More details coming in May, but an American icon of the West, in a hazy future, may no longer be with us. The American pika is apparently dying off due to global warming, I mean climate change, I mean humans suck, oh crap.
Some data seems to indicate our furry little hamster-like guy is decreasing in presumed numbers because it cannot cope with rising temperatures and it is on the path to becoming the first animal inhabiting the contiguous US placed on the endangered species list due to global warming. Here is the link to the article I pulled. Notice at this point we’re not seeing definitive data showing the drop, not to say that it is not there. Also by the same observation rationale, numbers appear relatively stable in the Sierra Nevadas. These observations cough up the profound notion that perhaps climate change is part of a complex set of pressures (mostly human of course) on pika population.
As an aside, we would have to assume the pika did not evolve in the last hundred years so I would imagine it has seen some temperature fluctuation in its composite time on Earth. We have seen some minor warming in the last century with some leveling off in the last decade, but their imminent doom seems to be band-aided together with projections of unknown outcomes. We continually seem to be obsessed with the microcosm of the last century and make (yes) near-sighted assumptions about a climate which is really not that concerned about us, all the while conveniently ignoring patterns in paleoclimatological data.
I am by no means advocating the extinction of a species and am not some austere dominion-over-the-animals type, but the conservation science wing seems to forget a basic tenet of the theory of evolution. If an organism cannot adapt; it dies. I am not an adherent to the theory, but as a trained archaeologist with a heavy focus in geology; I am well-versed (not that the preceding statement was very profound). The pika is stated to have a narrow limit to the variation in temperature it can withstand. It has carved out a very specialized niche in higher altitudes limiting its geographic range. What has happened to animals like this throughout geological history? They went extinct…
There is such an emphatic push to digest evolutionary theories yet when the basic principles come into play our self-deprecating arrogance gets in the way. People are no more important than any animal but it is our fault almost every time something else dies out. We are conveniently unnatural. It seems we forget if we evolved on this planet, then anything we do is achieved only with items available to us from the environment and utilized in manners born from our development. Yet we know what is optimal for the planet; we have set the artificial criteria. We are anathema.
