Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna
Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna
Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna
Ebook611 pages7 hours

Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Extinctions have always occurred and always will, so what is so surprising about the megafauna extinctions? They were caused by humans and were the first of many extinctions that eventually led to the extinction of the Moa, Steller's Sea Cow, the Dodo, Great Auk and countless other species great and small, all attributed to human agency. Therefore, the megafauna were humans’ first great impact on the planet. There is now an increasing realization that the 'blitzkrieg' view of these extinctions may have been wrong. A growing body of evidence and long-term field work is beginning to show that at least Australia's megafauna did not succumb to human agency, not because humans probably did not hunt the odd animal but because the an infinitely more logical reason lies in the climatic conditions of the Quaternary Ice Ages and the affect they had on continental geography, environment, climate and, most importantly, the biogeography of the megafauna. This book presents the evidence of this theory, demonstrating the biogeographic approach to Australia’s megafauna extinction.

  • Written clearly to benefit a diverse level of readers, from those with a passing interest to professionals in the field.
  • Examines future climate change and its effects on the planet by looking at examples buried in the past
  • Presents new evidence from extensive field research
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 27, 2013
ISBN9780124078406
Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna
Author

Steve Webb

Professor Steve Webb currently serves as Professor of Australian Studies at Bond University, Australia. He has worked with the Federal Government and Indigenous agencies extensively, playing a significant role in the repatriation of Aboriginal skeletal remains from Australian and overseas museums to Aboriginal communities. This work has given him a broad understanding of past and present Aboriginal society and the issues facing Aboriginal people.

Read more from Steve Webb

Related to Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna

Related ebooks

Biology For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Corridors to Extinction and the Australian Megafauna - Steve Webb

    1

    The Big Five or Six or More …

    Introduction

    The new science of Earth Systems emerged to view the world in a holistic manner in terms of how it works. The purpose of this book is similar. It will try and explain how natural forces working holistically affect animals and why that often results in their extinction. That principle is not unique but applied in the way used here it could be because I want to focus on the Australian megafauna. Arguments raised on the issue of megafauna extinctions do not often involve looking at the parsimonious ways these animals could have disappeared or what it might have taken for them to do so. Nor do they invoke the natural phenomena of climatic and environmental change as main causative agents in these past extinctions. The arguments that will later be discussed focus particularly on the Quaternary Ice Ages, the climate extremes brought about by those events and the environmental consequences Australia underwent during the Quaternary. We can now appreciate, perhaps more than ever before, what climatic change could bring to put animals in danger: each day brings new forecasts of such consequences for the natural world as our present climatic change unfolds.

    However, before plunging into the world of Quaternary Ice Ages and extinctions in Australia, as the title of this book suggests, I want to use a couple of chapters to recall some of the famous extinctions, wander through the processes that brought them about and look at the forces that are always waiting in the wings to act to eliminate animals. Those forces took millions of past life forms and that included Australia’s giant marsupials. More often than not, extinction does not have a single cause; rather, as many will appreciate, it emanates from many causes and depends on myriad factors including the biogeographic circumstances of the animals themselves. While today we are well aware of the part that humans have played and continue to play in the demise of modern species, there was, in times past, a natural armoury of forces aligned against the Animal Kingdom that sent many to their doom no matter how adapted they were to their surroundings or how quickly they could adapt. Those forces were there during the last 2 million years and they are still there, but today, unfortunately, many have speeded up, been masked or been beaten to the draw by the acts of humans of one kind or another. Thus the natural slow processes or long corridors that animals pass through before reaching extinction are often masked by the rapid events of human population growth, land clearing, general development and the movement of humans into ever greater expanses of our planet, usually to the detriment of the animals that live there. Therefore, it is worth looking at these natural forces, and examining those corridors of various lengths and the forces that operate within them.

    We will review the causes of the main extinction events of the past first as exemplary measures of why extinctions take place before focussing on Australia and its comparatively recent extinction event, the megafauna extinctions. We will next ask: Is there a positive side to extinction? If there is, what is it and how can that be possible?

    What Has Extinction Ever Done for Us?

