Extinction Up Close: A Rare Turtle Under Assault from Poachers

The paper, published last week in Science Advances used a new approach to estimate global extinction rates and supports previous studies finding that Earth is in the midst of a human-driven “mass extinction” spasm on the scale of past mass die-offs triggered by geophysical calamities.

Its conclusion that the mass loss of species imperils human civilization is also ripe for analysis. (A firmer conclusion would be that reducing the planet’s species abundance and richness cannot be good for H. sapiens.)

But it’s worth setting aside these broader questions for a moment to look at what human pressures on rare or isolated species look like up close.