How Many Animals Have Died in Australia’s Wildfires? (original) (raw)

Australia|How Many Animals Have Died in Australia’s Wildfires?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/world/australia/fires-animals.html

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A professor estimated this week that a billion animals had died in Australia’s wildfires. But where are these numbers coming from?

Officials in Australia said they were looking to kill approximately 10,000 feral camels, which have been wreaking havoc on the countryside and local communities.Credit...Glenn Campbell/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images

Jan. 11, 2020

Some 25,000 koalas feared dead on an island being consumed by flames. Ten thousand feral camels expected to be shot and killed. And claims that a whopping one billion animals estimated to have perished across Australia.

These are a few of the numbers that have emerged in recent days to capture the toll of the extreme heat and raging fires on Australian animal life. They add to the already staggering scope of the fires, which have killed at least 24 people, destroyed more than 2,000 homes and scorched more than 15 million acres.

The figures tallying the mass death of Australian critters have ricocheted around the internet, causing apprehension and grief.

Experts in biodiversity have expressed alarm at the span of scorched earth in a megadiverse country that harbors between 600,000 to 700,000 species, many which are not found anywhere else in the world.

Kate Umbers, a biologist at Western Sydney University who studies the Australian alpine grasshopper, is especially worried about the fate of the nation’s 250,000 insect species, of which only about one-third have been named.

The current fire season is “deeply, deeply troubling — far worse than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life,” she told The New York Times this week. “It’s really quite frightening in an ecological sense.”

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