We Have Made It Harder for Big-Brained Animals to Survive
Current Event #1
The article that I will be explaining today involves the extinction of animals. The article is called, “We have made it harder for big-brained animals to survive.” I got this article from http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160811-the-downsides-of-having-a-big-brain, and this article was made on August 16, 2016.
So, this article is basically about how animals with big-brains is not always a good thing. It also explains how us humans have made it harder for them to survive with their big brains. The reason for this is because animals with big brains need a lot of room to roam the area in where they live, and they can't do that when us humans are poaching them, deforesting where they live etc. William Ripple of the College of forestry at Oregon state University, said in a statement: “The more I look at the trends facing the world's largest terrestrial mammals, the more concerned I am we could lose these animals just as science is discovering how important they are.” So, it would not be good for us humans to lose these animals that contribute in many ways. But some other reasons that animals with big brains, aside from the fact that us humans make it harder for them, is the fact that big-brained infants tend to need longer gestation periods and higher levels of parental care, which means that the mother takes longer to reproduce, and also has fewer offspring at any one time. This means that the offspring could easily die young, considering the fact that their gestation and weaning periods are longer than other animals. This increases extinction because populations cannot grow fast enough to compensate for death. Like the gorilla, for example, gives birth every three to four years! That's definitely way too long.
There's also another major problem that involves us humans that contributes again to why being a big-brained animal is a dangerous thing: it's the fact that us humans have a great contribution to the changing of the environment, and animals just cannot cope with these changes. They cannot adjust fast enough to these changes, and this causes them to die out. And the fact that us humans are very ignorant when it comes to the well-being of these animals is not helping them. Literally, our own large