...
  • 主题
高级搜索  >
历史搜索 清空历史
首页> 外文期刊>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America >Drastic population fluctuations explain the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon
【24h】

Drastic population fluctuations explain the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon

机译：Drastic population fluctuations explain the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon

获取原文
获取原文并翻译 | 示例
           
页面导航
  • 摘要
  • 著录项
  • 相关主题

摘要

To assess the role of human disturbances in species' extinction requires an understanding of the species population history before human impact. The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird in the world, with a population size estimated at 3–5 billion in the 1800s; its abrupt extinction in 1914 raises the question of how such an abundant bird could have been driven to extinction in mere decades. Although human exploitation is often blamed, the role of natural population dynamics in the passenger pigeon's extinction remains unexplored. Applying highthroughput sequencing technologies to obtain sequences from most of the genome, we calculated that the passenger pigeon's effective population size throughout the last million years was persistently about 1/10,000 of the 1800's estimated number of individuals, a ratio 1,000-times lower than typically found. This result suggests that the passenger pigeon was not always super abundant but experienced dramatic population fluctuations, resembling those of an "outbreak" species. Ecological niche models supported inference of drastic changes in the extent of its breeding range over the last glacial–interglacial cycle. An estimate of acorn-based carrying capacity during the past 21,000 y showed great year-to-year variations. Based on our results, we hypothesize that ecological conditions that dramatically reduced population size under natural conditions could have interacted with human exploitation in causing the passenger pigeon's rapid demise. Our study illustrates that even species as abundant as the passenger pigeon can be vulnerable to human threats if they are subject to dramatic population fluctuations, and provides a new perspective on the greatest human-caused extinction in recorded history.

著录项

获取原文

客服邮箱：kefu@zhangqiaokeyan.com

京公网安备：11010802029741号 ICP备案号：京ICP备15016152号-6 六维联合信息科技 (北京) 有限公司©版权所有

  • 客服微信

  • 服务号