Essential+Questions+and+Investigation




 * Big Question: What a ****re the animals that might become extinct in 2050? **

**Key Questions: **
1. Why are some animals endangered? 2. How has animal extinction impacted on our world?

**Supporting questions: **
1. How has pollution affected the animals?

Pollution is where our environment, is being contaminated by harmful substances. Pollution is majorly caused by man, however, there is a few exceptions where pollution is naturally made.

There are many types of pollution which affects animal life. For example, marine pollution where excess nutrients, plastic, oil,chemicals, metals and radioactive waste are dumped into the ocean, therefore killing many marine animals.

Plastics are non-biodegraded which means that they cannot be decomposed and broken down. Instead, they go on to accumulate and pollute the land. Furthermore, wild creatures and sea animals might try to eat the plastic bags, which leads them to be tangled in waste plastic, often they perish.

Another pollution which is man made, is the air pollution. "Man" is polluting the air and atmosphere with technology. The power station produces sulphur oxide, cars produced carbon dioxide and factories produces nitrogen oxide. Ever since the industrial revolution, these greenhouse gases were released into the air, therefore leading to global warming, however there has been debates between scientist whether or not global warming is caused by humans.

When the air around us is polluted and it rains, the water in the rain reacts with the sulfur compounds along with the oxygen in the atmosphere, thus creating acid rain. Acid rain is highly dangerous to the environment, it has the ability to destroy forests, dissolve rocks and can contaminate the ocean, therefore killing fishes.

2. How have some human activities impacted on the animals' world?
Animals which cannot "**adapt**" to the changes in their environment will slowly die due to lack of shelter, water and food.

The changes of animal's environment can be caused by human activities such as deforestation, air/ocean pollution and climate change.

Deforestation is the act of cutting down forest for farming or industrial purposes. This can cause desertification, soil erosion, silting, salinity problem and eutrophication.

Desertification results in soil erosion where the nutrients in the soil is being washed away which would make a fertile land into semi-desert. Forest loss decreases the biodiversity(variety of species in an area), changes the Earth's climate and increased the levels of greenhouse gases.

When the deep-rooted trees are cleaned away, the water-table will rise and bring the dissolved salts to the earth's surface. Salting of land can cause severe loss of productive land. This will cause the herbivore(vegetarian) animals to loss their food and habitat. If these herbivore die, the carnivores(meat eaters) which eat them will also die due to the lack of food. Some of the salts will be washed into the rivers or sea. This can kill many aquatic animals and reduce the aquatic biodiversity.

To solve this problem, some animals will adapt to the situation and evolution starts. However, if they can't adapt, they will die out and become extinct.

3. Has climate change affected the animals? If so how?

Climate Change is a long-term change in weather. The Earth is currently suffering from **"Global Warming"**.

Global Warming can affect almost every organism which inhabits the earth, from humans to sea life to animals to plants. When greenhouses gases are released into the atmosphere, it traps heat from the sun, therefore making our planet warmer.

Global Warming has had a great impact on animal. Polar bears in the North Pole, where their ice land is slowly melting away, and the same case in Canada, Hudson Bay where the polar bears are losing two weeks of hunting due to the ice breaking two weeks earlier. The "warmer" temperature has also made number of days in each season imbalance. This has impacted on the animals a lot.

Coral Reefs The corals live with microscopic organisms(microbes) that grow in their tissues and make food by photosynthesis. But if the ocean temperature become too high, the coral will expel these colourful microbes and turn white. Bleaching corals can only survive for a short period of time. If the water stays too warm, eventually they will die from the lack of food. source: Climate Change by Eyewitness (book)

4. How does the change of seasons affected animals?

Due to warmer temperatures, the length of seasons has changed. A short winter can impact on a bird's feeding season. The availability of food will be short for example in Europe, woodland caterpillars are hatching 2 weeks earlier in spring. By the time the birds return from Africa to reproduce, most of the caterpillars have already turned into butterflies. This causes the birds to die from starvation. 5. How has the introduction of foreign animals affected the wildlife?

Introduced animals can cause lots of touble. New Zealand In the native forests of New Zealand, Norway rats with huge appetite gobbled up almost all of the leaves, seeds and fruit which makes the native animals to die from hunger. Kiore, a kind of mouse, are predators which causes tuatara, snails, frogs and lizard endangered. They had also made a few species of birds and a species of bat extinction. Foreign animals were first introduced into New Zealand because of many reasons.

Possums are possibly the worst of all. They were introduced into New Zealand for money making purposes. The natives plants which they enjoy eating the most are pohutakwas and New Zealand's threatened mistletoe. Possums eat plants such as the pohutakawa, New Zealand's threatened mistletoe and other plants. They also eat the eggs of native birds, chicks and even the adults. Possums also carry a disease disease known as Bovine Tuberculosis, otherwise known as TB. This disease is a threat to New Zealand's farming sector.

Some animals, like the stoats were introduced in order to control pests such as rabbits. However, soon after the introduction of stoats, their diet began to move away from rabbits and towards native birds.

6. How has animal research benefited our society? There has been many benefits to our society from researching animals. Research has been done on animals because animals are biologically the same as humans, also scientist believe it is wrong to expose threats to human beings just to develop a cure to diseases, however this has risen issues about animal abuse.