Climate change wipes out rare Australian rodent

FEW people would have heard of the existence – and the extinction – of the Bramble Cay melomys. The little-known rodent lived a lonely life on a tiny four-hectare coral island until rising tides caused by climate change wiped it off the face of the Earth.

Believed to be the only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier Reef, it was last seen in 2009, but will be recorded in the doomsday records as the first mammal species to go extinct because of the impacts of climate change.

“I can say that we have our first almost-certain mammal extinction from climate change,” explains Wendy Foden, chairwoman of the Species Survival Commission’s climate change specialist group at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Climate change, says Foden, is widely recognised to be one of the greatest challenges of our time, and species and ecosystems everywhere are already being impacted.

“Corals are seeing unprecedented bleaching and die-off.

“Ecological communities are experiencing shuffling of species compromising them, with species moving their ranges towards the poles and higher elevations and cooler ones moving in.

“We’re seeing population dieoffs; disconnection of inter-spe- cies interactions; changes in sex ratios of populations; shifts in the timing of key events such as migration, budding, breeding; physiological stress leading to direct mortality or to increased disease susceptibility or predation. These are just a few of the processes.”

Climate change interacts with and often exacerbates other threats such as habitat loss, invasive species, over-exploitation and disease.

“In fact, humans adapting to climate change can become an additional climate change stressor to species, for example by building hydroelectric dams, growing biofuels and planting forests in places that weren’t previously forests.”

Over the past two years, Foden, a senior researcher at the Department of Botany and Zoology at Stellenbosch University, led the process for the first IUCN guidelines for assessing species’ vulnerability to climate change, which were recently launched.

The IUCN says these “can be used for any species, from polar bears to puffins and wildflowers”.

The group is a collaboration of experts on climate change and biodiversity, including 30 prominent experts from locations ranging from Costa Rica, Norway, South Africa – Foden and local professor Guy Midgley, a climate change expert – the US, China and Australia.