Traits that predicted mammal extinction for 130,000 years are changing, raising questions about how scientists identify species most at risk today.<\/p>\n
For 130,000 years, certain traits reliably predicted which mammals would go extinct and which would survive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A new study suggests that this rule may no longer apply. <\/p>\n
Some of the very features that once spelled doom, like a large body or a slow reproductive rate, now seem to work in a species\u2019 favor instead.<\/p>\n
The findings come from an international team led by researchers at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences<\/a> and Wageningen University & Research<\/a>, working closely with Michigan State University<\/a>.<\/p>\n A world losing species fast<\/p>\n Extinctions<\/a> today are happening at least 100 times faster than natural background rates.<\/p>\n Roughly one in four of the world\u2019s mammal species is threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature<\/a> (IUCN).<\/p>\n Figuring out which species are most at risk should, in theory, make it easier to protect them while there\u2019s still time. But that\u2019s harder than it sounds.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nearly 15% of mammal species assessed by the IUCN, some 770 of them, are classified as \u201cdata deficient.\u201d <\/p>\n Scientists simply don\u2019t know enough about their numbers or whereabouts to say whether they\u2019re in trouble.<\/p>\n That gap isn\u2019t a minor bookkeeping issue. Conservation funding and policy decisions increasingly lean on models built to fill in these blanks, using traits like body size or diet as stand-ins for missing population data.\u00a0<\/p>\n If those models are drawing the wrong lessons from history, the animals that most need help could be overlooked.<\/p>\n To fill the gaps, researchers often turn to long-term historical trends. The question this team set out to answer was simple: how well do those old patterns actually predict what\u2019s happening to mammals<\/a> right now?<\/p>\n Pairing wildlife cameras with fossils<\/p>\n The team combined images from automatic wildlife cameras<\/a> with fossil records and species range data stretching back 130,000 years, covering the period before and after modern humans spread across the globe.<\/p>\n They tracked 210 species in total. Most, 199 of them, are still around today, everything from porcupines and anteaters to monkeys and bears.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some, like Asian elephants<\/a> and African leopards, have vanished from parts of their old range but are hanging on elsewhere. <\/p>\n Eleven species didn\u2019t make it at all, among them giant pangolins that stretched nine feet long, half-ton saber-toothed cats, and mastodons.<\/p>\n The analysis covered 64 forest sites spread across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.\u00a0<\/p>\n They were chosen specifically to capture tropical mammal communities that have faced very different histories of human contact, from long-settled regions to areas humans reached only in the last few thousand years.<\/p>\n What put mammals at risk over deep time<\/p>\n Looking across the full 130,000-year span, one pattern held steady. Species with large bodies, small brains, carnivorous diets, and slow reproduction were consistently the most likely to disappear.<\/p>\n That pattern showed up at local, regional, and global scales. Extinction risk factors don\u2019t always hold together so cleanly across such different levels of analysis.<\/p>\n None of this surprised the researchers much on its own. <\/p>\n Other studies have linked similar traits<\/a> to extinction risk before, and the consistency across scales offered a reassuring sign that the historical data was capturing something real.<\/p>\n What comparison with camera data revealed<\/p>\n The surprise came when the team compared those long-term patterns against more recent data pulled from camera traps. <\/p>\n Brain size told a different story than expected. Over the long run, bigger brains gave species an edge.\u00a0<\/p>\n But some recent research has suggested that a large brain can actually be a liability for mammals today. This is possibly because species with more behavioral flexibility<\/a> also tend to wander into more contact with humans and human-altered landscapes.<\/p>\n Body size and reproduction rate flipped too. Traits that once made a species more vulnerable, like being large-bodied or slow to reproduce, now seem tied to resilience instead.<\/p>\n One possible explanation: the camera traps were mostly stationed in protected areas, where animals face less pressure from human hunters.\u00a0<\/p>\n Larger mammals with longer generation times may simply do better in those specific conditions. The same traits could still be a disadvantage in areas with heavier poaching or habitat loss.<\/p>\n \u201cThe traits associated with survival are different,\u201d said Michigan State University professor Lydia Beaudrot, one of the study\u2019s lead authors, describing what shifted between eras.<\/p>\n Extinction risk is changing<\/p>\n Whatever\u2019s driving the shift, the implications matter for how conservationists prioritize their limited resources.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t just assume that large-scale patterns apply at smaller scales,\u201d Beaudrot said. \u201cWe have to take the temporal dimension into account.\u201d<\/p>\n The team hopes the work pushes researchers to be more careful about which timeframe they\u2019re borrowing lessons from, and about where exactly a given dataset was collected.\u00a0<\/p>\n A trait that doomed a species 50,000 years ago isn\u2019t necessarily still a warning sign today.\u00a0<\/p>\n Treating it as one could mean protection efforts land in the wrong place entirely, or worse, get funneled toward species that no longer need the help while data-deficient ones wait.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Science Advances<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014-<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Traits that predicted mammal extinction for 130,000 years are changing, raising questions about how scientists identify species most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":744625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-744624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/744625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}