Species Extinction Essay,Introduction
WebJan 21, · �� Top Ideas for an Essay about Extinction The Circumstances that Led to the Extinction of Dinosaurs We Must Save The Great White Shark From Extinction WebThe Extinction of Species. Guides. It is not a secret that the ecological situation on our planet is rather complicated. Apart from the common worries about global warming, WebExtinction is a topic of great ecological importance because of its effects on biodiversity. Many recent studies focused on the conservation of species have put great effort into WebAug 25, · Scientists have concluded that many species of plants, animals, birds, and insects disappear a thousand times faster compared to natural rates. It means that the WebThese extinctions are quite different from the rate of extinction, which occurs even when the diversity of life is increasing. Many species vanished from many ways of mass ... read more
Humans contribute a great amount to this pandemic. A prime example is that of the dodo bird, which was famously hunted into extinction. Around 20, species are currently listed as threatened by extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature IUCN. The thousands of traffic accidents they cause cost billions of dollars each year. There are 20 to 30 million deer right now and 12 million are born every year and if there were no more hunters within 5 years there would be around million deer most likely causing around 3 times as many deaths and traffic accidents. Should Animals be used for Scientific or Commercial Testing?
Introduction Can you imagine over , animals dying every year due to animal testing? Animal testing has been going on since BC. Home Flashcards Create Flashcards Essays Essay Topics Language and Plagiarism Checks. Essays Essays FlashCards. Sign in. Flashcard Dashboard Essay Dashboard Essay Settings Sign Out. Home Page Endangered Species Extinction Essay. Endangered Species Extinction Essay Decent Essays. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Related Documents Improved Essays. Essay On De-Extinction Words 4 Pages. Essay On De-Extinction. Improved Essays.
Read More. Great Essays. Anthropogenic Causes Words 6 Pages. Anthropogenic Causes. Zoos Are Bad For Animals Words 4 Pages. Zoos Are Bad For Animals. Superior Essays. Why Do We Need To Keep Endangered Species Essay Words 6 Pages. Why Do We Need To Keep Endangered Species Essay. Species Extinction Research Paper Words 7 Pages. Species Extinction Research Paper. How Does Climate Change Affect Animals? Endangered Animals: The Javan Rhino Words 6 Pages. Endangered Animals: The Javan Rhino. Endangered Species Ethics Essay Words 4 Pages. Endangered Species Ethics Essay. Arguments For Gun Control Words 5 Pages. Arguments For Gun Control. Ecologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believe the two species that would be especially reasonable to resurrect are the woolly mammoth, the last of which died about years ago, and the passenger pigeon, a gray bird with a red breast, once common all over North America and, which had gone extinct in early s.
Both of these species were functionally unique species strongly affecting their environments, so their vanishing had changed the ecosystems they lived in as well. In their turn, the passenger pigeons were extremely important for the forests they lived in as well ScienceMag. Reviving these two species will likely solve a number of ecological problems in an effective and quick way. As it can be see, mass extinction is not something that had never happened before on Earth. There are ways, however, to slow down or even turn back the processes of extinction; one of them, the more traditional one, is the reintroduction of cage-bred species to their natural environments. The other more advanced one involves the most recent advancements in genetics, and will probably allow scientists to resurrect animals believed to have gone extinct forever.
Thus, there is still hope for planet Earth. Follow us on Reddit for more insights and updates. Remember Me. Is English your native language? Yes No. What is your profession? Student Teacher Writer Other. Username or Email. Works Cited: National Research Council US Committee on Scientific Issues in the Endangered Species Act. National Library of Medicine, n. National Geographic Society, n. essay about life , essay about nature , science essay. Related Writing Guides There are three main types of expository essays: scholarly writing used mainly for academic purposes, which describes or examines a process in a comprehensive way; analyzing a concept, which describes and explores a written work or an event; also, exposi Login Username Password Remember Me.
Extinction—the permanent disappearance of a species from the earth—can be thought of as the ultimate social problem. When our neighbors disappear from the planet forever, our potential social interactions are forever diminished. Extinction is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is the current rate of extinction, which is dramatically higher than any in the geologic record, and the fact that for the first time ever, a single species—our own—is the cause of this high rate of extinction. This is why extinction represents a serious social and environmental problem. Just as every person will die someday, so too will every species eventually go extinct. In fact, almost all species that have ever existed on earth have already gone extinct.
