Human-driven climate change causes extinction of mammal species

New York Times: The Bramble Cay melomys—the only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier Reef—has disappeared from the atoll off the shore of northern Australia on which it lived. According to Luke Leung of the University of Queensland and his colleagues, rising sea levels caused by climate change resulted in the atoll’s occasionally being covered by seawater and its overall surface area being reduced; the changed water levels have destroyed the melomys’s habitat and food sources. The disappearance of the species is the first documented extinction of a mammal caused by human-driven climate change. The melomys was first documented by European sailors in 1845. In the 1970s researchers counted hundreds of the animals on the atoll. But surveys in 2002 and 2004 found no more than a dozen animals, and a 2014 survey by Leung and his colleagues found neither animals nor evidence of their presence.