Fauna of Europe
The fauna of Europe is all the animals living in Europe and its surrounding seas and islands. Europe is the western part of the Palearctic realm. Lying within the temperate region, the wildlife is not as rich as in the hottest regions, but is nevertheless diverse due to the variety of habitats and the faunal richness of Eurasia as a whole.
Before the arrival of humans European fauna was more diverse and widespread than today. The European megafauna of today is much reduced from its former numbers. The Holocene extinction drastically reduced numbers and distribution of megafauna and continues to. Many of these species still exist in smaller numbers, while others thrive in the developed continent free from natural predators, with the former threatened by human activity.
Origins of European fauna
The formation of the European fauna began in the Mesozoic with the splitting of the Laurasian supercontinent and was eventually separated from both North America and Asia in the Eocene. During the early Cenozoic, the continents approached their present configuration, Europe experienced periods of land connection to North America via Greenland, resulting in colonization by North American animals. In these times, higher sea levels sometimes fragmented Europe into island subcontinents. As time passed, sea levels fell, with seas retreating from the plains of western Russia, establishing the modern connection to Asia. Asian animal species then colonized Europe in large numbers, and many endemic European lineages died out.The cyclic changes of the Pleistocene between cold and warm periods resulted in antagonistic responses within two different groups of organisms: one expanding during the warm periods and retracting during the cold phases and another with opposed responses.
Glaciation during the most recent ice age and the presence of man affected the distribution of European fauna. As for the animals, in many parts of Europe most large animals and top predator species have been hunted to extinction. The woolly mammoth was extinct before the end of the Neolithic period. Tree species spread outward from refugia during interglacial periods, but in varied patterns, with different trees dominating in different periods. Insects, on the other hand, shifted their ranges with the climate, maintaining consistency in species for the most part throughout the period. Their high degree of mobility allowed them to move as the glaciers advanced or retreated, maintaining a constant habitat despite the climatic oscillations. Mammals recolonized at varying rates. Brown bears, for instance, moved quickly from refugia with the receding glaciers, becoming one of the first large mammals to recolonize the land. The last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago, resulting in the present distribution of ecoregions.
See also List of extinct animals of Europe.
Zoogeographic regions
Atlantic Ocean
The north-eastern Atlantic Ocean may be divided into two main biogeographic regions - the Lusitanian, and northern European seas. A clearly distinct area is also the Macaronesian Biogeographic Region.The North Sea is home to about 230 species of fish. Cod, haddock, whiting, saithe, plaice, sole, mackerel, herring, pouting, sprat, and sandeel are common and target of commercial fishing. Due to the various depths of the North Sea trenches and differences in salinity, temperature, and water movement some fish reside only in small areas of the North Sea. Of crustaceans, Norway lobster, and deep-water prawns and brown shrimp are commercially fished.
The coasts provide breeding habitat for dozens of bird species. Tens of millions of birds make use of the North Sea for breeding, feeding, or migratory stopovers every year. Populations of northern fulmars, black-legged kittiwakes, Atlantic puffins, northern gannets, razorbills, and a variety of species of petrels, seaducks, loons, cormorants, gulls, auks, and terns, and other seabirds make these coasts popular for birdwatching.
The Baltic Sea is an ecological island, isolated from other brackish seas by both land
and fully marine seas. The low salinity of the Baltic Sea has led to the evolution of many slightly divergent species, such as the Baltic Sea herring, which is a smaller variant of the Atlantic herring. The most frequent benthic species are Saduria entomon and Monoporeia affinis, which is originally a freshwater species. A great part of its bottom is anoxic and without animal life.
The Baltic Sea and North Sea are also home to a variety of marine mammals.
