It’s official - The Monk Seal is extinct
Sat, Jun 7, 2008
Post filled in: Biology, Environmental Issues
The Caribbean Monk seal (or West Indian seal) has been announced extinct on Friday. This comes as a shock (at least for me - and many others), as this is the first seal species announced extinct due to human activities; now, it will only be seen in drawings.After five years of futile efforts in which not even a single sighting has been reported, the U.S. declared extinct, and also declared that no other seal species has been extinct because of us. This probably (and sadly) opens the way for more such species to become extinct - unless something changes.
The Caribbean Monk Seal was a relatively small seal (6-9 feet) with rolls of fat around its neck and brown pelage that faded to a yellow-white color on the stomach. The last recorded sighting occurred in 1952.
Perhaps what’s even more important here is the lesson that must be learned. Humans left the population unsustainable due to overhunting. To how many other species have we done this? This will (and already is) ultimately affect us! Take just 10 seconds and think about that.
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Andrei is no scientist, but from an early age, he has been fascinated by science; that's why he went to college, and signed up for Geophysics. Feeling that there's a huge gap between science and average people, he rallied TP, started ZME Science, and gave it a green twist too.
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June 7th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
10 seconds to think about it? I’ve been thinking about it for 30 of my past 39 years.
Just our past stupidity - omitting our current stupidity - affects us in ways we barely understand.
For example, we used to have a phosphorus transport system called passenger pigeons that travelled in flocks of up to one billion birds. In just a few hours of rest, one flock making a stop would provide 50 years worth of phosphorus for the local vegetation. It is likely that much of the blight suffered by North American trees in the past 150 years has been due in part because the trees were weakened due to the loss of their nutrient delivery system. All this because “shootin’ stuff is aw’ful fun!”
This sort of foolishness is hurting us, as you say; and it will continue so as we rush headlong towards the abyss. Insistence on ignoring evidence of unpleasant outcomes stemming from our actions is pretty much a species characteristic that all but 10 to 25% of us possess. Our species as a whole is determined to learn the hard lessons first hand.
June 7th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
This is very sad news. It is time for a wake up call, but it will likely take our own extinction to realize that change was necessary.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:21 am
This is neither sad nor unexpected; it is a natural result. I find it funny that the same liberals who scoff at Creationism are unable to cope when natural selection rids the Earth of a species which is no longer fit to survive.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Although I am not surprised that someone who calls himself Squirrelpants and who would try to turn this into a political debate would not grasp this, there was no inherent weakness in this species that led to its downfall. It was a victim of being found by a culture that has proven itself quite incapable of being good stewards of nature.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
May botflies infest your anus and your balls sting with the pain of a thousand porcupines……You sir are a BAD MAN.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:10 am
The Caribbean Monk seal was a bit stringy, and fishy tasting. Manatee flesh is much yummier!
June 13th, 2008 at 6:44 am
That’s pretty lameass, man. Show some respect :<
June 21st, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Shut up T.P. I cant take you seriously or help but laugh after reading your comment and looking at your stupid profile face pic. What are you talking about “show some respect”? Were talking about a dead seal… The seal’s family isn’t going to be offended that some people are making fun of its taste. But hey, maybe you should try expressing your point to an oncoming train and see if it stops to listen.
June 22nd, 2008 at 4:53 am
You’ve got some serious moral issues. It’s clear to me you haven’t understood anything from neither the article itself or the other comments. It’s about respect for nature. It’s because people like you, who don’t give a shit about what’s happening around them and care only about themselves, that species, like the monk seal, are now extinct. Ego-centric individuals, like yourself, should mind their own business and maybe get closer to a railway, maybe the incoming train will ’show’ you the proper respect you deserve… Now, let the trolling begin!
August 6th, 2008 at 3:13 am
Good Riddance
October 26th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Life has been dying on earth since it all started . Why can’t people realize that death and extinction is more common then they think. People will probably be extinct too … its just a matter of time. Yes it is gone but you rather it be humans that died instead?
October 28th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Yes, species do go extinct through natural causes, yes this has been happening for millions upon millions of years, yes creatures go extinct due to a lack of fitness.
However the death of this species much like the death of the dodo is largely due to humanities interference and greed. The species may have had another 1000 years in it if left alone or maybe a million years possibly more.
Our race (species), Homo Sapiens, has only existed for around 500,000 years yet in that time our influence and culture has resulted in the extinctions of countless species as a direct result of our interference in the natural progress of life. If we don’t act to curb this insane pressure we are putting on the planet I’d only give us another 500 years before we manage to cause our own extinction.
October 29th, 2008 at 6:43 am
So we’ve caused a few species to go extinct. Them’s the breaks. If you can’t adapt to change you die and something else will eventually fill the void.
This is nature people, it’s not still life it’s practically chaos theory in action. There’s no such thing as a vaccum in nature. The monk seal being gone means whatever it fed on will be in abundance, which means that something will adapt to take advantage of the food source. Give it another 200-years and things will rebalance easy.
Let’s be honest, we’ve cause thousands of species to go extinct and yet things seem to still work just fine.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
The loss of a predator species does not necessarily mean that prey species will increase. There are a lot of unapparent links in ecosystems that can have surprising outcomes. For example, the North American forests are still weakened due to the loss of their phosphorus transport system (i.e. the passenger pigeon). The outcome, in this case, of the loss of the Carribean monk seal? No one really knows yet.
