We’ve reached a sad milestone: Climate change has claimed its first mammal species. Scientists have been warning us that a large percentage of species will face extinction thanks to manmade global warming, and the future is unfortunately here.
According to The Guardian, climate change’s first mammal victim was an adorable rodent known as the Bramble Cay melomys. Sometimes called a mosaic-tailed rat, the melomys was named after Bramble Cay, an Australian island close to Papua New Guinea, that was the only known home for the species.
We’ve reached a sad milestone: Climate change has claimed its first mammal species. Scientists have been warning us that a large percentage of species will face extinction thanks to manmade global warming, and the future is unfortunately here.
According to The Guardian, climate change’s first mammal victim was an adorable rodent known as the Bramble Cay melomys. Sometimes called a mosaic-tailed rat, the melomys was named after Bramble Cay, an Australian island close to Papua New Guinea, that was the only known home for the species.
The primary reason for the melomys demise is no secret: the rising level of the ocean, a devastating consequence of climate change. Bramble Cay island has flooded on multiple occasions when the sea was particularly high, thereby washing away the rodents’ homes and drowning many of them in the process.
Over the past 20 years, high tide has put more and more of the island underwater. The coastal vegetation that the melomys called home has decreased by 97 percent in the last decade alone.
When we discuss the consequences of a rising sea level (which is already not as often as we probably should), we tend to focus on the human inhabitants who will need to be displaced from their tiny island nations. We pay less attention to the animal species that are vulnerable from the rapidly shifting sea levels, some of which can be found in no other parts of the world.
Scientists last recorded seeing the melomys back in 2009. In 2014, they couldn’t locate a single one, so they conducted an exhaustive search to check on the animal’s status. As the search has turned up fruitless after two years, scientists now think it’s fair to say that the rodent species is extinct.
Extinction seemed farfetched when Europeans first wrote about the “large rats” they encountered in 1845. At the time, they were allegedly everywhere on the island. An informal census on the creature in 1978 found several hundred melomys still in existence.
Although scientists will no longer “recommend” actions for people to take in order to protect the melomys, there are still plenty of reasons to try to safeguard Bramble Cay from further effects of climate change. The island is a place where various types of seabirds breed and, perhaps most importantly, the top spot where green turtles go to mate.
Continue reading at ENN affiliate, Care2.
Image credit: Ian Bell, EHP, State of Queensland
