Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A deceased rat “species” composed of the inbred descendants of a few castaway rats which washed up on a low laying river delta island in Australia’s Cyclone Alley is our warning about the coming great climate change extinction.
‘Our little brown rat’: first climate change-caused mammal extinction
The Morrison government has formally recognised the extinction of a tiny island rodent, the Bramble Cay melomys – the first known demise of a mammal because of human-induced climate change.
The changed status of the Melomys rubicola from the government’s “endangered” to “extinct” category was included without fanfare in a statement released by federal Environment Minister Melissa Price late on Monday.
…
The limited range of the animal, living on a five-hectare island less than three metres high, left it vulnerable to climate change. However, its 2008 “recovery plan”, drawn up when numbers were likely down to just dozens of individuals, downplayed the risks.
“[T]he likely consequences of climate change, including sea-level rise and increase in the frequency and intensity of tropical storms, are unlikely to have any major impact on the survival of the Bramble Cay melomys in the life of this plan,” the five-year scheme stated.
The federal policy director for the Wilderness Society, Tim Beshara, said preparation for the plan was limited, and it was never reviewed at its completion in 2013.
“The Bramble Cay melomys was a little brown rat,” Mr Beshara said. “But it was our little brown rat and it was our responsibility to make sure it persisted. And we failed.”
…
The Bramble Cay Melomy was never going to survive, no matter how many wind turbines Australia constructed.
An island 3m high in a region where massive cyclones with huge storm surges are common is not a recipe for long term survival.
Calling the “extinction” of these doomed castaways a failure of our “responsibility” is absurd.
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On the mainland, rats are trapped poisioned and exterminated in a variety of ways. Throughout history they are regarded as a major pest, including association with the black plagues. Humans have spend enormous amounts of money trying to rid the world of these vermon.
Finally, we have a solution 🙂
I have a plan for rats, it’s called a Fox Terrier.
Or a Rat Terrier: mine was very proud last week when he caught one.
Don’t like rats, so I won’t lose any sleep.
My guess is most eco-types wouldn’t like polar bears either if they saw one up close. It’s amazing how presentation affects perception.
Several years ago, there was an artist (somewhere in New York, maybe?) – who took a mouse – a LAB mouse, no less – and was going to smash it with a hammer… as ‘art’.
He publicized his intent and literally had crowds of people rising to the defense of the mouse – with one gentleman telling the artist HE was the one who should have his head smashed with a hammer for ‘picking on a lil’ mouse’.
As I recall, the guy gave the mouse a stay of execution – no doubt returning the mouse to the lab, for whatever waited for it there.
There are rats all over the place in Chicago. Some of them get elected to office, and get seats on the city council. Just sayin’ – they would not be missed if a 50 foot sieche overwhelmed the lakefront. Almost did a few years ago.
I think the last time an article about the Bramble Cay Melomy was posted here on WUWT, it was concluded that an Aid to Navigation (aka light beakon) was the culprit. It attracted birds, which then slowly destroyed the vegetation.
As per Wiki Bramble Cay entry:
After several shipwrecks, the first lighthouse, a 42 feet (13 m) pyramidal steel tower, was finally erected in 1924. It was demolished in 1954 and replaced by the present lighthouse, a 17 metres (56 ft) stainless steel tower, which was equipped with solar power on 6 January 1987. There are maintenance visits by vessels of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority every three to six months.
Hmmm. Did any mammal species go extinct during the Ice Age?
Yeah, Joel, a bunch of them went extinct: Mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinos for starters. Giant sloths, shortfaced cave bears, sabre-toothed tigers, glyptodonts, Camelops hesternus, and those are only a few.
There’s also the dire wolf, Irish deer (much larger than today’s species) — gee whiz, a LOT of megafauna went extinct.
Sara,
I’m pretty sure that Joel knew that.
Not to mention the Australian megafauna as well. But, thanks, anyway.
Heh. Yeah – I need that sarcasm font – although Sara might have just been playing along.
Although, to be fair, you can’t assume people know these things anymore. Someone posted a picture of the ‘sick Triceratops’ animatronic model online, with Spielberg posing in front of it with a rifle as if he’d shot it.
You would be amazed at how many outraged comments were posted below that someone would shoot ‘such a magnificent animal’.
