Science. Animals are dying faster than thought. We are facing the ‘sixth mass extinction’

The results of the latest research were published in the journal Biological Reviews on Monday. An international team of biologists from Northern Ireland and Uruguay analyzed the population dynamics of over 71,000 people. animal species representing all five groups of vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish) and insects. The result turned out to be alarming: it was found that animals are dying out much faster than previously thought, and the number of as many as 48 percent. species is decreasing. Only 3% of the population is growing. species.

According to the authors of the study, their discovery leads to a “growing consensus that life on Earth enters the sixth mass extinction periodThere have already been five mass extinctions of species on Earth in the last half a billion years. The first occurred at the end of the Ordovician, about 444 million years ago, the last so far, the fifth – at the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago. In the mass extinction, about 3/4 of the plant and animal species on our planet became extinct.

How does the new sixth extinction differ from the previous ones, according to scientists? “It is the first directly caused by one species: man” – the researchers note. For example the fifth extinction, the Cretaceous, has been determined by scientists to have been significantly influenced by an asteroidwhich struck near the present-day city of Chicxulub.

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Biologists then looked at animals that are not considered to be in danger of extinction but are declining rapidly, co-author Daniel Pincheira-Donoso of Queen’s University Belfast told CNN. Putting the problem in this way led scientists to the conclusion that as many as 33 percent. of species classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in the Red List of Threatened Species as “not threatened” are in fact already threatened with extinction.

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