Freshwater
Europe contains several important freshwater ecoregions, including the heavily developed rivers of Europe, the rivers of Russia, which flow into the Arctic, Baltic, Black, and Caspian seas. There are about 15,000 known European freshwater animal species.Arctic tundra
is the northernmost of European habitats, in extreme northern Scandinavia, Svalbard archipelago, northernmost part of Russia. Some typical animals include reindeer, Arctic fox, brown bear, ermine, lemmings, partridges, snowy owl and many insects. Most tundra animals undergo hibernation during the colder season. Iceland is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean with very scarce land fauna. The only native land mammal when humans arrived was the Arctic fox. There are no native reptiles or amphibians on the island, but a rich marine fauna live in the ocean waters around it.Forests
Eighty to ninety per cent of Europe was once covered by forest. It stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arctic Ocean. Though over half of Europe's original forests disappeared through the centuries of deforestation, Europe still has over one quarter of its land area as forest, such as the boreal forests of Scandinavia and Russia, mixed rainforests of the Caucasus and the cork oak forests in the western Mediterranean.In temperate Europe, mixed forest with both broadleaf and coniferous trees dominate.
The cutting down of the pre-agricultural forest habitat has caused major disruptions to the original animal ecosystems, and only few corners of mainland Europe have not been grazed by livestock at some point in time.
Grasslands
The Eurasian Steppe is the term often used to describe the vast steppe ecoregion of Eurasia stretching from the western borders of the steppes of Hungary to the eastern border of the steppes of Mongolia. Most of the Euro-Asian Steppe is included within the region of Central Asia while only a small part of it is included within Eastern Europe. Characteristic are some small mammals.Alpine regions
The mountain regions have peculiar fauna relatively little influenced by human activities.The northernmost are the Scandinavian Mountains. Pyrenees present many instances of endemism. The Pyrenean desman is found only in some of the streams of the northern slopes of these mountains, Pyrenean brook salamander also lives in streams and lakes located at high altitudes. Among the other peculiarities of the Pyrenean fauna are blind insects in the caverns of Ariège . The Pyrenean ibex mysteriously became extinct in 2000; the native Pyrenean brown bear was hunted to near-extinction in the 1990s but was re-introduced in 1996.
Some common animals of the Alps are Alpine ibex, Alpine marmot, Tengmalm's owl and ptarmigan. The Apennine Mountains provide habitat to Marsican brown bear and the Italian wolf. The Carpathian Mountains are a range of mountains forming an arc of roughly 1,500 km across Central and Eastern Europe and are inhabited by the largest populations in Europe of brown bears, wolves and lynxes, as well as chamois and other animals.
Mediterranean
Formerly the region was mostly covered with forests and woodlands, but heavy human use has reduced much of the region to the sclerophyll shrublands known as chaparral, matorral, maquis, or garrigue. The loss of native forests had significant impact on biodiversity, with some 90% of the endemic mammalian genera of the Mediterranean becoming extinct after the development of agriculture. Conservation International has designated the Mediterranean basin as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots.As to the marine fauna, there are strong affinities and relationships between Mediterranean and Atlantic faunas. The deep-water fauna of the Mediterranean has no distinctive characteristics and is relatively poor. Both are a result of events after the Messinian salinity crisis. An invasion of Indian Ocean species has begun via the Suez Canal. Many species, are critically endangered.
Invertebrates
About 100,000 invertebrate species are known from Europe. The marine species richness is greatest in the Mediterranean with 600 sponge species, 143 known species of Echinoderms and about 500 species of Cnidarians. Almost 1000 species of oligochaetes live in Europe.There are about 1500 species of non-marine molluscs in Europe. The marine fauna is again richest in the Mediterranean region. 22 species and 3 subspecies of gastropods are extinct in Europe since the year 1500. No species of bivalves are known to be extinct in Europe since 1500.
The myriapod fauna contains 500 Chilopoda and 1500 Diplopoda. Of crustaceans, about 900 species of Maxillopods, 400 Ostracods, 1500 species of Isopods, 500 Amphipods and 30 Decapods and many others are present.
The number of spider species in Europe counts to 4113. Scorpions are mainly found in southern parts of Europe.
Insects
There are about 300 Neuropteran, over 1000 Orthopteran, 150 cockroach and 1000 caddisfly species in Europe. The dipteran fauna consists of 12,000 species of Brachycera and 7000 species of Nematocera. Among over 20,000 Hymenopterans are 180 species of ants. About 25,000 species of beetles are recorded from Europe.About 600 species of butterflies and about 8000 species of moths live in Europe. An estimated 18% of all European butterfly species are considered to be vulnerable to or imminently faced with extinction.