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https://theconversation.com/welcome-to-the-homogenocene-how-humans-are-making-the-worlds-wildlife-dangerously-samey-274092>
"The age of humans is increasingly an age of sameness. Across the planet,
distinctive plants and animals are disappearing, replaced by species that are
lucky enough to thrive alongside humans and travel with us easily. Some
scientists have a word for this reshuffling of life: the Homogenocene.
Evidence for it is found in the world’s museums. Storerooms are full of animals
that no longer walk among us, pickled in spirit-filled jars: coiled snakes,
bloated fish, frogs, birds. Each extinct species marks the removal of a
particular evolutionary path from a particular place – and these absences are
increasingly being filled by the same hardy, adaptable species, again and
again.
One such absence is embodied by a small bird kept in a glass jar in London’s
Natural History Museum: the Fijian Bar-winged rail, not seen in the wild since
the 1970s. It seems to be sleeping, its eyes closed, its wings tucked in along
its back, its beak resting against the glass.
A flightless bird, it was particularly vulnerable to predators introduced by
humans, including mongooses brought to Fiji in the 1800s. Its disappearance was
part of a broad pattern in which island species are vanishing and a narrower
set of globally successful animals thrive in their place.
It’s a phenomenon that was called the Homogenocene even before a similar term
growing in popularity, the Anthropocene, was coined in 2000. If the
Anthropocene describes a planet transformed by humans, the Homogenocene is one
ecological consequence: fewer places with their own distinctive life.
It goes well beyond charismatic birds and mammals. Freshwater fish, for
instance, are becoming more “samey”, as the natural barriers that once kept
populations separate – waterfalls, river catchments, temperature limits – are
effectively blurred or erased by human activity. Think of common carp
deliberately stocked in lakes for anglers, or catfish released from home
aquariums that now thrive in rivers thousands of miles from their native
habitat.
Meanwhile, many thousands of mollusc species have disappeared over the past 500
years, with snails living on islands also severely affected: many are simply
eaten by non-native predatory snails. Some invasive snails have become highly
successful and widely distributed, such as the giant African snail that is now
found from the Hawaiian Islands to the Americas, or South American golden apple
snails rampant through east and south-east Asia since their introduction in the
1980s."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
