ARE WE SEEING THE FIRST SIGNS OF THE SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION OF EARTHLY LIFE FORMS?

…MANY SCIENTISTS THINK WE ARE NOW IN THE MIDST OF THE SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION

alan skeoch

June 2018

A strange thing happened in our farm pond around  the year 1970.   A  remarkable event which  has become a singular event.

A chilling event.

It was  midsummer and  the pond  was thriving.  Seemed that was  the way things should be…the way things had been

for my lifetime.  The painted turtles were breeding like crazy over on the east side of the 7 acre pond.  Many resting like

nude sunbathers on floating  logs and pieces of  fence rails we there into the pond for that  purpose.  The big Snapping turtle

came out to breed as usual in the midsummer sun.  Primeval and menacing to some observers.   Intelligent and  familiar

to us for she  had been here long  before  we were even born.  Her diet of the odd duckling was sad but the duck  and goose

population was healthy.  And wiggling  through the aquatic life was a myriad of leeches whose  diet was any  of us with the

courage to swim  in the pond and here I include muskrats, dogs  and  human  beings.  Easy  to remove with a little salt.

Disturbing if yanked  off for those leeches were able to inject some kind of anti-coagulant.  When I pulled one off  Marjorie’s

foot a  thin stream  of blood  oozed  forth for some time.  Not deadly.  But an illustration of the Darwinian world of

nature “red in tooth and  claw”.  The pond was alive with things as tiny as water siders and as big  as the coyotes whe  left their turds

of rabbit  hair here and there just to let us know their presence.

In short the pond  was  normal….abounding in  life.

But something was strange over  at the western edge where the big pond  drained to the smaller pond (Big Snappers home)  and from thence

the water worked its way to the Speed  River and eventually to the magnificent Great River.  Everything made sense.

Except.  I can see them in mind’s eye to this day.   Something odd was  happening to the frogs.   There were so  many of them.

Clustered at the pond exit drain  there were so many juvenile leopard frogs that the pond water seemed  to have been  suddenly

consumed.   Hundreds of them  All about the  same age.   The  recent crop that had hatched  from the frog jelly in spring time.

I had never seen  so many clustered at one spot.  All looking directly at me.  Not croaking…not  scattering, no  diving.  They just

floated there looking at me.

Now we  had always had  a  large frog population.   Enough frogs to feed each other (they had  a  cannibal gene), to feed the snake population, and  enough

to fill the bellies of the Great Blue herons who paid a regular visit with their stiletto beaks…spear fishing for frogs.   Lots  of  frogs  every year.

But never so  many.

And the chilling part of this story is that there has never  been another burst of  frog life in the past fifty years.I know. We  look each  year at our frogs.

This year…this day…June  10, 2018…I  have yet to see one single frog on the verge or in the water.  And the pond is larger than it has ever been.  A Glorious wetland

with no frogs.

In 1962, Rachel Carson predicted this was happening in her famous book Silent Spring.  I read it back in 1962 and hoped  and prayed that she was  wrong.

Rachel said that the reason for the great dying of living creatures was caused by us…by the rampant post 1945 use of DDT.* (*Dichlorodiphenyltrichioroethane)

Invented in 1873 but put in widespread  use as an  insecticide in 1939 especially effective in controlling Malaria  bearing mosquitoes  Swiss chemist Paul Muller received the Nobel prize

for discovering that this human made chemical (i.e. not a natural chemical) was a great contact poison for insects.  After WW 2, DDT became a  household

pesticide that could be purchased with ease.   While DDT killed mosquitos effectively it also worked  up the food chain killing many creatures including

vast numbers of birds as Rachel Carson pointed out.  In 1972 under the Stockholm Convention, DDT was  banned.  By that time the chemical had  pushed the peregrine  falcon near to extinction and  devastated  the blad eagles.

DDT was a killer  let loose to disrupt the global food chain.  Perhaps contributing to what some scientists call the SIXTH EXTINCTION.

There was no DDT in our ponds.  No farm fields drained  chemicals  into the ponds which ar just  below the height of land draining on one side

to the Grand River and  on the others side  to the  Credit  River.   Our ponds are the source waters of  two great rivers. No  poisons.  So it is hard to explain why our wetlands are so devoid of life today.

Even  harder to explain was that incredible burst of  the frog population in 1970 followed by a slow but continuous decline to the present day

where No  Frogs Now Sing.

Trees that are about to die often have a  final burst of seeds as  if  trying to achieve some form of immortality.

Perhaps these  frogs were doing the same thing.  It was very unsettling at that moment back  in the 1970’s.  That pack of  a hundred, perhaps more,

just sat there looking right into my eyes.   And were never seen again.

Today, June 10, 2018, I walked around two of our ponds…7 acres of water…just to confirm they were dead.   Wishing I  was wrong.

But no frog  sang…no leech wriggled…no snake  slithered…no redwing blackbird  attacked.   All were gone.

Depressing.

“Crash”, our female wood duck that we rescued twice from our farm house this spring where she had taken an exploration trip down the

chimney and spent a couple of  days  smashing dishes in the house before being returned to the pond where her mate waited

resplendent in his  best mating colours.

I was thinking about her when Marjorie called”

“Alan, put the dog  in the truck, we’re  heading  home.”

“All Set.”

“Look!  LOOK!”

“WHERE?

“Over there between  the ponds.  Movement…”

“I see her now…and a  dozen little ones all waddling in  straight line like Madelaine school girls in uniform.”

“Who is she?”

“”Small duck…It’s  CRASH  our  wood duck…looks like her”

“Twelve ducklings at least…tiny .. just hatched. a few days  ago”

“I walked  right by them just a  few minutes ago…saw  nothing.”

“Look! There they are again…all  in line heading down the tractor trail.  Hustling.  Going somewhere.”

I wondered  if  maybe,  just maybe,  there were  a  few frogs bobbing under the fallen cattails…peeping

from  beneath those lilly pads…HOPE  SPRINGS ETERNAL.

alan skeoch

June 10,2018

Creatures  common to our ponds  but not so  common this year.   No frogs singing.  Extinctions  do  not come  suddenly … they take time, often thousands of

**Note: In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species (24⇓⇓⇓–28). For example, several species of mammals that were relatively safe one or two decades ago are now endangered. In 2016, there were only 7,000 cheetahs in existence (29) and less than 5,000 Borneo and Sumatran orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus and P. abelli, respectively) (28). Populations of African lion (Panthera leo) dropped 43% since 1993 (30), pangolin (Manisspp.) populations have been decimated (31), and populations of giraffes dropped from around 115,000 individuals thought to be conspecific in 1985, to around 97,000 representing what is now recognized to be four species (Giraffa giraffa, G. tippelskirchi, G. reticulata, and G. camelopardalis) in 2015 (32).