The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

the long-tailed woodcreeper and the olive-backed foliage gleaner, which
travel in mixed-species flocks, have all but disappeared from the smaller
fragments and are found at much lower abundance in the larger ones.
Frogs that breed in peccary wallows have vanished along with the
peccaries that produced the wallows. Many species, sensitive even to
slight changes in light and heat, have declined in abundance toward the
edges of the fragments, though the number of light-loving butterflies has
increased.
Meanwhile, though this is somewhat beyond the scope of the BDFFP,
there’s a dark synergy between fragmentation and global warming, just as
there is between global warming and ocean acidification, and between
global warming and invasive species, and between invasive species and
fragmentation. A species that needs to migrate to keep up with rising
temperatures, but is trapped in a forest fragment—even a very large
fragment—is a species that isn’t likely to make it. One of the defining
features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that
compel species to move, and another is that it’s changing in ways that
create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing
so.
“The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the
nineteen-seventies is climate change,” Lovejoy told me. He has written
that “in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human
activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity,”
the result of which could be “one of the greatest biotic crises of all time.”
That night everyone went to sleep early. After what felt like a few
minutes but might have been a few hours, I was woken by the most
extraordinary racket. The sound seemed to be coming from nowhere and
everywhere. It would rise to a crescendo, fall off, and then, just as I was
starting to fall back to sleep, start up again. I knew it was the mating call
of some kind of frog, and I got out of my hammock and grabbed a
flashlight to take a look around. I couldn’t find the source of the noise, but
I did come across an insect with a bioluminescent stripe, which I would