Ice Will Suffice

I was recently sitting with a friend watching the river.  We were discussing how the world would end, or probably more accurately, how human beings would die out.

He urged, (correctly, I think) that it was inevitable we would blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons and the only question is when.  I suggested, that although I have a prejudice in favor of people over other species, this might leave a pleasant enough world for smaller creatures.   Chernobyl might be the pattern.  The horses and cows died and the human beings left or died. But the lynx and the eagle owl may have made a comeback after homo sapiens left their habitat.  Studies have shown plants like soy and certain rodents have evolved a tolerance for the radiation.  So the large animals may all died, but plants and smaller animals may thrive.

But I don't think we will be around long enough for the nuclear destruction.  The frogs are all dying.  Apparently a species of frog that lived with a certain fungus was shipped around the world for scientific experiments.  The fungus was fatal to other types of frogs and now all of the frogs are dying, all over the world.

There have been five mass extinctions before.  A mass extinction is defined to mean half the species on earth have died.  Now most of the scientists believe we are in mass extinction event number six.  It may have begun only in the last few decades or it may have begun 50,000 years ago.  A book called Twilight of the Mammoths by Paul S. Martin describes all the great animals in North America when human beings showed up.  These include mastodons (a type of big elephant), gomphotheres (an elephant with a mouth like a shovel), four species of mammoths (hairy elephants), ground sloths, a glyptodon (sort of a living PT Cruiser with a mace for a tail), giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant peccaries, dwarf antelopes, native camels and horses, saber-toothed and dirk-tooth cats and an American subspecies of the lion.  So maybe the frogs are almost an afterthought.

The problem, of course, if you are fond of certain human beings is that in these extinctions the big creatures tend to go, and we are a big creature.  The earliest extinction lost a number of different types of trilobites and they are all gone now.  It may be the sharks ate the rest of them.  I don't understand this web of life that includes the frogs and how they help hold the whole together, but I imagine that without the frogs to eat the bugs, the bugs will eat our food and us.  Also, it seems somewhat like the canary who dies in the cave before the miners start dying.  The frogs dying may just be a signal the hole we are digging is filling with poisonous gases.