• Question: how often do animals become extinct ?

    Asked by anon-217277 to Savannah on 10 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Disclaimer: I am not a biologist or ecologist so I am not really qualified to talk about this but I will try to answer as best I can 🙂

      It’s hard to know exactly how quickly extinction is happening, partly because we don’t actually know how many species exist! It is estimated that there about 2 billion species on the planet but scientists just aren’t sure and new species are discovered all the time.

      In some sense, extinction is a natural process – all that is needed are factors that cause a species’ death rate to be higher than its birth rate for a prolonged period of time until it cannot recover. The one thing we do know, is that humans are probably making the problem of extinction worse, maybe up to a thousand times worse. The main reason is loss of animals’ natural habitat due to growing human population and agriculture. If you want to help out with the problem of extinction, you can try eating less meat (if you eat meat normally) and avoid buying products made from endangered animal products, like ivory 🙂

      I got info from this source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reference/extinct-species/

Comments

  • Photo: Harrison

    Harrison commented on :

    Species become extinct when they are unable to respond to rapid or catastrophic environmental changes. For example, a catastrophic environmental change occurred 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs. These majestic creatures ruled the Earth for 160 million years. But all of a sudden they were gone. We don’t know what happened, but the evidence strongly suggests that an asteroid struck the Earth at a glancing angle just off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, leaving a crater in the sea bed that exists to this day. From the shape and size of the crater it has been estimated that at least two major things happened. First, an enormous tsunami swept across what is now called the Gulf of Mexico and continued all the way to what is now southern Utah depositing lots of sea creatures whose fossils can still be found in that part of the US. Second, an enormous amount of pulverized rock was launched into low Earth orbit that blocked out the Sun thereby plunging the Earth in a long, cold, deep winter. Alas, the dinosaurs could not adapt and perished. Species are going extinct all the time. This is natural. The problem today is that the rate of extinction has accelerated because of what we are doing to the planet.