Climate Change Caused By Humans Drives Its First Victim Into Extinction

Around 179 years ago, a tiny brown rat lived happily on a tiny, sand-filled island of Australia. European sailors often reported shooting these rodents with bows and arrows. These little ones resided in the bare patches of compacted guano depressions that held water during the wet season. They crawled among tall grasses and fed on the little plants sprouting from within the rocks in the vegetated sand cay. After that, something disheartening happened. As humans became reckless, climate change spurred a vortex of buffeting winds, surging storms, and whirlpooling turbulent waters that, over the years, gobbled up this mini-sized creature. Today, “this cutie is no more,” BBC Discover Wildlife said, mourning the loss.

Also known as “melomys,” or “mosaic-tailed rats,” these little brown rodents were known to reside in Bramble Cay, a small reef island sitting at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia’s Torres Strait. The island is located about 31 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The rodent was known to feed on the little plants, grasses, and vegetation mats that carpeted this reef. However, as climate change and rising sea levels pressured the waters, the plants started to get choked under the pressure, and eventually shrunk. A report suggested that the volume of the leafy plants in Bramble Cay shrank by as much as 97% between 2004 and 2014. Last time, it was in 2006 when a fisherman spotted one, per The Guardian.

In March 2019, the Australian Government gloomily released a quiet announcement, declaring these melomys as “extinct,” according to Scientific American. The Guardian reports that another announcement declared these creatures as “extinct” in 2014. The government even initiated a “recovery plan” in 2008, calling out sea-level rise and coastal erosion as potential threats. But nothing much was accomplished. Tim Beshara, federal policy director for the Wilderness Society, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the plan was never finished or acted upon. Melomys are the "first mammal" to go extinct exclusively due to human-caused climate change. 

In 2016, Australia’s Queensland University partnered with Queensland's Department of Environment and Heritage Protection and conducted a survey on these rats to analyze the reality of the situation. Led by Ian Gynther, the team installed 150 traps on the island for six nights and set forth to measure the vegetation. After the survey, they stated in a report that the “root cause” behind the dwindling numbers of these rats was “human-induced climate change.” This included rising sea levels and a consequent loss of vegetation on the island.

“Significantly, this probably represents the first recorded mammalian extinction due to anthropogenic climate change,” the researchers said in their report, per Scientific American. As sorrowful as it sounds, the little bushy creature doesn’t exist anymore, but scientists believe that it didn’t do anything to deserve this extinction. Lamenting at the loss, Lee Hannah, a scientist for climate change biology with Conservation International, said to National Geographic, “This species could have been saved.”

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