(ORDO NEWS) — Researchers from Germany have come to the conclusion that endemic animals living on the islands are much more at risk of extinction than their mainland counterparts.
An important role in this is played by the anthropogenic factor.
The islands, as you know, are considered a kind of “evolution laboratories”: the most unique species of living organisms develop there – dwarfs and giants.
Both those and others evolve in the conditions of a closed ecosystem of the island, therefore, they acquire specific features. They become not like relatives living on the mainland.
This is the case, for example, for extinct animals such as the pygmy mammoth and hippopotamus or the Sardinian giant otter.
On the islands, small species, as a rule, become larger, while large ones, on the contrary, become smaller.
Island whims of evolution touched at one time, probably even our relatives – Homo floresiensis, a species of dwarf people who lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia, nicknamed hobbits for their small stature.
Scientists from the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) have studied such species in detail.
The authors of the study estimated the evolution of body size in island mammals by combining data on 1,231 extant and 350 extinct species from 182 islands (including those that later became part of the mainland) around the world over the past 23 million years.
The researchers showed that those species that, in the process of island evolution, significantly changed the size of their body, were more likely to be threatened with extinction.
However, for giant species, the risk of extinction was higher than for dwarfs.
Scientists were able to identify an additional factor contributing to extinction – anthropogenic. The researchers found a clear correlation between the disappearance of island species and the arrival of people in these areas.
If sapiens came to the islands , the rate of extinction of endemic mammals there increased by more than 10 times.
Nevertheless, scientists do not exclude that some environmental factors, for example, climate change, played a role in these processes.
Strongly changed island species are, in principle, more prone to extinction than more “established” mainland ones, therefore, according to the researchers, current endemic animals are also in danger.
Moreover, many of them are already on the verge of extinction.
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