1 billion animals dead in Australia’s fires. It may get worse

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Experts worry ecosystems devastated by this climate disaster may never recover.

[Catch]

Sad

[roxiczone]

ankul insects ni kooda kalupthara aah 1 Billion number lo 

[Sachin200]

Mana Desi celebrities ki matter dorikindhi ga Twitter lo hadavidi cheyadaniki

[tacobell fan]

Australia, bushfires have torched more than 21 million acres of land in the past four months. Fire officials regard it as the worst bushfire season ever seen on the continent: A combination of record-breaking heat and drought, lightning strikes, and potentially a few cases of arson have led to more than 100 fires, mostly in the southeastern state of New South Wales, destroying 2,500 buildings and killing 27 people.

But perhaps the most striking consequence of the fires has been the massive loss of animal life. On January 3, University of Sydney ecologist Christopher Dickman estimated that the fires have killed 480 million animals, but he has since revised that estimate to 1 billion. Harrowing footage of charred kangaroo and koala remains have become emblems of the catastrophe.

Now, though the blazes continue to burn — there are still four months left in the fire season in some parts of southeastern Australia — ecologists are bracing for the secondary effects of the fires. Entire ecosystems and the animals that live in them have already been decimated, but when fire season is over, the resulting destruction of key habitats, starvation, exposure to predators, and loss of genetic diversity are expected to lead to even more animal deaths.

“Billions of animals will have died during the fire or will likely die soon after,” says Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology at Deakin University in Victoria.

Dickman and other ecologists who spoke to OneZero predicted what might happen in the near- and long-term future of Australia, noting that it could take decades for these ecosystems to regenerate, if they do at all. Even if the ecosystems succeed, it’s possible that this single fire season will have caused the extinction of entire animal species.

“It’s pretty awful,” Dickman says. “A lot of these animals occur nowhere else on the planet.”

At present, many ecologists agree that the actual number of animals killed is likely unknowable but that the current estimates are low. Dickman’s 1 billion figure, for one, doesn’t include insects, spiders, frogs, or bats, which are especially vulnerable to increasing temperatures. It does, however, account for both direct and indirect mortalities, like animals that escaped the fires but risk death upon their return to their now-transformed habitats. In the months and years to come, surviving animals will face a gauntlet of secondary killers.

For example, when mobile or migratory species that escaped the initial flames return to their habitats, they may find that the fires destroyed their sources of food and protection from predators.

The new landscape may instead favor nonnative “introduced” species, further endangering surviving animals. Dickman explains that native animals that return after the fires die down will be at a disadvantage because they have evolved to be dependent on the environment and will have a harder time adapting to drastic changes. Predatory nonnative species, like foxes and cats, may have an additional advantage in burned regions because larger native species will lack places to hide from them.

While small mammals like bush rats or marsupial mice likely escaped the bushfires by burrowing underground and can do the same to avoid predators, medium-sized mammals like bandicoots and potoroos cannot and are “particularly favored by foxes,” Dickman says.

“If the foxes get in after the fires, they’re really going to make big inroads into these species,” he says. Bandicoots and potoroos are important for the ecosystems of this region because they are important “ecological engineer” species that help maintain the health of the soil. “The bandicoots and potoroos dig holes. They turn the soil over. They help rainfall infiltrate the ground. They create heterogeneity in the topsoil,” Dickman explains.

Introduced species that are not predators may also compete with native animals for resources. Nonnative deer, for instance, are expected to compete with any surviving marsupials for food.

“It may be that we’re providing more challenging conditions for the native species to return to these ecosystems,” Dickman says.

As wildlife populations shrink, so too will genetic diversity — the genetic variation within a species that gives certain individuals a leg up in changing conditions, such as climate change. Greater genetic diversity means more chances for individuals within a population to survive; populations with reduced diversity, meanwhile, may be unable to adapt as a whole, in what would be a one-two climate punch.

“Losing species from ecosystems will have knock-on effects on others,” Ritchie explains. “

If pollinators such as insects and bats die, plants will be affected, and in turn species that depend on those plants. If digging mammals such as potoroos and bandicoots disappear from areas, this will affect the fungi they feed on and help to spread, which helps to maintain healthy soils and plant communities.”

Ecologists worry that habitat-dependent species will be edged toward extinction in the near to middle term. The Blue Mountains water skink, for example, is found in fewer than 60 swamps throughout Sydney’s Blue Mountains and Newnes Plateau, where bushfires have consumed large swaths of the protected landscape. On Kangaroo Island, located off the coast of South Australia and described as Australia’s Galapagos, infernos have killed thousands of koalas and kangaroos. Fires there also threaten the fates of the Kangaroo Island dunnart — a small, critically endangered marsupial — as well as an endangered subspecies of glossy black cockatoo and hives of Ligurian honey bees believed to be “the last remaining pure stock of this insect found anywhere in the world,” according to Australia’s ABC. Researchers have little hope for the silver-headed antechinus, an endangered and recently described marsupial native to southern Queensland, and the long-footed potoroo, another endangered marsupial of which only several thousand remain, as both of their known ranges have been hard hit by fires.

Fire can play a regenerative role in some environments, invigorating the soil, clearing away dead material, and sparking new life from the ashes. But not all Australian ecosystems are adapted to it, and even in tolerant ones, burns that are too intense can stifle life altogether. Looking toward the future, some experts fear that some ecosystems might be damaged beyond repair.

