Nick Issac - Institute Research Fellow

What are you currently working on?

I work on lots of different projects at the same time. I am mainly trying to understand extinction and how much of extinction already exists in the animals biology or if it is down to where the animal lives; so who you are versus where you are. For example sometimes all the species in the forests can be affected by a change and other time it is just certain individuals that are. I also look at patterns such as why so many different animals are so fond of nectar and whether they all eat nectar in the same way or different animals eat nectar in different ways, and so therefore whether they affect each other. Also if a dynamic change occurs in the forest and one particular species goes extinct then does another new species come in and fill that gap. The problem with looking at patterns in biology is that we only have a snap shot of data for the past 100 years so we don't really know about the changes that will occur over a long period of time.

Why are there so many species that live in a rainforest?

There are many theories and no one answer but as a general overview there is plenty of rain and sunlight in a rainforest, which is obviously good for plants to photosynthesise. Lots of plants provide lots of food and places for animals to live, so then there are many animals there too.

Is extinction not naturally happening?

There are many different theories of why extinction is happening in nature. There have been studies done that show extinction is occurring naturally, although it is believed to have been sped up by human activities. From looking at fossil records it can be seen that extinction rates have been much higher in the past 500 years. However sometimes human activities that are may be thought to affect animals actually don't. For example it has been shown that in areas of forests that have been logged and used for agriculture gorillas like eat the new plants. Although they do not like it in areas of the forest that hunting occurs in, therefore some disturbances can be good and other bad. There obviously needs to be a balance as people need resources and food but it needs to be done without causing to much affect on the wildlife in that area.

One of your projects was with the EDGE programme, what did you do there?

I worked on the technical side of the team to create a programme that worked out the EGDE rating for over 4000 mammals. This was done using their IUCN status and the ED (Evolutionary Distinct) number. For animals to get on the list they had to be threatened in the wild. From this list we got the top 100 EDGE species and ZSL picked 10 species from this list to focus on. These ten were ones that didn't already have project currently running for them and they include: elephant shrew, Bactrian camel, slender Loris, pigmy hippo, Attenborough's echidna, jerboa, baiji (thought to have recently gone extinct), solenodon, hirola and the bumblebee bat.

What happens when they think that there are no more of a particular species left in the wild, such as recently with the baiji?

An animal cannot be regarded as extinct until none have been sighted for 50 years so it will remain endangered on the IUCN list. Work will also continue to be carried out if there are projects on going in the area. A new category is thought to be put into place for animals to be classed as "possibly extinct" for ones such as the baiji that are thought to be extinct in the wild.