philosophy of Lao-Tzu — whose words are still there to remind us after first being translated in the 4th century BC — the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

A Christmas Tail — The Long and Short of It

“Moving a giraffe is a delicate process. We have to survey the habitat and make sure we anchor the barge in a manner that makes it easy for the giraffes to enter without causing them unnecessary stress.”

— Jackson Komen, Kenya Wildlife Service, in the Sunday Observer.

A long time ago, in a continent called Africa, giraffes had very short necks, about an inch shorter than any normal human’s neck. The giraffes thought this was perfectly normal, and so it was at the time. 

One hot summer’s day, though, the giraffe families gathered for a picnic on a nearby island surrounded by shallow, calm waters. The little giraffes played games while the mothers and fathers stood about and talked.

One little giraffe had a habit of getting into trouble, though. He climbed a tree, even though his parents told him to never climb trees. He knew the greenest shoots were near the top of the tree, out of reach from the middle branches,. He strained and strained and strained to reach the tallest branches, but it was all  in vain. He would fall to the ground, awkwardly and painfully, and try and try again. He tried this for such a long time that his neck stretched and began to grow. It grew so long that, after a while, he didn’t try to climb the tree anymore. He stood on the ground and tried to see if he could reach the higher branches using only his neck.

The other little giraffes laughed at him, but over time they grew envious and decided to emulate him. And that is why all giraffes have long necks today.

Moving a giraffe is a tall order.

The rains have been uncommonly heavy this year across wide swathes of the lake district in East Africa’s Rift Valley, in some cases endangering entire  communities that live along the lake shores and threatening the wildlife that co-exists with nearby agricultural communities.

The rise in rainfall had been gradual, over a period of years, but in 2019 there was a sharp increase that resulted in serious flooding. It’s a law of nature, driven by changes in wind patterns and exacerbated by more dramatic and unpredictable monsoon rains. Drought in one region invariably means heavy flooding in other regions. Satellite imagery from NASA’s Earth Observatory shows that between 2013 and 2020, just seven years, sediment deposits between Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria in Kenya have shrunk from 20km (12 miles) to 13 km (8 miles). This is important because Lake Baringo is a freshwater habitat that is home to fish, Nile crocodiles and hippos. Lake Bogoria on the other hand is an alkaline lake and home to 100,000 flamingoes that depend on the blue-green algae that thrives in alkaline waters. Alkaline water and fresh water do not mix well.

The changes have affected area wildlife, even giraffes. Lake Baringo, the freshwater lake, is home to a large island, Longcharo, which over time has developed its own fragile, complex ecosystem. As water levels rise, the available area for gazelles, antelopes, bush pigs and other herbivores to forage has dwindled, to the point now where local wildlife authorities have to consider relocation. This past fall, as reported by correspondent Peter Muiruri in the Sunday Observer, an operation involved moving ostriches, impalas and warthogs across the lake to a conservancy on what is only half-joking referred to as “the mainland.”

Earlier this month, a delicate operation involved moving two of the island’s remaining giraffes to safety, using a specially rigged barge that had to take into consideration the giraffes’ exceedingly long necks which, while powerful, are also prone to injury.

©Pixabay-Ante Hamersmit

“It took a whole day just to move one giraffe, with the barge taking at least two hours to get to the mainland,” Jackson Komen, a game warden for the Kenya Wildlife Service’s Baringo District, told the Sunday Observer in a story published this past weekend. “The remaining (giraffes), including some pregnant female, will be moved a little later.”

Climate change, coupled with increasing human activity around water catchment areas in a region of the world already noted for its wild swings between drought and flooding, is a major reason for rising water levels. Interestingly, lakes’ capacity to hold water is reduced even as water levels rise. Silt leaks into lakes and changes the chemistry of the lake water, and the animals — and people — who rely on the lakes to survive.

Why so much effort? What is a giraffe worth, anyway?

After God created the earth, when all the animals lived together peacefully, a huge bushfire swept through the land, started by a bolt of lightning. The dry grass burst into flames and strong winds quickly spread a wall of flames from horizon to horizon. Unable to do anything to put the fire out, the animals fled in panic before the deadly flames. 

A pair of oxpeckers had made their nest in a hole in a giant tree trunk. The tree lay in the path of the advancing flames.

The oxpeckers pleaded with the passing animals to help them rescue their little chicks, but the animals took no notice as they ran from the deadly flames.

Just when the desperate oxpeckers were about to give up hope, a kind giraffe came along and seeing the birds so distressed asked what was wrong. ‘Oh Giraffe!’ the oxpeckers wailed, "Our nest will soon be burned and our chicks with it. Please carry it away from the fire for us!’

Giraffe took pity on the oxpeckers in their dreadful plight and rushed to the tree through the dense smoke and the flying sparks. Because of his long legs and neck, Giraffe was able to reach to the top of the tree and pluck the nest and the young fledglings from the hole and carry them to safety.

‘Oh, thank you, thank you, kind Giraffe!’ the much relieved oxpeckers said. ‘How can we ever repay you for your kindness?’

‘I am always troubled by ticks,’ Giraffe replied. ‘If you like you can ride on my back and pick the ticks off for me’

‘We will gladly do this service for you forever and ever,’ the grateful oxpeckers replied.

That is why, today, if you go to the African bush, you will nearly always see oxpeckers and giraffes living together. 

(Traditional, as told to Nick Greaves in When the Hippo Was Hairy and Other Tales from Africa.)

©Pixabay-Chräcker Heller

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