Sorry, I misunderstood you intent, Joel, but it was a nice exercise for me, anyway. I worked as a volunteer at the Field Museum in Chicago, helping a paleontologist sort fossils and occasionally got to see the critters that are not normally in view of the public. I was the most impressed by the dire wolf and the sabretoothed cat. The dire wolf looked like a half-grown version, and the cat had arthritis in its spine.
You can ride a saddled baby Triceratops at the Creation Museum.
‘I worked as a volunteer at the Field Museum in Chicago, helping a paleontologist sort fossils and occasionally got to see the critters that are not normally in view of the public.’
Very cool!
“occasionally got to see the critters that are not normally in view of the public.’”
So…unicorns, right?
I KNEW it!!!!
All this excitement over the demise of a few rats who happened to be temporarily residing on a tiny coral cay….. Meanwhile, over at the alarmist lefty Australian Broadcasting Commission they appear to have uncovered a somewhat different rodent problem.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-21/rat-extermination-on-a-remote-tropical-island-tahiti/10544694
PS. If the so called “researchers” had gone looking for the rodent in its natural jungle habitat in the Fly River area, from whence it came, they would more than likely have located plenty of the little vermin….But it’s not so much fun in the jungles of PNG and they would rather loll about in the sunshine and sand pretending to be planet savers.
They are not even likely to be extinct, they almost certainly live on the mainland to the north, and people brought dogs to the islands where they were exposed and threatened.
I dug up and read the original research papers, and of course found that the authors downplayed or failed to mention that they originally came from the mainland to the north, where no surveys were done.
This was almost certainly not a valid endemic species. Bramble Cay is only 50 km from the Trans-Fly coast and the intervening waters are very shallow. It was connected to the mainland less than 10,000 years ago. Mammal species don’t evolve that fast. There is no known case of a true endemic mammal on any “continental” island anywhere in the World.
The cases sometimes cited from e. g. Australia are actually continental animals that were exterminated on the mainland by introduced predators but where island populations have survived.
The Bramble Cay Melomys is almost certainly still extant in New Guinea, though it may well not have been found yet. On average more than one new mammal species is still found every year in New Guinea. Which is not surprising given the extremely difficult terrain, dense vegetation, trying climate, almost complete absence of roads and sometimes less-than-friendly inhabitants.
It is probably the same species as these abundant, “least concern” “species”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_grassland_mosaic-tailed_rat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_melomys
Splitters go wild on tropical rodents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melomys
Or Melomys burtoni, which is perhaps more likely since it occurs on both sides of the Torres strait. Populations would almost inevitably have been isolated on most cays and islands at the end of the ice-age, but of course most would have gone extinct long ago.
That does seem more likely.
Given how shallow the shelf is between Oz and New Guinea, the lowest cays must be very recent.
PS
Missed a word
It should be:
“There is no known case of a true endemic mammal on any low “continental” island anywhere in the World.”
Islands large enough to have a mountain chain of their own (like Honshu, Borneo, New Guinea) may have endemic montane species since these will mostly remain isolated during glaciations. This, however does not apply to six feet high cays.
From 1998:
https://www.wettropics.gov.au/site/user-assets/docs/46RodentsOfTheWetTropics.pdf
“Bramble Cay melomys(Melomys rubicola)
“The only known home of this melomys measures just 340m by 150m — a sand cay at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef, 50km from New Guinea. Bramble Cay is home for nesting colonies of seabirds, turtles and the only mammal endemic to a coral cay on the GBR. Several hundred melomys forage for food in the dense vegetation but do not seem to eat bird or turtle eggs or young.
“This animal is closely related to the Cape York melomys but has a much rougher tail (the scales stand out) and different blood proteins. It seems to be a unique species but sand cays are quite recent and Bramble Cay cannot have existed for longer than a few thousand years. Either this melomys is a very rapidly evolving species or it has relatives — somewhere. Researchers are currently investigating melomys species in New Guinea where it is thought genetic studies may discover another population.
“Otherwise, as Bramble Cay is being gradually eroded away, this unique animal is doomed to extinction.”
The rats mentioned here must have been non-inidgenous ships’ rats:
When the ship HMS Bramble landed
on the cay named after it, in 1845, it
was recorded that, “on capsizing (over
60 empty turtle shells which had been
left at the end of the cay) numbers of
large rats made their escape from
beneath them, and our people, who
(being Sunday) had an afternoon’s
leave on shore to collect eggs for their
messes, amused themselves with
shooting them with the bows and
arrows they had obtained from the
natives of Erub!”