3-08 article - entering the sixth mass extinction response
TRANSCRIPT
3-08 Article - Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction Response
What can you tell about the article and the authors from the title? What did you learn from reading the Abstract?
What does anthropogenic mean? How do we know what prehistoric species went extinct? Why does this article only consider vertebrate species?
Why are some people skeptical about the magnitude of anthropogenic extinctions? What does this tell us about their ideas and philosophies? Could this cloud their thinking? Why is understanding the extinction rate important? Why did they use mammals to determine background extinction rates?
Why would it be bad for scientists to be considered “alarmists”?
What are differences between “extinct,” “extinct in the wild,” and “possibly extinct”? Speculate the main causes for the recent extinction of mammals? … of birds? … of reptiles? … of amphibians? … of fish?
What stands out the most in this table? What is the message this chart conveys? How does it support the argument of this article? If this chart was formatted differently--say a pie chart of a line graph or a bar chart--would it affect the message this chart conveys?
Why do you think the years 1500 and 1900 were chosen for this study? What is significant about those dates?
What is the most important piece of information in this paragraph? Why is that most important?
What does the visual tell you? What biases might be present in those visuals? Would it read differently or affect you differently if it were in a different format--bar graph instead of line graph, etc.?
How do you feel about this? Why do you feel that way?
What does the visual tell you? What biases might be present in this visuals? Would it read differently or affect you differently if it were in a different format?
What is the importance of “ecosystem services”? What questions do you have based on this paragraph?
What does extirpation mean? What does incontrovertible mean? Why did the author use this word? What effect is the author trying to achieve? What does unprecedented mean? If a bunch of animals go extinct, why should we care? Won’t more evolve?
Why would this section be included in a scientific article? Why would the IUCN list be considered authoritative? If 88-100% of known mammals, birds, and amphibians have been evaluated only only 44% of reptiles and 38% of fish species have been evaluated, what does that mean?
Who might be interested in these supplementary materials? Why?
What types of references are used for this study and article? How old is the oldest reference?
Why would they include information on funding and competing interests? What might have been the reason for the 4 month delay in the submission and acceptance of this article to the journal? List 5 questions that this article brings to mind.