Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Claims are flying that Global Warming has claimed its first mammal, a kind of rat which used to live on just one small island in the Cyclone prone Torres Strait, off the Northern coast of Australia.
Human-caused climate change appears to have driven the Great Barrier Reef’s only endemic mammal species into the history books, with the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent that lives on a tiny island in the eastern Torres Strait, being completely wiped-out from its only known location.
It is also the first recorded extinction of a mammal anywhere in the world thought to be primarily due to human-caused climate change.
An expert says this extinction is likely just the tip of the iceberg, with climate change exerting increasing pressures on species everywhere.
The rodent, also called the mosaic-tailed rat, was only known to live on Bramble Cay a small coral cay, just 340m long and 150m wide off the north coast of Queensland, Australia, which sits at most 3m above sea level.
It had the most isolated and restricted range of any Australian mammal, and was considered the only mammal species endemic to the Great Barrier Reef.
When its existence was first recorded by Europeans in 1845, it was seen in high density on the island, with sailors reporting they shot the “large rats” with bows and arrows. In 1978, it was estimated there were several hundred on the small island.
But the melomys were last seen in 2009, and after an extensive search for the animal in 2014, a report has recommended its status be changed from “endangered” to “extinct”.
Calling the dead rats a victim of “climate” seems a bit of a stretch. A small population species which precariously clings to existence on a tiny spit of low lying land in the middle of Australia’s Cyclone Alley was never destined to survive for long.
From the Australian Government Website;
There are three threats to the species. Firstly, there is only the single known population of the species and searches on other cays and in adjacent areas of New Guinea have failed to discover other populations. Secondly, the cay is prone to inundation from storm surge and other disturbances. Further compounding risk to the species is that the species appears to be inbred. Therefore, resilience of the species to catastrophic events such as cyclones, introductions of weeds or introduced predators, or the arrival of a novel disease, is very low (Curtis et al. 2012 cited in DEHP 2013e).
The most recent survey for the species in 2012 resulted in no animals being recorded. The most recent verified record of the species is from trapping in 2004. It is possible that a catastrophic inundation of the island has already occurred (DEHP 2013e).
Read more: http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=64477
The greatest extinction event observed to date that may be unambiguously assigned to global warming (aka climate change) is extinction of the professional integrity of far too many scientists and journalists.
According to http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=64477
– “this species is also a case study in how the role of natural and largely unpreventable processes, and the high cost of undertaking any recovery actions in such an isolated location, are important considerations when weighing up how and where conservation actions are directed”, note “natural” and “unpreventable”
– it’s not certain that this was a distinct species from the Cape York melomys
– a recovery plan for these animals was published in 2008, so what happened to that plan? Oh wait, “an integrated program of monitoring, on ground management, searches for other populations and raising public awareness.” The plan DIDN’T include captive breeding. 100 individuals left, and no captive breeding plan, an island frequently inundated, “two weed species already present”, … someone WANTED these animals gone.
An island, the smaller the better, is an ideal way first to develop a new species through isolation from the gene pool of related species and then to wipe it out given normal weather variation or introduction of a predator. When people “look for the bodies”, they don’t find many if they can’t count those from islands.
Pretty sure a captive breeding program would have been eminently successful, if in fact they breed like rats!
I’m all in favor of and gladly paid my share of the taxes that went into the ongoing recovery of the Whooping Crane, and the California Condor.
But this rat lookalike on a sandspit, is lunacy. Only thing sillier I’ve ever heard of was a rare fly species that inhabited a region in Southern California, that was scheduled to become divided by a freeway they were building in the area. That would have made two species instead of one, so surely that was a good thing.
But they didn’t want two species of rare flies, so they had to make a ten mile detour around the football field sized piece of land that was home to these flies.
Oh these were very special flies; all eight of them ! Surely each one had a pet name.
Now you give me a class of fifth graders and a gallon of ice cream and some fly swatters, and I will take care of those eight flies for good.
But ten extra miles of freeway, at many megadollars per mile, was their choice over a gallon of ice cream.
Nutz !
G
Snail darters were found in other streams after their protection cost untold billions. The Northern Spotted Owl is at best a subspecies of the Southern SO, but logging the the western PNW was shut down to protect it.
Insanity.
There are several papers suggesting that between 2000 and 5000 years ago, the Pacific Ocean experienced a sea level high stand that was at least 1 meter higher than today. The one small atoll on which these rodents live would have been exterminated if sea level was the issue. Yet these alarmists are erroneously suggesting a 3 inch rise since 1900 extirpated this rodent.
