Great Ape Genomes Offer Insight into Human Evolution 英文参考文献.docVIP

Research Digest Synopses of Research Articles On the Brink: How Biology and Humans Affect Extinction Risk Close to a quarter of the world’s mammals are at high risk of extinction. Save for the periodic“great extinctions,” mammalian extinction has been a relatively rare event in geological terms, with one species disappearing from the fossil record every 1,000 years or so. Over the past 400 years, species have been disappearing 50 times faster than this“background”rate, with one vanishing every sixteen years. Human population growth and all its consequences—habitat destruction, propagation of invasive species, poaching—are largely to blame.Top predators often suffer heavily from encounters with humans, especially when those predators are perceived as economic threats.Thirty-four Mexican gray wolves have been reintroduced in Arizona since 1998, and ?ve have been shot, reportedly by ranchers. Species in the most densely populated areas are expected to face the greatest risk, yet some survive while others perish, suggesting biological factors play a role in their fate. If, for example, the same external force drastically reduces populations of species with different biological pro?les, then a species with a relatively short gestation period may stand a better chance of recovering than a long-gestating species. The IUCN lists lions as vulnerable. Photo, with permission, by Nicky Jenner, Institute of Zoology, London. While it’s possible that the direct effects of human population density are past—that is, species most sensitive to human incursions are already gone—human population density likely modulates biology.That might explain why gestation length didn’t predict risk for species living in sparsely populated areas— all else being equal, their numbers remained relatively stable. A species with a small population forebodes a high extinction risk regardless of human density, though species with long gestation periods, again, face greater danger in the company of human