    The title of this section is a parody of the line from the Monty Python film Life of Brian. The Chairman of the revolutionary committee of the People’s Front of Judea (John Cleese) addresses his very small audience and, folding his arms defiantly, asks sarcastically, ‘And what have the Romans ever done for us?’ in an effort to stir up his very small band of followers against his country’s invaders. Of course, he is insinuating that the Romans have never done anything for them – how could they as invaders? However, rather than hearing a unanimous ‘nothing’ from his audience, he is nonplussed to hear various members of the group begin to list all the positive things the Romans have done for them: better roads, medicine, education, law and order and the aqueduct! Similarly, the unexpected dire consequences of extinction, as we know them, have also brought benefits to the world’s biological organisms and we humans would definitely not be here without them.

    As humans, surrounded by our gadgets and gizmos, overpowering technology and vast civilisations and seemingly an indestructible presence, we commonly perceive that we are the end product of an evolutionary process that has inevitably led to us. That could not be further from the truth and I am not the first to point that out. Because we perceive who we are, think about and manipulate the world around us, plan, reason about, gather knowledge of and examine our circumstances in a way that, as far as we know, no other animal does, we see ourselves as special and good enough to be the rightful custodians of the planet and, naturally, the top cats of the evolutionary process. This is not necessarily a deliberate thought, but just comes naturally from our large and complex brains as though it is just built into our biological and neurological structures like a nose. We might even see ourselves as the top predator in the same way T. rex was, as an unassailable and powerfully equipped predator–scavenger that could tramp the world unchallenged, able to overcome and take anything it wanted. It is likely, however, that T. rex did not see itself like that or see itself as anything at all. Although most of us never even contemplate such a thought, evolution does not care about us and neither does planet Earth. Why should it; how could it? Evolution is a process, not a thinking organism, and we are subject to it as much as any other creature: this is the level playing field that brings us back to Earth. We are here because of a series of circumstances, incidents and accidents and a chain of ancestral beings of one type or another being lucky. But our species has had its own series of extinctions (Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo floresiensis being only some) and, seemingly, we Homo sapiens sapiens are the last in the line. Being whatever we perceive ourselves to be, we march forward balanced on the random acts of astronomical mechanics, on the repercussions of terrestrial geophysics, on climate variation and on the survival of one group of genes over another. The outcome is evolution, with a few other things thrown in, like adaptation and extinction. Ah, there it is. Although there is the possibility that T. rex was on its way towards extinction, together with other dinosaur species, when it disappeared, its might was absolutely cut short by one of those random acts and, for all its power and terrifying presence, it went extinct almost in the blink of an eye – just blown away like a leaf in a cloud of dinosaurian debris, darkness and climatic catastrophe. If we had been there we would have disappeared also.

    Extinction is an emotive word and one that conjures up disaster among many other adjectives. It immediately invokes negative ideas focussed on loss of life, sometimes massive losses, among the planet’s life forms and the demise of fascinating species that will never be seen again, at least 95% of which have never been seen alive by humans. In that way extinction can be regarded as a terrible disaster that brings devastation to the biological world on various levels and that is, therefore, not something to be encouraged. It also intrigues us because it means the loss of creatures we know little or nothing about, and never will, and so they become mysterious to us as the megafauna However, the truth is otherwise, as in the case of the positives that came from the presence of the Romans in Judea. Yes, extinction does cause loss of unique life forms but our planet would be crowded without it. It would also mean that creatures we know and love would not be with us today. The planetary development of life can be seen as a two-sided coin working in dialectic rhythm with evolution on one side and extinction on the other, with life lurching between the two. The two forces play and compete against each other, often in complex manoeuvres that are still not completely understood. Of course, they are part of the same coin and extinction has been as much a force for change as evolution has. Indeed, they are intertwined in a sort of stop–go swirling dance of production and change through time, directing life forms this way and that, for good and bad. They produce dead ends and brilliant sparkles of living miracles and life forms that live 5 min, metaphorically speaking, while others span hundreds of millions of years.

