• Question: are plants going extinct

    Asked by anon-352110 to Nikolai on 2 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Nikolai Adamski

      Nikolai Adamski answered on 2 Mar 2023:

      We know that during the history of life, at least five major mass extinction events have occured. The latest one was the asteroid that crashed into Earth 65 MYA (million years ago) and essentially killed the dinosaurs (excepts birds and their ancestors!). But plants perished and have gone extinct in these events as well.

      Human activity on the planet has increased dramatically over the last 10,000 years and is causing many species, both plant and animal, to go extinct.

      One thing is sure. If all plants go extinct, humans will follow soon. That is why we need to protect the plant from climate change and its impacts on plant and animal life.

Comments

  • Photo: Rosa

    Rosa commented on :

    If you want to see more about it you can have a look to this link, it gives some information of plant species at extintion danger https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/september/two-in-five-plants-are-threatened-with-extinction.html.
    Also we have the “endemic” plants that can growth into a very very specific conditions so they are like isles that they are really are threatened with extinction https://growwild.kew.org/blog/uk-native-plants-and-fungi

  • Photo: Phil

    Phil commented on :

    It is normal, over very long periods of time, for some species (plants, animals, bugs, you name it!) to become extinct, and for new species to evolve. But there are too many species under threat at the moment, we are destroying their habitats and changing the environment too quickly for many to keep up and adapt, putting them at risk of extinction. And remember that everything is joined up (what we call an ecosystem) – if a plant becomes extinct then that might have a really bad effect on animals, birds, insects, fungi etc that would normally use the extinct plant for food or shelter.

  • Photo: Sam

    Sam commented on :

    Evolution is a constant process of new species evolving and some older species going extinct. Some species last longer than others Ginkgo trees have been around for about 200 million years, whereas wheat that we eat is only about 10,000 years old.

    In that time between when Ginkgo was first around to when early human farmers started breeding wheat, millions of different plant species have probably ( I say probably because it’s a difficult number to be exact about) come into existence, and millions have gone extinct, leaving us with the few hundreds of thousands that currently live on earth.

    So plant species (like other life) is constantly going extinct. However, at the moment, species of plant are going extinct at a rate faster than ever in the history of the earth, because of the activities of humans. We are destroying natural habitats to make way for farming, houses, and industry, and we are changing the climate making it difficult for many species to adapt.

    We’re not going to lose all of the plant species any time soon, we’d be in serious trouble if we did. But if we’re not careful we will lose a lot of the diversity of plants, and that’s not something we can get back easily.