Essay Sample on Habitat Loss

Over the last five centuries, more than 800 species have been classified as extinct but is the way we determine this accurate. 

It used to take 50 years without the species being seen to declare it extinct however in the 1990s they changed the law, an an animal extinct can be declared extinct if scientists have completed several surveys in their known habitat to prove there is no evidence, a sighting or its continued survival.This way of declaring animal extinction isn't always accurate though.

We have over 80 percent of the world's oceans to explore; however , we have still put 514 sea creatures on the extinction list. The coelacanth(see la kanth) was one of these animals. In 1938 the fossil record was full of specimens of an extinct fish, the coelacanth. The fish lived between 65 million to 360 million years ago and was thought to have gone extinct in the cretaceous paleogene extinction event, the same mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. Scientists knew from the fossils that the fish was over 1.8 metres long and weighed around 100 kilos.However, in 1938, fishermen caught an unusual fish. They sent sketches of the fish to an ichthyologist( ic thee ol i gist) which studies fish, he recognized the fins as the coelacanth (see la kanth). Between 1938 and 1975 84 sightings were reported that later became known as the West Indian Ocean coelacanth.Fast forward to 1997  a marine conservationist was visiting a fish market when he saw an odd fish, he took photos of it and it wasn't long before it was identified as the Indonesian coelacanth (see luh kanth) The coelacanth is still a living species to this day.

When you think of a stick insect you probably imagine a well camouflaged bug. The lord howe (how) stick insects also nicknamed as tree lobsters, was very well camouflaged in fact it was on the extinct list for 80 years after a supply ship brought rats to their island in 1918. They were taken off the extinct list in 2001 when two scientists found 24 individuals. Now the species is critically endangered and lives on lord Howe island in Australia. 

Flightless birds have become extinct in the past such as the dodo or moa and then there is the takahe. The takahe roames most of modern day New zealand but it wasn't always that way, the takahe was announced dead in 1898 due to hunting and habitat loss, but were discovered in the murchison mountains 50 year later. Now the takahe is considered nationally vulnerable with over 400 birds remaining.

The pygmy tarsier was thought to be extinct in 1920 but in 2008 researchers found live pygmy tarsiers in the mountain of sulawesi. The pygmy tarsier is often compared to furbies, yoda and gremlins. There is so much we don't know about these creatures however we do know that there were two new species of tarsier found in 2017.

However only a small number of extinct animals have been found alive and more than 90 percent of all species that have ever lived on earth have become extinct. The main reasons for this are habitat loss and predators.Habitat loss is the most widespread of species endangerment and extinction, usually this happens because of human activity including deforestation and pollution which in the last 500 years has caused over 800 extinctions.