A simple way is to reason that tomorrow's extinct species will be drawn from today's endangered species. How many species that still exist have populations already reduced to dangerously low levels? The ICBP estimates that at least 1,666 bird species are either endangered or at imminent risk of extinction—almost twenty per cent of the world's surviving birds. I said 'at least 1,666 , because this number is an underestimate for the same reason I mentioned that the ICBP's estimate of extinct species was an underestimate. Both numbers are based just on those species whose status caught a scientist's attention, rather than on a _^reappraisal of the status of all bird species.

The alternative way of predicting what is to come is to understand the mechanisms by which we exterminate species. Extinction of species caused by humans may continue accelerating until human population and technology reach a plateau, but neither shows any signs of plateauing. Our population, which grew ten fold from half a billion in 1600 to over five billion now, is still growing at close to two per cent per year. Every day brings new technological advances for changing the earth and its denizens. There are four main mechanisms by which our growing population exterminates species: by overhunting, species introductions, habitat destruction, and ripple effects. Let's see if these four mechanisms have plateaued.

Overhunting—killing animals faster than they can breed—is the main mechanism by which we have exterminated big animals, from mammoths to California grizzly bears. (The latter appears on the flag of California, the state in which I live, but many of my fellow Californians do not recall that we exterminated our state's symbol long ago.) Have we already killed off all big animals that we might kill off? Obviously not. While the low numbers of whales led to an international ban on whaling for commercial reasons, Japan thereupon announced its decision to triple the rate at which it kills whales 'for scientific reasons'. We have all seen photos of the accelerating slaughter of Africa's elephants and rhinos, for their ivory and horns respectively. At current rates of change, not just elephants and rhinos but most populations of most other large mammals of Africa and Southeast Asia will be extinct outside game parks and zoos in a decade or two. The second mechanism by which we exterminate is through intentionally or accidentally introducing certain species to parts of the world where they did not previously occur. Familiar examples of introduced species now firmly established in the US are Norway rats, European starlings, boll weevils, and the fungi causing Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight. Europe too has acquired introduced species, of which the misnamed Norway rat is an example (it originated in

Asia, not Norway). When species are introduced from one region to another, they often proceed to exterminate some of the new species they encounter, by eating them or causing diseases. The victims evolved in the absence of the introduced Pests and never developed defences against them. American chestnut trees have already been virtually exterminated in this way by chestnut ^b"ght, an Asian fungus to which Asian chestnut trees are resistant. milarly, goats and rats have exterminated many plants and birds on oceanic islands. Have we already spread all possible pests all around the world?

Obviously not; there are many islands still free of goats and Norway rats, and many insects and diseases to try to keep out of many countries by quarantines. The US Department of Agriculture has been trying at great expense, but apparently without success, to forestall the arrival of killer bees and Mediterranean fruit flies. In fact, what will probably prove to be the biggest extinction wave caused by an introduced predator in modern times has just started in Africa's Lake Victoria, home to hundreds of species of remarkable fishes found nowhere else in the world. A large predatory.fish called the Nile perch, intentionally introduced in a misguided effort to establish a new fishery, is now eating its way through the lake's unique fishes. Habitat destruction is the third means by which we exterminate. Most species occur in just a certain type of habitat: marsh warblers live in marshes, while pine warblers live in pine forests. If one drains marshes or cuts forests, one eliminates the species dependent on those habitats just as certainly as if one were to shoot every individual of the species. For example, when all the forest on Cebu Island in the Philippines was logged, nine of the ten birds unique to Cebu became extinct. In the case of habitat destruction, the worst is still to come because we are just starting in earnest to destory tropical rainforests, the world's most species-rich habitats. The rainforests' biological richness is legendary—over 1,500 beetle species living in a single rainforest tree species in Panama, for instance. Rainforests cover only six per cent of the Earth's surface but harbour about half of its species. Each area of rainforest has large numbers of species unique to that area. To mention only some exceptionally rich rainforests now being destroyed, the felling of Brazil's Atlantic forest and Malaysia's lowland forest is already almost complete, and those of Borneo and the Philippines will be mostly logged within the next two decades. By the middle of the next century, the only large tracts of tropical rainforest likely to be still surviving will be in parts of Zaire and the Amazon Basin.

Every species depends on other species for food and for providing its habitat. Thus, species are connected to each other like branching chains of dominoes. Just as toppling one domino in a chain will topple some others, so too the extermination of one species may lead to the loss of others, which may in turn push still others over the brink. This fourth mechanism of extinction may be described as a ripple effect. Nature consists of so many species, connected to each other in such complex ways, that it is virtually impossible to foresee where the ripple effects from the extinction of any particular species may lead.

For example, fifty years ago no one anticipated that the extinction of big predators (jaguars, pumas, and harpy eagles) on Panama's Barro Colorado Island would lead to the extinction there of little antbirds, and to massive changes in the tree species composition of the island's forest. Yet it did so, because the big predators used to eat medium-sized predators like peccaries, monkeys, and coatimundis, and medium-sized seed-eaters like agoutis and pacas. With the disappearance of the big predators, there was a population explosion of the medium-sized predators, which proceeded to eat up the antbirds and their eggs. The medium-sized seed-eaters also exploded in abundance and ate large seeds that had fallen on the ground, thereby suppressing the propagation of tree species producing large seeds and favouring instead the spread of competing tree species with small seeds. That shift in forest tree composition is expected in turn to cause an explosion of mice and rats feeding on small seeds, and then to an explosion in hawks, owls, and ocelots preying on those small rodents. Thus, the extinction of three uncommon species of big predators will have triggered a rippling series of changes in the whole plant and animal community, including the extinction of many other species.

Through these four mechanisms—overhunting, species introductions, habitat destruction, and ripple effects—probably over half of existing species will be extinct or endangered by the middle of the next century, when this year's crop of human babies reaches the age of sixty. Like many fathers today, I often wonder how I will describe to my twin sons, who are now three years old, the world that I grew up in and that they will never see. By the time they would have been old enough to come with me to New Guinea, one of the world's biological treasurehouses where I have worked for the past twenty-five years, most of New Guinea's eastern highlands will be deforested. When one adds the extinction of species we have already caused to that which we are about to cause, it is clear that the current extinction wave is surpassing the asteroid collision that may have wiped out the dinosaurs. Mammals, plants, and many other types of species survived that collision nearly unscathed, while the current wave is affecting everything from leeches and lilies to lions. Thus, the claimed extinction crisis is neither a hysterical fantasy, nor just a serious risk for the future. Instead, it is an event that has already been accelerating for 50,000 years and will start to approach completion in our children's lifetimes.