JAKARTA – Animal Large animals such as elephants, rhinos or lions have a very important impact on life on Earth. So what happens if the Earth loses a large animal?
Research by University of New Mexico biologist Felisa Smith and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States has shown the profound impact of the loss of large mammals or megafauna in ecosystems.
In a National Science Foundation report on Wednesday (10/19/2022), the following is an explanation of the impact that will occur if the population of large animals on Earth decreases.
Smith and the team report their research findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists are looking to the past for clues to the future of large mammals, which are dwindling at an alarming rate.
“Humans have had drastic effects on large mammals, both directly, such as hunting, and indirectly through land use and climate change,” said Sam Schiener, program director at NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology.
Furthermore, he also said that this study shows that these effects can have a large impact on ecosystems.
“The current conservation status of large mammals is dire. Their decline has serious consequences because they have a unique ecological role,” Smith said.
However, according to him, this kind of biodiversity loss has already happened.
“Humans, who entered the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene around 13,000 years ago, caused the widespread extinction of the large mammals that existed then, through some of the same activities that damage mammals today,” he said.
The researchers used the fossil record of previously extinct animals to explore what happened to living mammals.
The team focused their efforts on the mammal community on the Edwards Plateau in Texas, examining thousands of fossils preserved at the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin.
By measuring stable isotopes in fossilized bones, they characterized the diet. Measurements of the teeth and long bones allowed the researchers to estimate the size of the body.
They were also able to reconstruct the ancient Pleistocene food web and see how it changed after extinction.
The results were particularly surprising for the Felid Guild, which once had two species of saber-toothed cat, in addition to the American cave lion, jaguar and lynx.
It turns out that, in modern times, the impact of declining populations of elephants, giraffes, rhinos and other large mammals has a very serious impact on ecosystems, because they have important roles, such as influencing ecological interactions and biogeochemical cycles.
“It is important to understand how the decline or potential extinction of the last remaining large mammal on Earth can change ecosystems. We cannot lose this large mammal,” he stressed.