Read LESSA, G. and MASSELINK. G., 2006. Evidence of a mid-Holocene sea level highstand from the sedimentary record of a macrotidal barrier and paleoestuary system in northwestern Australia. Journal of Coastal Research 22(11 100- 112. West Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.
or Dickinson (2012) Paleoshoreline record of relative Holocene sea levels on Pacific islands
The rodent probably floated out to the cay after the high stand of the Holocene Climatic Optimum. Five thousand years is plenty of time for a rodent population to evolve the minor differences it displays from the Cape York melomys on the mainland.
Ummmm, so Rats are good or bad?
Think about that. Just sayin……….
Assuming this is true and the brand of rats is gone….
…how can we even know that it’s a distinct specie?
…why would we care whether it’s a distinct specie?
…why would we care when species with a tiny territory and no ecological significance disappear?
The Bramble Cay melomys was probably best classified as a subspecies of the Cape York melomys. It showed some protein differences and sported a coarser tail due to elevated scales.
The “Old Endemic” rodents of Australia had evolved there since the Miocene or possibly Pliocene in some cases. The “New Endemics” arrived during the Pleistocene. The recently introduced rats, mice and squirrels are invasive and have caused problems. The Cape York and Bramble Cay melomyses are old endemic species.
It’s unclear if sea level rise caused the apparent demise of the Bramble Cay variety. It’s perfectly clear that humans had little if anything to do with the purported sea level rise.
Pure propaganda.
Here is the PSMSL record for change in sea level near the rat’s atoll. Not much change.
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.monthly.plots/1300.png
And how much of a local warming ? Any ?
“And worse for the melomys, they lost 97% of their habitat in just 10 years”
Ah, the magic 97% again. Whenever you want someone to believe something, just claim 97%. It doesn’t matter if you are pushing AGW doom or trying to sell cat food or toothpaste, it’s the magic claimed statistic you can apply to anyone incapable of logical thought or ability or willingness to ask questions. It’s amazing how many times a week you notice the application of 97% when applied to selling you something these days.
Could it be that in their isolation they mutated, gained intelligence, learned to read; and became “alarmed” over the Guardian stories of sea level rise and migrated?
michael
Perhaps it was an overzealous Albertan visiting the atoll that caused the extirpation?
http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agdex3441
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0331_030331_rats.html
Siants slithers on . .
The rat moved to Canberra and is now an Australian Federal politician.
That is a nasty thing to say.
About the rodent, that is.
This just in (my mailbox this morning): Announcement for csicon Las Vegas 27-30 october, sponsored by the Center for Inquiry and the Skeptical inquirer: the magazine for science and reason. Surely these skeptics will have the expertise to debunk this theory. Or maybe not. Michael E. Mann is listed as a speaker from 2:30-3:00pm on the second day. He is the second speaker after lunch, so everyone should be asleep by then.
The skeptics society don’t do climate skepticism – they gave ace psychic debunker James Randi a hard time when he strayed off narrative.
http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/806-i-am-not-qdenyingq-anything.html
I agree with you, Mr.Worrall. I subscribed to the magazine for a year to see what the self-proclaimed skeptics had to say about AGW and all I saw were some pathetic surveys of the science journal articles to “confirm” the 97% agreement claim. The Amazing Randi is also speaking at the conference. As I said in a post in another thread, the professional skeptics are all devout congregants of the Church of AGW.
I am not a biologist, but I know a little about the problems of classifying variants and sub-species within a group.
If it is a sub species or variant of other Cape York Melomys (Melomys rubicola — Bramble Cay Melomys), then technically it may not be a ‘separate’ species at all, depending of course on classification.
Biologists can sometimes get too enthusiastic when classifying a ‘species’, which are really much the same as other variants. They sometimes do this of course to claim more species, for various reasons. The Australian dingo for example, is sometimes claimed to be a separate ‘species’ of dog, despite it being just like a wild ordinary dog, morphologically it’s the same as any other dogs, it interbreeds with other dogs, and is really a sub-species at best, if at all.
Splitters tend to beat out lumpers because every time a biologist describes a formerly nondescript organism, he or she wants it to be a new species.
So the Eastern Elk went extinct. Well actually, the last one; him or her, just never ran into any ordinary western elk, her or him, in time.
