[Newsbot]

Title: Australian rodent named the 1st mammal to go extinct due to human-caused climate change
Category: Science
Posted By: andyt
Date: 2016-06-14 09:51:13

[N_Fiddledog]

Calling the dead rats a victim of 'climate' seems a bit of a stretch. A small population species which precariously clings to existence on a tiny spit of low lying land in the middle of Australia's Cyclone Alley was never destined to survive for long.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/14/ ... es-of-rat/

From the Australian Government Website;

"There are three threats to the species.

Firstly, there is only the single known population of the species and searches on other cays and in adjacent areas of New Guinea have failed to discover other populations.

Secondly, the cay is prone to inundation from storm surge and other disturbances.

Further compounding risk to the species is that the species appears to be inbred. Therefore, resilience of the species to catastrophic events such as cyclones, introductions of weeds or introduced predators, or the arrival of a novel disease, is very low (Curtis et al. 2012 cited in DEHP 2013e).

The most recent survey for the species in 2012 resulted in no animals being recorded. The most recent verified record of the species is from trapping in 2004. It is possible that a catastrophic inundation of the island has already occurred (DEHP 2013e)."

Read more: http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/s ... n_id=64477

[Thanos]

Sounds like the marmots out at Vancouver Island. The things are complete inbred morons. If it wasn't for the government declaring them endangered the big cats, bears, eagles, and foxes would have exterminated them outright a long time ago.

And "catastrophic inundation" means something like getting swamped by a cyclone as much as it does from the slow rise of the overall water level. There's dozens of little places across the Pacific that look like paradises. The water is blue and the greenery is lush. People and the larger animals can't live on them though, because at certain points in time these smaller atolls have been flooded over by hurricane storm surges that caused salt ocean water to poison the shallow fresh water aquifers. The trees and grasses can survive from what rains they get. Everything else though but the hardiest of fauna can't.

[raydan]

This is where he lived...

[BartSimpson]

The actual cause of the extinction: