26.4 Threats to Biodiversity

Habitat Loss

Humans rely on technology to modify their environment and replace certain functions that were once performed by the natural ecosystem. Other species cannot do this. Elimination of their ecosystem—whether it is a forest, a desert, a grassland, a freshwater estuarine, or a marine environment—will kill the individuals belonging to the species. The species will become extinct if we remove the entire habitat within the range of a species. Human destruction of habitats accelerated in the latter half of the twentieth century. Consider the exceptional biodiversity of Sumatra: it is home to one species of orangutan, a species of critically endangered elephant, and the Sumatran tiger, but half of Sumatra’s forest is now gone. The neighboring island of Borneo, home to the other species of orangutan, has lost a similar area of forest. Forest loss continues in protected areas of Borneo. All three species of orangutan are now listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but they are simply the most visible of thousands of species that will not survive the disappearance of the forests in Sumatra and Borneo. The forests are removed for timber and to plant palm oil plantations. Palm oil is used in many products including food products, cosmetics, and biodiesel in Europe. A five-year estimate of global forest cover loss for the years 2000–2005 was 3.1 percent. In the humid tropics where forest loss is primarily from timber extraction, 272,000 km² was lost out of a global total of 11,564,000 km² (or 2.4 percent). In the tropics, these losses certainly also represent the extinction of species because of high levels of endemism—species unique to a defined geographic location, and found nowhere else.

Overharvesting

Overharvesting is a serious threat to many species, but particularly to aquatic (both marine and freshwater) species. Despite regulation and monitoring, there are recent examples of fishery collapse. The western Atlantic cod fishery is among the most significant. While it was a hugely productive fishery for 400 years, the introduction of modern factory trawlers in the 1980s caused it to become unsustainable. Fisheries collapse as a result of both economic and political factors. Fisheries are managed as a shared international resource even when the fishing territory lies within an individual country’s territorial waters. Common resources are subject to an economic pressure known as the tragedy of the commons, in which essentially no fisher has a motivation to exercise restraint in harvesting a fishery when it is not owned by that fisher. Overexploitation is a common outcome. This overexploitation is exacerbated when access to the fishery is open and unregulated and when technology gives fishers the ability to overfish. In a few fisheries, the biological growth of the resource is less than the potential growth of the profits made from fishing if that time and money were invested elsewhere. In these cases—whales are an example—economic forces will always drive toward fishing the population to extinction.

For the most part, fishery extinction is not equivalent to biological extinction—the last fish of a species is rarely fished out of the ocean. At the same time, fishery extinction is still harmful to fish species and their ecosystems. There are some instances in which true extinction is a possibility. Whales have slow-growing populations due to low reproductive rates, and therefore are at risk of complete extinction through hunting. There are some species of sharks with restricted distributions that are at risk of extinction. The groupers are another population of generally slow-growing fishes that, in the Caribbean, include a number of species that are at risk of extinction from overfishing.

Coral reefs are extremely diverse marine ecosystems that face immediate peril from several processes. Reefs are home to 1/3 of the world’s marine fish species—about 4,000 species—despite making up only 1 percent of marine habitat. Most home marine aquaria are stocked with wild-caught organisms, not cultured organisms. Although no species is known to have been driven extinct by the pet trade in marine species, there are studies showing that populations of some species have declined in response to harvesting, indicating that the harvest is not sustainable at those levels. There are concerns about the effect of the pet trade on some terrestrial species such as turtles, amphibians, birds, plants, and even the orangutan.

Bush meat is the generic term used for wild animals killed for food. Hunting is practiced throughout the world, but hunting practices, particularly in equatorial Africa and parts of Asia, are believed to threaten a number of species with extinction. Traditionally, bush meat in Africa was hunted to feed families directly; however, recent commercialization of the practice now has bush meat available in grocery stores, which has increased harvest rates to the level of unsustainability. Additionally, human population growth has increased the need for protein foods that are not being met by agriculture. Species threatened by the bush meat trade are mostly mammals including many primates living in the Congo basin.

Exotic Species

Exotic species are species that have been intentionally or unintentionally introduced into an ecosystem in which they did not evolve. For example, Kudzu (Pueraria lobata), which is native to Japan, was introduced in the United States in 1876. It was later planted for soil conservation. Problematically, it grows too well in the southeastern United States—up to a foot a day. It is now an invasive pest species and covers over 7 million acres in the southeastern United States. If an introduced species is able to survive in its new habitat, that introduction is now reflected in the observed range of the species. Human transportation of people and goods, including the intentional transport of organisms for trade, has dramatically increased the introduction of species into new ecosystems, sometimes at distances that are well beyond the capacity of the species to ever travel itself and outside the range of the species’ natural predators.

Most exotic species introductions probably fail because of the low number of individuals introduced or poor adaptation to the ecosystem they enter. Some species, however, possess pre-adaptations that can make them especially successful in a new ecosystem. These exotic species often undergo dramatic population increases in their new habitat and reset the ecological conditions in the new environment, threatening the species that exist there. For this reason, exotic species are also called invasive species. Exotic species can threaten other species through competition for resources, predation, or disease. For example, the Eurasian star thistle, also called spotted knapweed, has invaded and rendered useless some of the open prairies of the western states. However, it is a great nectar-bearing flower for the production of honey and supports numerous pollinating insects, including migrating monarch butterflies in the north-central states such as Michigan.

Lakes and islands are particularly vulnerable to extinction threats from introduced species. In Lake Victoria, as mentioned earlier, the intentional introduction of the Nile perch was largely responsible for the extinction of about 200 species of endemic cichlids. The accidental introduction of the brown tree snake via aircraft (see figure below) from the Solomon Islands to Guam in 1950 has led to the extinction of three species of birds and three to five species of reptiles endemic to the island. Several other species are still threatened. The brown tree snake is adept at exploiting human transportation as a means to migrate; one was even found on an aircraft arriving in Corpus Christi, Texas. Constant vigilance on the part of airport, military, and commercial aircraft personnel is required to prevent the snake from moving from Guam to other islands in the Pacific, especially Hawaii. Islands do not make up a large area of land on the globe, but they do contain a disproportionate number of endemic species because of their isolation from mainland ancestors.

It now appears that the global decline in amphibian species recognized in the 1990s is, in some part, caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which causes the disease chytridiomycosis (see figure below). There is evidence that the fungus is native to Africa and may have been spread throughout the world by transport of a commonly used laboratory and pet species: the African clawed toad (Xenopus laevis). It may well be that biologists themselves are responsible for spreading this disease worldwide. The North American bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana, which has also been widely introduced as a food animal but easily escapes captivity, survives most infections of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, and can act as a reservoir for the disease. It also is a voracious predator in freshwater lakes.

Early evidence suggests that another fungal pathogen, Geomyces destructans, introduced from Europe is responsible for white-nose syndrome (see figure below), which infects cave-hibernating bats in eastern North America and has spread from a point of origin in western New York State. The disease has decimated bat populations and threatens extinction of species already listed as endangered: the Indiana bat, Myotis sodalis, and potentially the Virginia big-eared bat, Corynorhinus townsendii virginianus. How the fungus was introduced is unclear, but one logical presumption would be that recreational cavers unintentionally brought the fungus on clothes or equipment from Europe.

Climate Change

Climate change, and specifically the anthropogenic (meaning, caused by humans) warming trend presently escalating, is recognized as a major extinction threat, particularly when combined with other threats such as habitat loss and the expansion of disease organisms. Scientists disagree about the likely magnitude of the effects, with extinction rate estimates ranging from 15 percent to 40 percent of species destined for extinction by 2050. Scientists do agree, however, that climate change will alter regional climates, including rainfall and snowfall patterns, making habitats less hospitable to the species living in them, in particular, the endemic species. The warming trend will shift colder climates toward the north and south poles, forcing species to move with their adapted climate norms while facing habitat gaps along the way. The shifting ranges will impose new competitive regimes on species as they find themselves in contact with other species not present in their historic range. One such unexpected species contact is between polar bears and grizzly bears (see figure below). Previously, these two distinct species had separate ranges. Now, their ranges are overlapping and there are documented cases of these two species mating and producing viable offspring, which may or may not be viable crossing back to either parental species. Changing climates also throw off species’ delicate timed adaptations to seasonal food resources and breeding times. Many contemporary mismatches to shifts in resource availability and timing have already been documented.

Range shifts are already being observed: for example, some European bird species ranges have moved 91 km northward. The same study suggested that the optimal shift based on warming trends was double that distance, suggesting that the populations are not moving quickly enough. Range shifts have also been observed in plants, butterflies, other insects, freshwater fishes, reptiles, and mammals.

Climate gradients will also move up mountains, eventually crowding species higher in altitude and eliminating the habitat for those species adapted to the highest elevations. Some climates will completely disappear. The accelerating rate of warming in the Arctic significantly reduces snowfall and the formation of sea ice. Without the ice, species like polar bears cannot successfully hunt seals, which are their only reliable source of food. Sea ice coverage has been decreasing since observations began in the mid-twentieth century, and the rate of decline observed in recent years is far greater than previously predicted.

Finally, global warming will raise ocean levels due to meltwater from glaciers and the greater volume of warmer water. Shorelines will be inundated, reducing island size, which will have an effect on some species, and a number of islands will disappear entirely. Additionally, the gradual melting and subsequent refreezing of the poles, glaciers, and higher elevation mountains—a cycle that has provided freshwater to environments for centuries—will also be jeopardized. This could result in an overabundance of salt water and a shortage of fresh water.