• Question: Can anything you've learned help figure out a way to help certain animals/plants from going extinct?

    Asked by anon-231541 to Jessica on 14 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Jessica Mitchell

      Jessica Mitchell answered on 14 Nov 2019:


      It’s usually quite difficult to work out how and why species go extinct because so many different things can impact on each species (food, weather, disease etc.). Using long-term information can help us understand how the environment around an animal/plant has changed and how this could be effecting them.

      When I worked with meerkats we had over 20 years of information about these animals and the weather. We could see that 2012-2013 were very hot and dry years, also very few meerkats had babies. So… we could link the hot/dry weather to low birth rates which could effect the survival of this group. But there may have been other factors involved in this situation (for example diseases that we didn’t know about). We need to be careful about generalising this information and look at meerkats in other areas to see if this also happens.

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