Friday, May 14th, 2010

Modern Extinctions

Liolaemus pictus, a viviparous Chilean lizard typical of temperate forests. Photo by P. Victoriano.

Over the course of the Earth's history, there have been at least five major extinction events -- the End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian, End Triassic, and End Cretaceous. Some ecologists, citing the loss of biodiversity in certain areas and the species at risk, say that a new major extinction event could be on the horizon. Writing this week in the journal Science, researchers say that warming temperatures could cause one-fifth of the world's lizard species to become extinct by the year 2080.

In this hour, we'll talk about modern extinctions and what causes them. How much is human activity to blame? Plus, we'll check in with researchers studying a fungal infection that has devastated frog populations in some parts of the world.

Guests

Vance Vredenburg
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
San Francisco State University
Research Associate, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
Research Associate, California Academy of Sciences
San Francisco, California

Barry Sinervo
Professor, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California

Tony Barnosky
Author, "Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming" (Shearwater, 2009)
Professor, Department of Integrative Biology
University of California, Berkeley
University of California Museum of Paleontology
Berkeley, California

George Amato
Director and Affiliated Professor
Sackler Institute of Comparative Genomics
American Museum of Natural History
New York, New York

Related Books

Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming

The World Without Us

Related Links

The Sixth Extinction Documentary (with Prof Tony Barnosky)

Segment produced by:Christopher Intagliata

Image: A male Liolaemus tenuis, an oviparous species broadly distributed in Central-Southern Chile.
Photo by P. Victoriano.

Image: A temperature modeling device that researchers use to estimate how hot a lizard would get in the field.
Courtesy Barr Sinervo.

Image: A pile of southern mountain yellow-legged frogs in California's Sierra Nevada.
Credit: Vance Vredenburg.

Image: Vance Vredenburg collects a skin swab from a southern mountain yellow-legged frog in California's Sierra Nevada where he and colleagues tracked the spread of the deadly amphibian disease Chytridiomycosis.
Credit: Natalie Reeder.

Image: Species diversity has yet to be explored for many lizard groups of the world, as exemplified by this unnamed Liolaemus species from Bolivia.
Photo by Ignacio De la Riva.