How the Bramble Cay melomys became the first mammal lost to the climate crisis
By Hannah Seo, The Guardian.
Excerpt: No one knows how the Bramble Cay melomyses – rodents with large, liquid eyes and reddish-brown fur, small enough to fit in the palms of your hands – ended up on Bramble Cay. The cay is speck of land about 50km (31 miles) off the coast of Papua New Guinea, at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef. ...in 2015, the Bramble Cay melomys became the first mammal to go extinct directly because of human-caused climate breakdown. ...Bramble Cay is only a little larger than an average US shopping mall. The highest point is about 10 feet above sea level. ...The tiny cay and its essentially trapped inhabitants were susceptible to even small changes in the surrounding ocean. Climate change and rising sea levels led to salt-water intrusions throughout the island, choking much of the flora – in the decade between 2004 and 2014, the volume of leafy plants on Bramble Cay shrank by 97%. Storm surges also winnowed down the population, sweeping animals out to sea. When biologists returned in 2002 and 2004, only about a dozen melomyses could be found....