If Maura Massachusetts want some new elk, we can ship her a bunch of ours from California.
Same damn thing as the one she ran out of town.
G
If Google Earth has it right (big if) then Bramble Cay is 230km from Cape York and 57km from the PNG mainland. Don’t think the rats got there by swimming. Maybe on flood debris? The Cay is right in front of the estuary of the Fly River. So their habitat could conceivably have been affected by the (ongoing) Ok Tedi disaster.
A species of rat is extinct, and if we don’t stop global warming, all the rats in the world may die. Sounds awful.
‘… the melomys were last seen in 2009, and after an extensive search for the animal in 2014, a report has recommended its status be changed from “endangered” to “extinct” …’ (The Guardian).
====================================
If they were on an “endangered” list, so precious and their habitat so precarious why weren’t a number trapped and transported to Papua New Guinea where they are alleged to have come from originally and probably still exist?
Maybe the little critters on the island had to be sacrificed to serve a ‘higher cause’.
The CAGW hypothesis will likely become extinct in 5~7 years….
Perhaps CAGW alarmists should now change their mascot from the polar bear (whose numbers are INCREASING) to this extinct rat.
Their habitat sounds to be about the right size to be swept clean of all life by the wake of a medium sized research vessel.
Maybe I should have checked the log of the “Rainbow Warrior”… 🙂
Rainbow Warrior is underwater too. They made a scuba diving reef out of it. Much more valuable now that its under water.
We still hate the frogs for doing that. Next time they get themselves in a fix, do not call US for help.
G
“We still hate the frogs for doing that.”
Who are “we”?
3 metres high, a couple of hectares, fishermen used to let their dogs onto the island to hunt the melomys, and something pretty bad seems to have happened to the vegetation.
@Danny Thomas at 6:23 pm
Here’s the report:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/90071372/bramble-cay-melomys-survey-report.pdf
https://db.tt/50yDWGWJ
I was a bit surprised at the number of times “climate change” was dragged up in the report, until I discovered whose assistance they acknowledged – Tim Flannery.
10 minutes reading of the report reveals some interesting unreported details. The devil is always in the details.
Apparently wild dogs eat them, and are brought to the island periodically. From the report.
“Direct mortality of Bramble Cay melomys individuals due to predation by domestic dogs brought
ashore from fishing vessels (A. Moller-Nielsen pers. comm.) and hunting by visiting indigenous
people from Papua New Guinea (A. Ketchell pers. comm.) would have contributed to pressures on
this isolated rodent population”.
You think?
It may not be extinct. It might occur on other places, including the PNG mainland.
“the possibility that the species occurs elsewhere on islands in the Torres Strait deserves serious
consideration”.
“Together, these observations and associated evidence suggest a New Guinean origin of the Bramble
Cay melomys is not only plausible but perhaps the more likely of the two hypotheses.”
Did they look properly on PNG.? Apparently not.
“However, a possibility exists that the Bramble Cay melomys occurs in the Fly River delta area of
southern New Guinea and so, until this area is adequately surveyed, it may be premature to formally
declare the species extinct.”
This kind of sloppy journalism wouldn’t past muster in any other field except within environmentalism, for reasons that are obscure to me.
It gets worse folks. Paul Ehrlich and his fellow doomsters are claiming that, thanks to man, we are now in the 6th mass extinction event, the last one being 65 mya – the one that took out the dinosaurs. And of course, “manmade climate change” is a big part of it. These people are mentally ill.
I’d call it ” Criminally insane ”
g
Look Fellers and smart, Whatever? send a pied piper to
Sante Fe Texas and I will let them collect as many of the four species of rats that run around.
Tell them I will serve bar-b-q brisket, fresh pickled okra, blackberry honey mead, and homemade cheesecake with clementine orange marmalade.
The rat’s kinda cute, but it’s still A RAT! We won’t miss it regardless of how it disappeared, if it even did disappear. Talk about stupid, insipid, transparent propaganda!
The first three words, , are the product of anti-science or ignorance or Post Modern Science, your choice. Everything that follows is to feed speculation. So under the guise of climate, let’s by all means have a dialog about the rodents. Rats!
First three words: “human-caused climate change”. Lesson: don’t use angle brakets for quotation marks.
Why this matters at all is beyond me, I have been living my life quite nicely without even knowing if this rat existed. Apparently most if not all of humanity survived very nicely prior to 1845 not know this rat existed.