Extinction Vortex
How do species go extinct? In this video I will explain how populations become trapped in something called an extinction vortex/spiral, and disappear from the world. #extinction #conservation #mammoth #seaturtle #blackstilt #genetic drift #maths Around 4,000 years ago, as the Egyptians were busy building the great pyramid, the last of the world’s wooly mammoths died. They had been survived for thousands of years on the remote Wrangel Island in the Arctic ocean, so how did they disappear? To understand why the mammoths on Wrangel island died out we have to understand how species and populations ultimately go extinct, which can be explained with a special class of mathematical models, called the Extinction Vortices or Extinction spirals, which during the course of this video I hope to explain, along with effective population size. There are four recognized vortices, the A vortex, the R vortex, the F vortex, and the D vortex. In this video I use the stories of the Wooly Mammoth, Black Stilt (kaki), Sea Turtle, and deforestation to explore and explain each of these vortexes.