Did you know that of every 3 mammal species that goes extinct around the world, 1 of these is Australian?
Since European settlement, 30 species of Australian mammals have faded into extinction. When you include birds, reptiles and amphibians, this number sky rockets to well over 100 species being wiped out.
This is an insane number of species. How is this even possible?
Causing a species to go extinct is actually easier than you might think, and it happens far too often due to our own carelessness. In Australia the main causes include:
Habitat loss - Due to logging and land clearing, a lot of the habitat that these species called home has been lost or repurposed to fit our needs.
Invasive predators - Feral cats and foxes have decimated many populations of smaller species. For example, feral cats kills an estimated 75 million native animals every night across Australia, a loss that many species are unable to recover from.
Other invasive species - these include weeds, feral herbivores and species such as the cane toad which have significantly changed our ecosystem and reduced the amount of available resources for native species.
Fires - Over time due to human interference, there has been a change in fire regimes causing an increase in the severity and extent of wildfires which many species are unable to withstand.
But this is just the beginning of the issue. Not only have we driven many species to extinction, we are still doing it. At present, according to the IUCN, Australia has 96 critically endangered animal species. This means that these species, which include the northern hairy nosed wombat and the orange bellied parrot, are either facing an extremely high risk of extinction, or have numbers which decreased (or will decrease) by 80% within three generations. Some of these species may already be extinct.
But this doesn’t even begin to cover the scale of the problem. The IUCN red list hasn’t been updated for a few years and there are several other Australian species very near extinction that have not yet been recognised as critically endangered. One such species is Victoria’s own faunal emblem, the Leadbeater’s Possum. The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires destroyed approximately 42% of the possum’s habitat, halving the wild population to only 1500 individuals. This number gets smaller every year due to continued industrial clear felling in their habitat. It is common consensus amongst scientists who study this species that the Leadbeater’s Possum may not survive the next couple of decades if drastic action isn’t taken, but the classification, which hasn’t been updated since 2008, doesn’t reflect this fact and little is being done to protect the species.
Most of Australia’s wildlife is found on no other place on earth. Over 80% of our mammals, reptiles and frogs are unique to Australia, and are incredibly important to maintaining our rare and beautiful ecosystems.
It’s up to us to protect these amazing and unique species, and we can’t do it without you.
Visit the Australian Wildlife Conservancy here: http://www.australianwildlife.org/support-awc.aspx to find out more about what you can do to help save some of our amazing Australian wildlife and put a stop to the extinctions.
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