Paleontologist David Raup has estimated that More complex unicellular life—formed of eukaryotic cells, those with cell nuclei and organelles—began to appear approximately 2 billion years ago. More recognizable, larger multicellular forms of life—fishes, plants, and the like—began proliferating about million years ago at the start of the Paleozoic era. Throughout the history of the Earth, species have arisen and faded like the blossoming and wilting of generations of flowers. Even though extinction is inevitable, species have different fates. Some morph into new, better-adapted species, becoming the ancestors of vital living lines.
Others find themselves in evolutionary dead ends, the last of their kind. The interaction of living species with the ever-changing environments on Earth, through the process of natural selection, creates ever-better-adapted organisms, usually resulting in greater diversity of life. While extinction is almost as old as life, it has not always occurred at a uniform rate. In general, though, new species have been generating much more rapidly than old ones have been going extinct. Creation, then, has generally been outpacing loss. Accordingly, biological diversity on this planet is higher than ever before.
Two of these have drawn special attention from biologists. The abruptness of this massive change in life forms had long been recognized, because of fossil evidence, but had long puzzled scientists. Evidence suggests that this mass extinction was precipitated when a meteorite approximately 6 miles 10 kilometers wide struck the planet, in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, causing enormous climatic and habitat shifts. The Permian extinction crisis represented the closest brush that life on earth ever had with total annihilation.
The history of extinction is usually examined through study of marine animal fossils. When looking so far in the past, biologists tend to focus on organisms at the level of the family—two steps more general than species in the hierarchy of biological taxonomy—because they can have greater confidence in their conclusions about this more general grouping. During the other four mass extinction crises, roughly 12 percent of marine animal families went extinct, but during the Permian, well over half the families disappeared. Extrapolations suggest that this represents somewhere between 77 percent and 96 percent of species lost. It took almost million years for species diversity to regain previous levels. But of course these were new species.
One of the starkest realities of extinction is that it is truly for-ever—once a species and its complex genetic coding is lost, it will never be seen again. What is of concern today is that humans have initiated the sixth great extinction crisis in the history of the planet. While this point is occasionally argued in popular media, there is remarkable scientific consensus that this rate of extinction is much higher than anything seen in the fossil record. It is difficult to be exact, of course, when predicting the future. And predicting extinction is especially challenging because the vast majority of species have yet to be described. Approximately 1. Well-reasoned estimates range from approximately 5 to over million species on earth today. Why such confusion? Because Western science emerged from Europe and North America, the temperate zones have been studied much more carefully than other parts of the world.
Certain habitats have only recently begun to be explored—the canopies of tropical rain forests, for example, and deep-sea thermal vents. As it turns out, these new biological frontiers are, in many cases, immensely more diverse than anything in Europe or North America. Also, certain groups of organisms—vertebrate animals, especially—are relatively well-known, whereas many other groups are just now being discovered. In some cases, we are losing species before we even know they exist. One poignant example: In two botanists visited a ridge in Ecuador and found almost 90 species of plants that were known from nowhere else. Within 8 years the ridge had been cleared for agriculture, and most of those species were gone forever. If not for that one visit, we would be ignorant of this loss.
In spite of these predictive challenges, many scientists have attempted to predict the short- and long-term future of extinction. Harvard biologist E. Actually, all these estimates are remarkably similar: All declare that the current extinction trend is at least an order of magnitude higher than ever before, and all estimates are based on conservative assumptions on numbers of species and optimistic assumptions on crucial changes in human behavior patterns. Thus the reality could be worse. Not only is the future hard to predict in relation to extinction, but the recent past can elude certainty as well. For one thing, it is difficult to know exactly when a species has gone extinct.
Nevertheless, biologists do their best to maintain records of species loss. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List—an authoritative database of loss and endangerment—documents a minimum of extinctions since Alarmingly, the rate of loss increased dramatically in the most recent century. Why do species go extinct? While some species have been directly and intentionally exploited, the most common cause of extinction is destruction or fragmentation of habitat. Certain characteristics of species predispose them to be more vulnerable to extinction. Species with more general food and habitat preferences are able to adapt to environmental changes—including those induced by humans—more readily than specialists.
Species with limited geographic ranges, such as islands, are at special risk. In fact, 75 percent of the animal species that have gone extinct in the past 4 centuries were island dwellers. Species that specialize in a particular habitat become vulnerable when people desire that habitat. Many species from the prairies of the North American Midwest, for example, almost all of which have been plowed under for large-scale agriculture, have either gone extinct or hang on in remaining shreds of prairie—in pioneer cemeteries and along remote roadsides. Passenger pigeons were once the most abundant bird in North America; individual flocks, numbering millions of individuals, were known to darken the sky at midday.
