Question

EXERCISE 18.6 How Quickly Can Humans Hunt a Species to Extinction? Name: Course: Section: Date: The moa, a giant flightless bird, was hunted to extinction on New Zealand in the early 1400s. The human population of New Zealand was no more than 2,500 at the time when the moa went extinct. We can make some simplified calculations to see how many moas were hunted per year (a) Humans first settled New Zealand and began hunting moas in 1314. The last moa was killed around 1425. How many years did it take for humans to hunt moas to extinction? years (b) The founding human population of New Zealand was about 400 people. There were about 159,000 moas in New Zealand when humans first settled the islands. The complex equations that ecologists use to calculate population change are beyond the scope of this course, but we can roughly calculate how many moas each human would have to hunt per year using arithmetic. Assuming no change in the human population and ignoring the decreasing numbers of moas, we can solve the following equation: number of moas Rate of hunting X number of number of humans years How many moas would each human have to hunt per year to cause their extinction in the time you calculated in question (a)? -moas/year (c) Studies show that there were about 1,500 people living in New Zealand when moa hunting was at its peak. With this human population size and a moa population of 159,000, how many moas would each human have to hunt per moas/year year to cause their extinction in the time you calculated in question (a)? (continued)

Answer 1

A: The Moas got extinct in 111 years as their hunting started in 1314 and they became extinct in 1425.

B Rate of hunting = (159000/ 400 )/ 111 = 3.58 Moas per human per year or around 7 Moas by each human in every 2 year for absolute numbers.

C Rate of hunting = (159000/ 1500)/ 111 = 0.95 which gives roughly one Moas was killed per year for it to be extinct.

D No this does not surprise me as the number of Moas every year hunted by each human is just around 3 which is not that big number of Moas to be hunted over time period of one year.

E As all the people wont have been able to hunt the Moas the number of Moas hunted each year by each human increases as the number of Moas which were hunted remains the same with same years of extinction but the number of hunters decreases leading to higher rate of hunting per human per year.

F With advanced weapons the rate might have been extremely larger leading to extinction of Moas in a relatively shorter duration of time. This supports the hypothesis that we are in midst of sixth mass extinction as our rate of resource use has increased rapidly due to better technology.