Considering all the threats facing endangered seabirds -- extreme weather, pollution, oil spills -- I would not guess that "giant mice" would really rate concern. But on Gough Island in the South Atlantic, ten-inch mice have been decimating Atlantic petrel populations by eating the birds' young. This is especially bad news because Gough Island is the only known place where Atlantic petrels breed -- meaning that the young of the entire species are at risk of ROUS attack.

And here is my face right now: 8O

Artist's conception.

You couldn't have a one-ton snake today -- the climate's just too moderate for a cold-blooded creature that size. But back when the planet was warmer by nature, all kinds of terrifying mega-reptiles roamed the Earth. So, in anticipation of global warming, maybe we should start preparing for how to coexist with snakes the size of buses. Lesson one: Apparently they pal around with giant turtles.

We love wildlife! We love watching it in high definition on our TV screens while David Attenborough says something droll to ease the trauma of looking at a whale penis. (SO FLEXIBLE.) But apparently we don’t love it so much that we're dedicated to keeping it around.

A new report [PDF] from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found that in the past few decades, wildlife populations have declined by about 30 percent:

OK, this is the kind of extreme weather I can get behind -- the kind where every time it rains, it rains puppies from heaven.

I actually have a rough time with sad dog stories, even ones with happy endings; I tend to get all weepy because I can't have all the dogs in bow ties on a rainbow. But for you sane people who actually find heartwarming stories heartwarming, this is the heartwarmingest: This pup squirmed out of a hawk's talons midair, fell 30 feet, survived, and is now being happily bottle-fed by a wholesome seven-year-old and his family. Ugh, excuse me a minute, I've got something in my eye. It's a bunch of tears.

Rodolfo Dirzo. (Photo by Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.)

If you think all ecologists are focused on the gloom and doom of climate change, think again. Some of them have even bigger things on their minds.

“I think that, given time and political will and political savviness, we might be able to fix the climate change situation,” says Rodolfo Dirzo, the Bing Professor in Ecology at Stanford University, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Latin American Studies. “But biological extinction is not a reversible thing. To me -- and I know that this might be controversial -- I think that biological extinction is the most dramatic global environmental change that characterizes the Anthropocene.”

I met Dirzo while preparing for my first class at Stanford: Field Ecology and Conservation. We were organizing the materials for experiments that we would be performing in Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve, the northernmost tropical rainforest in the Americas, located in Veracruz, Mexico. Dirzo, many years prior to his arrival at Stanford, was the director of research at the reserve. His observations there have led him to study not only the effects of deforestation, but his new line of thinking around “defaunation,” or how the loss of medium and large animals have restructures the forest understory, and ultimately shape a whole tropical ecosystem.

“Go to Los Tuxtlas and you walk in this amazing forest -- it looks so lush and green and exuberant,” he says. “We don’t really see what is happening to the animals, unless you begin to really carefully start monitoring.”

In this interview, we talk about the rise of "rodentation," the ecological version of “the living dead,” and the ethical implications of wiping out the results of 3.5 billion years of evolution.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

Let me tell you about your generation, people in your 20s. You like brunch. You're not sure what you're doing with your life. You give a shit about the future of the planet. And you have tattoos. Shhhh. You have tattoos. I won't tell your grandma; it's cool.

Conservation nonprofit Tatzoo will not give you brunch (as far as I know), but it can help you with the other things. Apply for Tatzoo's training bootcamp, and the organization will teach you crucial skills for becoming a leader in conservation activism. Each team at the 10-week training camp will work to preserve an endangered species, gaining experience in fundraising, organizing, and communication along the way. And at the end of the program, you get a tattoo of the species you've helped work to save.

Elephants travel to the Anthony home. (Photo by Thula Thula Game Reserve.)

In case you needed another reason to care about wildlife, here's one: If you devote your life to elephants, they might come to your funeral. Or anyway that seems to be what happened for conservationist and "elephant whisperer" Lawrence Anthony, who died in March. A few days after his death, two herds of elephants filed through the bush to their friend's home, where they appeared to stand vigil for two days, according to Anthony's family.

Photo by the New England Aquarium.

The lobster is having its day in high fashion -- Anna Wintour wore one to the Met Ball -- and apparently the little sea bugs are letting it go to their heads (if that is strictly a "head"). This one was apprehended off the coast of Maine (where else?), just prancing around being all orange and Jackson Pollock-y and incredibly, incredibly rare.