    As for the speed of effect between these two mechanisms of change, this is now more debatable than ever. Evolution is usually seen as taking place through many small, incremental alterations in an organism over great amounts of time as genes change and mutations accumulate, producing beneficial forms that gradually become incorporated into the form and function of planetary life. Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge argued for a rather spasmodic series of speeding up and static cycles in what they termed ‘punctuated equilibrium’ where evolution moved in step-like jumps that sped up and then slowed down at spaced intervals. Possibly, but whatever its mode of production, evolution as a term evokes the ponderous: a process taking many generations and vast amounts of time to produce observable change. But now it is blatantly apparent that there is another form of evolution that has been documented for nearly as long as Darwin’s theory: rapid evolution. There are now many cases where fish, moths, weevils, Cane Toads (Bufo marinus) and Galapagos Finches show that the road to speciation can be a very short one, measured in decades, not millennia. Whether fast or slow, or a combination of both, the natural processes of evolution are the mainstay of biological change and they largely created the world we know today. Those processes can be seen operating in both the field and the laboratory. We have learnt much about evolutionary mechanisms and developed the study of genetics that proves the biological processes involved. This has gone hand in hand with technology, particularly vast computer power that has allowed sequencing of many genetic codes from many organisms, including us. It is in this realm that we now have irrefutable proof of the existence of evolution and its ways of changing life forms which cannot be disputed. Indeed, genetic sequencing has allowed us to study animals and ourselves in a way not possible before, placing them and us in both space (relationships between life forms) and time (when these entities split from one another). Evolution is no longer a mystery, nor is it a theory, at least not in the pejorative way it is used usually by those of a religious fundamentalist persuasion. Rather, it is a theory composed of facts – although that does not necessarily mean there is not more to learn about the processes that make up a particular theory. The word ‘theory’ has been used by some to dismiss something that is not believed by them and has, therefore, become a weak link, or the dead giveaway: if it’s a theory it only exists as a belief. Wrong! I will let Steve Gould reply in the neatest possible way:

    Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. Facts and theories are not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravity replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid air pending the outcome.

    (Interview published in Discover, Winter 1987)

    For many, religious mythology and mysticism explains the emergence and variety of organisms in the Animal Kingdom. The truth is every bit as fascinating as human-contrived mythologies and gods, unless you require a ready-made answer for everything even if that answer is not true. The incredulity expressed by some at the ‘sudden’ appearance of various life forms requires, for them, invoking the mythology of God’s Creation as the only way it could have been achieved. For the most part, however, the process was far more exciting, complex, exhilarating and long-winded than that, and we continue to learn more about it as we go. Having an imaginary friend to tell you the answer to everything is not fun: fun is not knowing and working within the realms of science to find out how the world really works. If we knew everything, there would be nothing to do except impose exceptionally conservative and restrictive rules on a naturally inquisitive and gregarious animal: us! How boring. Finding out is what drives humans and it makes us special in the animal world: this is the realm of the researcher. It boosts enthusiasm for learning about the natural world – what will it tell us next, what amazing evidence will turn up about this and that and what are the mysteries that confront us? I believe learning gives most researchers a far greater high than any artificial drug induced habit ever could. I would also like to place a bet that the vast majority of those involved in research began their fascination when young, reading about dinosaurs and ‘cave men’, and collecting fossils, rocks, beetles and all sorts of other natural objects that can be categorised, studied and look good in a box that was usually kept under the bed. I even collected bird’s eggs – what a crime! But my boyhood was in a world without the word conservation. I knew only that dinosaurs had gone extinct, not other animals and birds, and I had no idea that we played a part in extinctions. Big game hunting was still a widely accepted ‘sport’ and one of my old books had a picture of a hunter with his foot on the head of a dead lion.

    Extinction has played a vital role in the layout of our present biological world. In a peculiar reversal of these two processes, just as we now know evolution can move rapidly, so extinction can move very slowly unless caused by sudden catastrophe. It acts in a similar way to evolution by pushing change forward and clearing the decks for the emergence and sorting of new species. That is particularly so when it comes to mass extinctions: they drive forward selection and introduce new chapters for life across the world usually in a geological instant. In fact, it all took an almost incomprehensible length of time to work through the increasing complexity of life on the Earth and it required all the geological and climatic ingredients the world could muster to enable that story to develop the way it has. The processes of making the building blocks of the Earth we know today took enormous amounts of time. They did not appear overnight: the era of bacteria alone was almost half the age of the Earth, the atmosphere took at least 1.8 billion years to form and the first fish appeared only after 89% of the Earth’s age had passed. These facts seem to support the old adage that, given enough time, anything can happen.

