Humanity killing off Earth's wildlife
Nearly three-fifths of all animals with a backbone -- fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals -- have been wiped out since 1970 by human appetites and activity, according to a grim study released yesterday.
On current trends, that plunge in stocks of global wildlife could extend to two-thirds by 2020, an annual decline of two percent, conservation group WWF and the Zoological Society of London warned in their joint biennial Living Planet report.
There is no mystery as to why: our own ever-expanding species -- which has more than doubled in number since 1960 to 7.4 billion -- is simply eating, crowding and poisoning its planetary cohabitants out of existence.
Victims include gorillas and orangutans, rhinos and elephants, tigers and snow leopards but also faceless species such as corals, a crucial cornerstone not only of marine life but also coastal human communities.
Swathes of coral reef around the globe have already turned white, killed by warming waters, pollution and disease.
The findings are based on long-term monitoring of some 3,700 vertebrate species spread across more than 14,000 distinct populations.
Scientists have tracked changes in the size of those populations, not how many species are threatened with extinction.
But the news on that front is not good either: experts now agree that Earth has entered only the sixth "mass extinction event" -- when species vanish at least 1,000 faster than usual -- in the last half-billion years.
Freshwater environments such as lakes, rivers and wetlands have fared the worst, with an 81 percent decline in average population size between 1970 and 2012 for 881 species monitored. Marine and land vertebrates populations dropped 36 and 38 percent respectively over the same period.
Factory fishing has emptied the seas of 40 percent of sea life, and nine out of 10 fisheries in the world are either over- or full-fished today.
On land, the big threats are loss of land to agriculture and cities, followed by rampant hunting, mostly for food but also for commerce -- much of it in endangered species.
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