Climate change havoc! Endangered Australian rodent slips to extinction

The Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent also known as the mosaic-tailed rat, have been completely wiped-out from its only known location.

The report said the “key factor” responsible for killing off the animals was flooding of their island on multiple occasions during the last decade, “causing dramatic habitat loss” and possibly killing some individuals directly.

Accounts of the melomys’ presence on Bramble Cay date to 1845, when European sailors encountered what they described as large rats (and tried to kill them with bows and arrows). They were last spotted on the island in 2009. “Available information about sea-level rise and the increased frequency and intensity of weather events producing extreme high water levels and damaging storm surges in the Torres Strait region over this period point to human-induced climate change being the root cause of the loss of the Bramble Cay melomys”, Leung said.

Scientists from the University of Queensland visited in 2014 to be sure, and they could find no trace of the mammals, they said this month. The pace of warming is deemed as unprecedented, and has been caused by human activities, according to the report, published on the Queensland government website.

A report in 2015 found one sixth of the world’s species face extinction due to climate change, and scientists have warned that the world is on the edge of the sixth mass extinction.

“Consequently, at this stage, it may be premature to declare the Bramble Cay melomys extinct on a global scale”, it added. They were thought to eat mostly plants, especially a succulent herb called Portulaca oleracea that’s common on Bramble Cay, and possibly turtle eggs.

The Bramble Cay melomys has disappeared from its only known habitation on a Great Barrier Reef island in far northern Australia and “probably represents the first recorded mammalian extinction due to anthropogenic climate change”, a scientific study reveals.

The rodent was known to have lived only on Bramble Cay, a minuscule atoll in the northeast Torres Strait, between Cape York Peninsula in the Australian state of Queensland and the southern shores of Papua New Guinea.

Stuart Pimm, a Duke University professor of Conservation Ecology and endangered species expert was also disturbed by the report.

“I am of absolutely no doubt we will lose species due to the increasing pressures being exerted by climate change”, he said. “Species restricted to small, low lying islands, or those with very tight environmental requirements are likely to be the first to go”, Australia’s Deakin University ecologist John White told The Guardian.