 

For example, Victoria’s wetlands and parts of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area in New South Wales — ancient reservoirs of rich biodiversity that have been around since the time of the dinosaurs — are burning like never before and may be impossible to recover.

“This may be a tipping point and step change,” says Ritchie, referring to the way that fire can alter an ecosystem’s DNA. “Rainforest becomes woodland, and so on.”

The diversity of ecosystems in Australia is also at risk of shrinking, because many of them are burning simultaneously. Some ecologists warn that the fires will act as a “hard reset,” resulting in a landscape consisting of a single ecosystem, rather than multiple types that have developed alongside each other over millennia.

“There will be enormous potential loss of biodiversity, because when those forests regrow, they’ll regenerate as a uniform type of forest with massive amounts of regrowth of trees or shrubs,” says Peter Stanton, a landscape ecologist with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

The brutality of Australia’s wildfires, which have been described as an “ecological Armageddon,” “atomic bomb,” and “climate suicide,” cannot be overstated. As the country burned, conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison vacationed on the Hawaiian island of Oahu and denied that the fires are linked to Australia’s carbon emissions. Authorities eventually deployed military aircraft and rescue ships in a response “not seen since World War II,” according to the New York Times, but for the many Australians who’ve lost everything, it was too little, too late.

As the fires rage, there is renewed interest in using controlled burns to limit the affected areas, a technique that may have helped prevent the current disaster had it been adopted sooner and more widely. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have incorporated fire as an environmental management tool for thousands of years, using controlled burns, sometimes referred to as “cultural burning,” to reinvigorate landscapes and reduce hazards, but European colonization of Australia and forcible removal of Indigenous peoples from their land have greatly affected these practices.

Fire is integral to the connection of Indigenous communities to the landscapes where they live. “Indigenous Australians are the caretakers of their own cultural heritage,” says Jessica Wegener, who is Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan and the director of the Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation, an Indigenous-led network that is furthering the use of cultural fire and land management practices in Australia. “It is not just stones and bones and things that happened yesterday, but about ongoing connection to Country and practice of our culture,” Wegener says.

Last year, Victor Steffensen, an Indigenous fire practitioner who advised the government to unilaterally incorporate these tools, called Australia’s conditions a “time bomb.” Wegener says there has been increasing support for cultural burning over the past decade, even from within agencies, but headway has been made “with little government investment.”

Today, Aboriginal fire practitioners are among the forces at the front lines of these blazes. In eastern Victoria, Australia’s first all-Indigenous, all-women fire brigade — including mothers and grandmothers — are defending the self-governing Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust.

“Seeing Country, all the animals and plants so badly impacted impacts Indigenous people, as they are their totems, and they have a cultural obligation to look after Country, which has been difficult since colonization,” Wegener says.

Fire officials are anticipating months of burning, which means the ecological toll won’t be tallied until much later.

Researchers say they’ll need considerable government funding to monitor species in fire-ravaged areas. “This work needs to start as soon as possible in order to record ecological changes as they happen,” Ritchie says. That will entail on-the-ground data collection through camera traps, acoustic recorders, and vegetation surveys, as well as remote sensing by satellite, for example.

For now, it’s unclear whether Australia’s government will provide the resources for this work. “It’s really Australia’s responsibility to look after them, and we’ve been doing really a bloody awful job,” Dickman says. “It’s been a feeling among the environmental science community here that we could have done a lot better to look after what really is a unique biodiversity that doesn’t occur anywhere else.”

[tacobell fan]

Just now, roxiczone said:

ankul insects ni kooda kalupthara aah 1 Billion number lo 

They contribute towards environment know. Documentaries chuse alavatu leda manaki? 

[roxiczone]

2 minutes ago, tacobell fan said:

They contribute towards environment know. Documentaries chuse alavatu leda manaki? 

nenu em adiga nuvvu em chepthunav ankul, Insects ni add chesinara ledh ani adhi matuku cheppaledhu 

[mettastar]

inka aaagipoleda bush fires ?

[tacobell fan]

Just now, roxiczone said:

nenu em adiga nuvvu em chepthunav ankul, Insects ni add chesinara ledh ani adhi matuku cheppaledhu 

They might have estimated based on species not the size and shape.

[roxiczone]

2 minutes ago, tacobell fan said:

They might have estimated based on species not the size and shape.

idhi kadha maaku kalvalsindhi, me vignana pradharsana kadhu eeh ankul 

[TOM_BHAYYA]

15 minutes ago, tacobell fan said:

They contribute towards environment know. Documentaries chuse alavatu leda manaki? 

Emanna scenes untene

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1 Billion  animals ఆ ..... Proofs కావాలి అంటున్న లెఫ్టిస్ట్ లిబరల్ ఫ్రెండ్స్ ....

[Spartan]

1 hour ago, roxiczone said:

ankul insects ni kooda kalupthara aah 1 Billion number lo 

insects kalipite that count will be in trillions...

Aussie west coast was rich in animal speices...chala chanipoinai wiped out mostly

[Jilchika]

Billion number is including insects...

”Experts fear a billion animals including mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs and insects have perished in the bushfires, according to Sky News.”

[perugu_vada]

Epatiki aaguthayo e fires