An isolated rodent that lived on a single island located off the coast of Australia has become the first mammal to become extinct as a direct result of global climate change, a team of researchers from the University of Queensland have confirmed in a report released this week.
In their new study, researchers at the university and colleagues from Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection jointly reported that Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola) had indeed vanished from their home in the eastern Torres Strait of the Great Barrier Reef, making it the first mammalian species to succumb to the Earth’s warming climate.
According to National Geographic, the melomys had last been spotted by a fisherman back in 2009, and failed attempts to trap one five years later proved unsuccessful, prompting speculation among scientists that the creature had become extinct. The long-tailed, whiskered rodent, which was the only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier Reef, was purportedly wiped out because of rising sea levels linked to manmade climate change, the New York Times added.
“The key factor responsible for the death of the Bramble Cay melomys is almost certainly high tides and surging seawater, which has traveled inland across the island,” Queensland researcher and study co-author Luke Leung told the newspaper via telephone. “The seawater has destroyed the animal’s habitat and food source.”
“We knew something had to be first, but this is still stunning news,” added Lee Hannah, a senior scientist for climate change biology with Conservation International who told Nat Geo that up to one-fifth of all species could be at risk of extinction due to climate change-related loss of habitat. “Certainly some species will benefit from climate change, but most will see reduced ranges.”
While gone from Bramble Cay, the creature may live on elsewhere
Also called the mosaic-tailed rat, the melomys species was named after the island which it called home, a small atoll that was at most 10 feet (3 meters) above sea level and was named, what else, Bramble Cay, Nat Geo noted. They were first spotted in 1845, and as of 1978, several hundred of the creatures lived on the island, according to the website.
Since 1998, however, rising sea levels have slowly started swallowing up the land, reducing the amount of land sitting above high tide from 9.8 acres (4 hectares) to 6.2 acres (2.5 hectares). As a result, less vegetation had been growing there, and leaving the rodents with just three percent of their original habitat. Now, scientists have recommended changing its status from endangered to extinct, which would make it the first mammalian casualty of global warming.
University of California, Berkeley professor and climate change expert Anthony D. Barnosky called the loss of the melomys “a cogent example of how climate change provides the coup de grâce to already critically endangered species,” telling the Times that it “is significant because it illustrates how the human-caused extinction process works in real time.”
There is a glimmer of hope for the creature, though: according to the CBC, while the report does indicate that the species is most likely extinct, as it was believed to have existed only on Bramble Cay, the authors do indicate that there is a slight chance that the species – or a close relative – are still alive and well in the Fly River delta of Papua New Guinea, which is thought to be the region from which the ancestors of the Bramble Cay melomys originated.
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Image credit: Queensland government
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