It ain't just the honeybees -- whose epidemic of colony collapse disorder is wiping out beekeepers, nor is it the near-extinction of many wild pollinator populations. It's not just the disrupted bat hibernation in the Northeast, or the disruption in songbirds and farmland birds, butterflies, amphibians, the fish or the coral reefs of the ocean, or just the collapse of freshwater mussels.

It's all of the above, and more. It's increasingly clear that biodiversity is rapidly declining, worldwide. Species are going extinct before they can be catalogued, and those whose numbers were significant a decade ago have become rare.

If it was just the cute critters -- the koalas, the polar bears, the tigers, the mountain gorillas -- it would still be sad. But it's the species upon which other populations of species depend (which is nearly every species), the workhorse species, the fundamental species, that are also in decline. That's the scariest part, for the species homo sapiens.

Without wild and domestic bees, for example, a large proportion of food crops (apples, soybeans, almonds, peaches, cherries, strawberries, and more) would not bear fruit. Without a robust bird population, many beetle and locust populations might explode. Without amphibians like frogs, mosquito and other insect populations may swarm, imbalancing yet other ecosystem interrelationships. And, without critters we hardly pay attention to -- say, a particular kind of plankton -- then the tiny plankton-eaters, which feed the small fish, which feed the bigger fish, which feed the sharks, all crash. The web of life becomes tattered.

There is evidence that even the fairly slight effects of climate warming that we've been experiencing the last decade may be turning dependencies out of whack:

... Nesting wood warblers are important predators of the eastern spruce budworm, which defoliates millions of acres of timberland every year. Without the birds, those losses would likely be far greater. Under normal conditions, warblers consume up to 84 percent of the budworm's larvae and pupae.... Similar problems could occur in the West, where savannah sparrows, sage thrashers and other species that help control rangeland grasshopper populations are expected to move north. "A single pair of savannah sparrows raising their young consumes an estimated 149,000 grasshoppers over the breeding season," says [an expert]. "Unless all of the components of this ecosystem --- grasslands, insects and birds -- change at the same time, an unlikely prospect, we're looking at more grasshopper outbreaks in the future."
Silent Spring: A Sequel?, National Wildlife, 2003

It is very difficult to disaggregate the Climate Change Scenario from the Species Collapse Scenario, as seen above, but unlike the Confluentialists at The Center for PostApocalypse Studies, we at the Institute strive to focus on one catastrophe at a time, to better understand and analyze them.

To that end, we are hypothesizing a decade in which a number of key species go into catastrophic decline, for reasons we will only dimly understand. In some areas it will be dramatic, in other areas less so.