Extinctions In Near Time: Biodiversity Loss Since The Pleistocene

On an island called Isla Juan Fernandez in the Pacific Ocean there lives a hummingbird that I’ll tell you a bit about today called the Juan Fernandez Firecrown. It is a strikingly beautiful little thing, and it lives only on this one island (Hodum). Today it is threatened for a whole host of reasons, all caused in some way by humans, and exacerbated by the remoteness and size of the island on which it lives. Isla Juan Fernandez is an island 400 miles off the coast of Chile (Terrestrial Eco…). It has been 400 miles away from the mainland and therefore any contact with other ecosystems, for 4 million years (Anderson pp1). In that time, the biota, meaning the total complement of animals and plants, that initially settled the island has evolved on its own, independent from outside interference, and formed a totally endemic, native ecosystem (Anderson pp1). Later on as humans began to arrive, which didn’t happen until this century, they brought things with them. Things like invasive plant and animal species, t