Bramble Cay is tiny island, made of sand, about 50 kilometres off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Its highest point is just three metres above sea level, but that didn’t stop the Bramble Cay melomys – a little brown rodent once found there and nowhere else – from living there happily.
For more than a thousand years, the melomys dwelled and dined on the low-growing plants that clung to the sand, but then humans started changing the climate. As sea levels rose, salt water flooded the island, choking the local flora. Between 2004 and 2014, the volume of leafy plants on Bramble Cay shrank by 97%.
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This did not bode well for the melomys. With their food source gone, the melomys soon followed. This island was deadly for them. Many animals have gone extinct, but the Bramble Cay melomys is the first mammal to go extinct as a direct result of human-induced climate change.
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Top image: Bramble Cay melomy by State of Queensland, CC BY 3.0 AU https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons
