2
2
The extinction rate they calculated was between 150 and 260 species per million years (E/MSY). In other words, for every million species, 150 to 260 become extinct each year.
The team also estimated the number of extinctions for other wildlife groups, including amphibians and birds. The numbers ranged from 10 to 243 E/MSY, and the researchers say the 100 E/MSY figure is a reasonable value that is neither too exaggerated nor too conservative.
Several human-related factors combined to lead to the dodo’s extinction, including overhunting and the rise of invasive species such as rats, which ate many of the dodo’s eggs. (Photo: Mike Kemp/Getty Images).
Applying the 100 E/MSY figure to the 2022 calculation, the result is that in the past 500 years, 100,000 of the 2 million known animal species have gone extinct. This only accounts for the species we know, not for the species that are not yet known to humans.
Associate Professor John Alroy from the School of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia, said that it was almost impossible to calculate the extinction rate in the modern era and we needed to be very careful when drawing a figure based on current data.
To understand the overall extinction rate, researchers first need to know how many species there are, he said. We know very little about wildlife, and it is concentrated in a few regions, such as the tropics.
Not only do insects have more species than any other group of animals, but we know incredibly little about them compared to larger groups of animals like mammals and birds.
Although the calculations are difficult, Professor Alroy also suggests estimating extinction rates by using museum data for a few representative animal groups of larger groups, and studying the number of species that go extinct over time.
According to him, no matter how accurate the calculation is, it is clear that humans are making this rate increasingly larger, the number of extinction cases is much higher than the number of 777 published by the IUCN Red List.
So, what all the studies have in common is that the numbers are much larger than the natural baseline rate. This is enough to say that humans are seriously damaging the Earth’s biodiversity.