Human-induced extinction of animals is happening - scientists found out that the Steller's sea cows died out in a short span of three decades. These massive sea-dwellers lived in seclusion on the Arctic islands in between the Aleutians and the Kamchatka peninsula. The Steller's sea cow is a close cousin of the manatee and dugong. They were survivors of the Pleistocene period or the last ice age and lived until the 18th century.
While it is debatable that the extinction of other animals from the ice age was a result of mass hunting activities by humans, the Steller's sea cow tragedy cannot be contested. Human has definitely fast-tracked its decline. What has been discovered during the early expeditions and mapping of Siberia and the North America is now lost forever.
To step back a bit in the history of the Steller's sea cow, its demise started when German naturalist Georg Steller and Danish explorer Vitus Bering set sail. When the duo reached Alaska in June of 1741, Steller explored the territory to search for new species. It is among these adventures that the party stumbled upon the Steller's sea cow, the IUCN Red List said.
Upon the Steller's sea cow discovery for the first time after thousands of years from the Pleistocene, the gentle giants were victimized by humans. Steller and his crew developed a taste for the sea cow meat, boiled down its oil which they described as comparable to the best butter that Holland can offer, according to The Atlantic.
The far bigger mistake is Steller's notion that the giant sea cows were inexhaustible. By 1812, another German scientist named Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff listed the Steller's sea cow as "eradicated" from the animal kingdom.
While the ecosystem played a key role, nothing can surpass the atrocities done by humans against the Steller's sea cow. Apart from massive hunting, scientists also believed that the Steller's sea cow went extinct because of the ecological domino effect. These giants fed on kelp but the sea urchins' population ballooned to the level where they left nothing for others to feed on.
