Kids' "Create your future" website _ Today's Earth, Our Future _ 3. All living things are our friends

Do you know what a toki is? It's an ibis with the scientific name Nipponia Nippon. It was a common bird that could be seen in rice paddies all over Japan up until about 100 years ago. Recently, its population has declined to the point where its existence is a serious concern.

The people in Japan have tried many ways to increase the population of these toki, such as setting up centers for protection, adopting toki from China to try to breed them for repopulation in Japan, and attempting to hatch toki eggs artificially. Because of these efforts, the number of toki has begun to increase.

Although no one wants to believe it could happen, what if the last toki were to die? We would never again be able to find that species of ibis even if we searched the whole world over. When a species of life, such as a plant or animal, disappears from the earth, they have become what we call "extinct."

Ever since life appeared on earth ages and ages ago, many varieties of animals and plants have become extinct.

Both plants and animals take a long time to adjust to their environments, where they gradually transform into new species that look different and even have different body mechanisms. This is what we call "evolution." During this transformation, old species naturally may become extinct if they can't keep up with the changes in the environment.

There are also some plants and animals that became extinct because of sudden environmental changes, such as dramatic temperature changes or because hot ashes from?meteorite collisions blanketed the earth. One such example is dinosaurs that became extinct 65 million years ago. According to one scientist's calculations, in the days of the dinosaur, one species disappeared from earth--or became extinct--every 1000 years.

Long after this time, however, humans appeared on earth and their population began to grow. They hunted for food, built ships to travel across the oceans, and they cleared away forests by cutting down trees. And what's more, they started to use machines and guns, which sped up the extinction of many plants and animals.

When people began farming 10,000 years ago, every 100 years, one species became extinct. But 1,000 years ago, that rate of extinction rose to one species every 10 years. And, in the Industrial Revolution (the period in the 18th and 19th centuries), more machines were used for manufacturing, speeding up the extinction of different species to the point where about 100 years ago, one species became extinct each year. Today, as many as 100 species of plants or animals disappear from the earth each day. This amounts to a total of about 40,000 species that become extinct in a single year! If things continue like this, 1/4th of the earth's species might be eliminated over the next 25 to 30 years.

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Let's take a ride on a time machine and go back 400 years ago to Mauritius, an island on the Indian Ocean. Look! There are some unusual-looking birds about the size of turkeys.

Listen to one of the birds tell their story. "We're called Dodos. We didn't have any enemies on this island. We didn't have anything to escape from, so we didn't need to know how to run fast and we couldn't even fly. Even so, we were living very happily.

One day, people came to our island by boat. We tried to become friends with them, but they wanted us for dinner! Since we couldn't run fast or fly away, most of us were caught and killed and so our Dodo bird population rapidly decreased.

To make matters worse, dogs, pigs and mice brought by those people ate our precious eggs and baby birds, too! As a result, in the 100-some years since human beings came to our island, we had all been killed. Now there are no more Dodos on anywhere on earth."

If humans had not come to their island, Dodos would probably still be living happily today.

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