Question: How easy is it for an animal to become extinct, and what can cause it?

Matthew Pankhurst answered on 17 Jun 2013:

It’s really easy for an individual animal to die – it happens all the time and will happen to every animal. All the animals that are the same are called a species, and it’s species which go extinct. Some go extinct easier than others. For instance, there is a species of stick insect than only lives in one place in the world – a tiny island of Australia. If that island was hit by a massive wave or was destroyed for some other reason then the species would go extinct because all the members of that species would die. Sometimes a species goes extinct because they evolve into something else, this happens when the environment changes slowly enough for them to change too and keep pace. But, if the environment changes too quickly for them, or another species arrives and takes their food or water or living space, they go extinct. Volcanic eruptions have caused local extinctions (all the species in one area get wiped out) and also global scale extinctions (they pump heaps of gas into the atmosphere and it changes how hot or cold it is). It sounds sad, but, many many species went extinct to allow us humans to live now. Evolution is an amazing process.