    However, the Hindu myth of the world being supported on the backs of four elephants standing on a turtle is a good metaphor for the truth. What we do know is that there are four major interconnected terrestrial forces or systems (lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere) and they stand as cornerstones working together to make the world tick. There is a fifth, the cryosphere, but ice has been with us for only a small percentage of Earth’s past so we will forget it for the moment, although it becomes extremely important in later chapters. These four forces could represent the four elephants. They have been the interconnected driving forces behind the evolving Earth for the last 4.5 billion years and they have often joined forces to eliminate life on many occasions. An astronomical force (the turtle) includes the position of the Earth in the Solar System, the type of system we are in, the type of star we revolve around and the Goldilocks position of the Earth’s orbit in the Solar System, all of which enable the terrestrial forces to function. Besides the fact we are made of star dust, the universe around us naturally affects our planet in subtle and not so subtle ways. The Sun is the major driving force of our climate and the resulting environmental conditions here on Earth. Changes in our the orbit around the Sun, the Earth’s axial angle in relation to the Sun and the spin of that axis all play a part in how hot or cold we become. Electromagnetic radiation and meteorites also have an effect on our disposition as they bombard the planet’s surface, but thankfully our earliest life forms built us an atmosphere to help guard against impacts and deadly ultraviolet radiation. Fortunately, the meteoritic debris of the Solar System seems to be slowly running out of much of the debris that was left over from its early beginnings 5 billion years ago.

    The four cornerstones constantly interact with one another through many feedback mechanisms (including astronomical ones). They sculpt the planetary ecosystems that drive life onwards in its many forms. At the same time, changes to any of the five can cause extinctions big and small. The complex and convoluted interactions among these major planetary drivers form such an intricate web that teasing them apart is difficult; we are still in the process of untangling them and probably will be for some considerable time. It is doubly hard to do this when looking into the past. Indeed, the solid action and reaction of climatic and geological forces cannot be separated in assessing their respective contributions for the continuation of life on the Earth. Geological and climate changes have done the lion’s share of moulding life here and encouraging it to spread and adapt in the myriad ways it has. But occasionally those same two processes clear out life in various ways and to different degrees and these have taken the biological Earth on a broad and very convoluted pathway that eventually led to the emergence of humans. Extinction was an integral part of this and it also allowed a certain set of circumstances to emerge that particularly favoured our early mammalian and then primate ancestors. But our biggest break was the extinction of the dinosaurs as it was for many, many other mammalian species.

    The conservationist hymn says that extinction is forever and that is quite right. The loss of an animal, plant, bug, worm or forget-me-not is the complete loss of a unique set of chromosomes bearing an extremely large and unique genetic sequence with a unique array of assembled base pairs in that now-familiar A–T (adenine–thymine) and C–G (cytosine–guanine) combination constituting the unique DNA sequence profile of an individual. It is also the loss of an organism that was associated with, dependent on or beneficial to other organisms. The loss, therefore, shuffles its immediate world till something else takes its place. The only thing not unique is the famous double-helix DNA structure common to all living things. All genetic assemblages in the world today took millions of years to sort and resort and gather mutations to produce a particular individual. Each species on the planet has a unique set of DNA sequences and they represent the end product of a wide range of life histories that went before and which had their bad and good times. But the evolutionary road was peppered with climatic and geological changes that altered environments, brought predators and provided just the right food resources and other forms of sustenance and protection at the right time. The end product represents the assortment history of DNA, which also depended on a variety of climatic and environmental factors as well as interactions between an organism and its competitors. That is evolution: it has no goal, it does not work for a preordained purpose or to produce a particular life form; rather, it just makes them from fortuitous natural and climatic ingredients, the meeting and assortment of DNA, random mutation and a soupçon of the right environment for success. That is probably an oversimplification but the essence is certainly true. The evolutionary sequence of events that take place, whether they are good or bad, is just another mixing of DNA material that will produce another or many other organisms in the future no matter how long that takes to accomplish. Another creature similar to the one that goes extinct may emerge in the future. It will certainly consist of the same four base pairs but any lost creatures will never come back or evolve in quite the same way with their unique genetic sequence among all those that have gone before as well as those that will come after

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1