I am discussing with a group of kids whether the idea of a species being threatened (less so endangered) is related to practice or numbers. An example is of course the passenger pigeon who went from huge numbers in 1870 to collapse by 1890 and extinct in 1914. The bison is another possibility but I’m debating because it never went extinct. Likewise, I’m not using the dodo because by the time they were discovered, they were already in low numbers.
Any other examples of animal that went from huge (they’ll be around forever) to extinction in an extremely short time?
Missed the edit window. I see you want dates from population high to extinction.
In 1900 MacLear’s rat was described as being so abundant that a man couldn’t sleep on the ground anywhere on the island because of the number of rats running over him. So the population was in the millions, possibly tens of millions.
Within 5 years it was utterly extinct.
Detailed records don’t exist, but the period from normal abundance to extinction was probably 18 months or less. That is probably the world record for the time from abundance to extinction. Black rats introduced a whole suite of diseases and the local population was so dense that the disease swept through before they could possibly develop resistance to all of them.
The heath hen comes to mind. In a few decades in the 18th century they went from being a “poor man’s food” due to being so plentiful, to being restricted to an island with 120-200 birds. They did linger until the 1920s. I’ve heard them used in the past as an example of how extinctions can be caused by a “one-two punch”; human hunting reduced their numbers and range drastically, then the species is destroyed by disasters that wouldn’t have been able to kill them in their former range and numbers.
The Moa was a 3.7m (12’) tall flightless bird that was wiped out within about 100 years of the arrival of humans in New Zealand, along with its only predator Haast’s eagle.