Climate change casualty
Years ago, the small, rat-like rodents could be seen scurrying across the sand and coral rubble on Bramble Cay.
Fishermen would sometimes see them while visiting the island in the Great Barrier Reef. As mackerel fisherman Egon Stewart told Queensland scientists in a 2016 report, around 2009 there was ‘‘a heap of sticks and a smashed-up dugout canoe at the northwestern end of the island’’. When Stewart flipped over the pile, a few of the furry critters took flight.
Researchers believe this was the last time anyone saw a Bramble Cay melomys.
They had suspected for a while that the Melomys rubicola had become the first mammal to go extinct because of human-made climate change – and now the Australian government has confirmed it.
Environment Minister Melissa Price said the Melomys rubicola had been moved from the ‘‘endangered’’ category to the ‘‘extinct’’ category – confirming what Queensland scientists had concluded some years ago. The Queensland state government made the same determination in 2016.
Geoffrey Richardson, assistant secretary in the Department of the Environment and Energy, said that for the past five years, researchers had been unable to find melomys on Bramble Cay, nestled in the Torres Strait.
Greens Senator Janet Rice, who is leading a Senate inquiry into Australia’s threatened species crisis, said the news was a ‘‘huge tragedy’’.
The 2016 report said that between 2004 and 2014, the amount of leafy plants on Bramble Cay shrank by 97 per cent, probably due to rising seas that swept over the island during storms and high tides. Bramble Cay rises no more than three metres above sea level. Without plants providing food and shelter, the scientists believe, the rodents succumbed to local extinction. – Washington Post