We do know that the loss did not come about by natural means. One could try and argue that the species could not adapt, but that is a very weak argument. To say that an species is inherently ill-adapted because it could not adapt to overhunting is not a convincing argument. There is not a species on the planet that has adapted for the possibility that some other organism will be simultaneously intelligent enough to create impressive technologies but stupid enough not to even bother to think about using them sustainably.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
about time! How many more does a guy have to eat…
October 30th, 2008 at 9:54 am
It seems to me that all of you have gotten so accustomed to seeing the wild on TV while living in ecosystems made of parking lots and gated communities that you don’t even seem to understand nature. On one side, we’re blaming everything on human activity, as if we were masters of the world, when the reality is that we haven’t advanced past the nomadic level, this is why, like the Mayans, we are about to go extinct ourselves, systematically. Some of us will be left, hopefully, but the end result won’t be the human we know now. On the other hand, this appears as a natural thing to most of us, because death has always already been taking place. I have had the privilege of growing up somewhere were a little “true” wild remains, and in the 20 years that I’ve lived, I’ve seen that true wild be reduced to the puny expanse you guys refer to as “nature reserves”. Blame it on humans, blame it on evolution, blame blame blame. And in the end, the sad fact is, the train left the station a long time ago, and here we are, debating wether we should step in front of it or not…
October 31st, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Well said TP.
I think the saddest thing of all is to read of the ignorance regarding our carelessness as human beings. For those of you who think this is about survival of the fittest, you need to educate yourselves. The chain reaction, even if it’s a slow trickle-down…affects everything. Ability to adapt ? To what ? When their habitats are depleted, or ultimately removed….it no longer is about adaptation. Not unlike the probability that YOU (those of you who think it’s not a big deal) would not survive, if your homes were removed, your food sources removed, your water polluted and perhaps even a bounty on your head or various other body parts. Step outside your selfish, cushy little world, and try to care about something other than yourself.
The only time nature is ever out of balance, you can be sure that man is there, with his greedy little finger on the scale.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:17 am
This is terrible news to me. The idea that we went too far again made clear by the annihilation of a specie.
November 2nd, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I thought that they were nedded like 50 years to announce an animal extintcion since the last seeing. Sorry for my bad english :S
November 4th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Soon my I shall unleash my nanobot hordes and confer absolute genocide on homo sapiens. I gloriously lead you into eternal oblivion together so that the Innocent of the Earth may be fruitful and Gaia have the freedom to produce an intelligence wiser than our own. Remember my words!
November 13th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Some of the commenters above say “no big deal- species go extinct all the time, their fault they didn’t adapt, it’s just natural selection”
Doesn’t seem natural to me given rates of extinction are 100-1000x greater than background levels (hand-in-hand with our expansion).
Doesn’t seem natural when selection operates over thousands/millions of years and yet we see species wiped out in a matter of decades.
Will we (humans) be alright? Probably. But at what point do we start to care? When 10 more species go extinct? 100? 1000? As long as it doesn’t hurt economic growth, right?
What about the services those missing species provide? What if there are no more species left to fill their role? In the early 1980s the long-spined sea urchin experienced a massive die-off in the Caribbean. So what if we lose this algae-eater, we have fishes that eat algae. Oops, we overfished the fish that could have stepped up to keep algae levels low. And with coastal development clearing vegetation, increased pollution, and increased atmospheric CO2, we see even more reef degradation. Good bye coral reefs, tourism, fishing, cancer medicines, hurricane buffering, and all those other ecological services that we don’t miss until their gone. This is a pattern we see worldwide in different habitats with different species. So while the lowly urchin may not play a huge role in the world, it matters. Same for the monk seal. Same for the passenger pigeon, snow leopard, dodo, axolotl, giant panda, black rhino, Baiji dolphin, golden toad and many other endangered/extinct species. They all matter.
The question is when do we recognize this and take meaningful steps to preserve our world?
PS. Economic well-being and conservation are not opposing ends. In fact, long-term economic health and conservation are intertwined.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:07 am
The American Indians had utmost respect for nature and the buffalo. It’s okay to hunt if food is the primary and underlying cause. Of coure, also using all other parts of the animal after the meat is gone. However, hunting an animal with a primary goal of anything other than for meat (skin, fur, horns, et cetera), for instance is what causes extinction of a species. As long as we have dumb ass humans being slaves to money, extinction will continue to happen. Hell, dumbass humans would kill off a race of other humans if they happened to have a valuable material, power, land/oil, et cetera. Hence, genocide. Poor Darfurians and Native Americans. My apologies for the tangent. What i was getting at is extinction is going to happen as long as we have dumb leaders with even dumber supporters. Thankfully, legislation has been getting passed protecting innocent creatures in our country. Anyway, love your mother earth, but don’t be a smug asshole if you are doing your part.
January 1st, 2009 at 6:14 pm
If humans are natural creations, for us calling ourselves “stewards of the earth”, reflects quite the self-righteous attitude. If my ancestors ate monk seals to survive or even become wealthy (survival of the fittest), more power to them.
Still, it’s necessary to have that cautionary voice warn us of the consequences of our own actions, but we continue to lose freedom and free-will as larger misguided bureaucracies decide our future.
Ultimately, we will be judged by our progeny, and I suspect this reactionary, global-warming generation will be labeled quite naive if not downright kooky…that is, if future humans are allowed to think freely.
January 11th, 2009 at 11:00 am
that sucks! where am i gonna find a monk seal coat now!
May 6th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
It’s sad from a human, emotional point of view. As humans, we also have the capability to feel guilt, but in the big picture, what does this mean? Would the Tyrannosaur feel guilt if it cause the extinction of its food source? Our emotions mean nothing, if you believe in evolution. Perhaps we should be mourning our Neanderthal cousins? If there is no Creator, we aren’t better than animals, just more self-aware and creative. “Stewards of nature”? That sounds like someone believes humans were created special, with a purpose other than survival. Where do we come up with this stuff? LOL! It’s a good thing new species keep popping up, or we would have run out a long time ago.
May 8th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Oh great. Just what the world needs: another cavalier nutter who doesn’t know what a metaphor is.