Their extinction would have been unthinkable to early settlers. Yet the pigeons relied on extensive tracts of eastern deciduous forest; once these forests were cleared away for settlement and agriculture, they did not last long. Some species are victims of direct hunting and persecution; those that taste good or scare us are especially vulnerable. Some species, especially large predators such as bears and mountain lions, have problems because they require large areas to roam. Some species are vulnerable for several of these reasons. Wolves, for example, require large home ranges of relatively wild country, and they have been persecuted for centuries because people consider them fearsome beasts.
Whatever the initial causes of endangerment, when a population becomes very small, it becomes especially susceptible to extinction. Small populations are more likely to inbreed mating between closely related individuals , which can accentuate harmful genetic traits as was seen in some European royal families. And unpredictable events, such as forest fires or hurricanes, can be catastrophic for a species with only a few individuals. As terrible as wars, injustice, and poverty are, no form of human violence and indiscretion will have such long-lasting and irreversible consequences as the extinction of species from our planet. As Wilson has pointed out, this is the only human-caused problem that will take literally millions of years to compensate, and then only incompletely.
The forms of life we lose will never come back, a folly for which Wilson believes our descendants will be least likely to forgive us. His calculations, described earlier in this entry, on extinction rates work out to a prediction of losing 10 to 25 percent of the species in the world in the next 50 to years. This relatively conservative prediction is based on an assumption of stabilizing human population and reducing excessive consumption in developed nations. Without achieving those laudable goals, the losses will be much greater, perhaps even worse than losing a quarter of the species in the world in the next two human generations.
Why does this matter? Foremost is the simple tragedy of so much loss. Forms of life that evolved over the course of millions of years, through the interactive forge of natural selection, have an intrinsic right to exist for their own sakes. More pragmatically, the loss of biodiversity creates both direct and indirect problems for humanity. Biodiversity has several types of instrumental utilitarian value for people. It directly provides goods, such as food, medicines, fuel, and fiber. It also provides ecosystem services—for example, climate regulation, pollination of crops, and fixation and cycling of crucial chemical elements. Without these services, life on earth as we know it would cease to exist. Moreover, wild species hold information of untold usefulness to humans—potential templates for genetic engineering and future medicines, for example.
For this reason, environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott has likened the mindless destruction of biodiversity to book burning. For all these reasons, a world of human-hastened extinction of species is a tragically diminished world. But because humans are the cause of this problem, we are also the source of solutions. This example Extinction Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in. Essay Examples. Essays on Controversial Topics. ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER Always on-time.
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The Extinction of Species,Persuasive Essay On Coral Bleaching
WebThe Extinction of Species. Guides. It is not a secret that the ecological situation on our planet is rather complicated. Apart from the common worries about global warming, WebAug 25, · Scientists have concluded that many species of plants, animals, birds, and insects disappear a thousand times faster compared to natural rates. It means that the WebThese extinctions are quite different from the rate of extinction, which occurs even when the diversity of life is increasing. Many species vanished from many ways of mass WebThe Holocene Extinction is thought to have started around 10, BCE and is cause mostly by human interference. When an animal or plant is seen to be at risk of becoming WebJan 21, · �� Top Ideas for an Essay about Extinction The Circumstances that Led to the Extinction of Dinosaurs We Must Save The Great White Shark From Extinction WebExtinction is a topic of great ecological importance because of its effects on biodiversity. Many recent studies focused on the conservation of species have put great effort into ... read more
These species, along with many others have gone extinct over the course of time and now only fossils remain. The rate of extinction seems to keep escalating as time passes as well. Dinosaur basis of mass extinction theory do not give plausible explanation for extraterrestrial bodies since they occurred only once during the period […]. Argumentative Essay-It's Time To Stop Big Game Hunting Words 2 Pages When a certain species is removed from their ecosystem, it can have effects on their prey and their predators. Review of Literature Issue: The rapid increase in the extinction rate of plant and animal species has proven to be a massive issue regarding biodiversity loss. Even though, environmental change is still the primary root for the extinction of organisms, but now the process of extinction is accelerated by human modernization and development and activity. Explains that many scientists express negative comments about de-extinction and the use of cloning to complete the process.
Register Lost your password? Information gained by understanding extinction of one species can provide insights into conservation methods designed for another species in order to prevent the extinction of that species. Pros And Cons Of Actitis Hypoleucos Words 3 Pages. It is crucial to note that the extinction of species and populations as a result of unconstraint processes is natural, essay on extinction of species. According to the World.
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