The American bumble bee is destined to go the way of the brontosaurus and the wooly mammoth thanks to manmade climate change, media report.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Bombus Pollinators Association of Law Students have launched a petition calling for the bumble bee to be placed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to save it from extinction, USA Today reported Thursday.

“The American bumble bee was once the most common bumble bee species in North America, but without immediate action to protect it under the ESA, it will continue its alarming decline towards extinction,” the petition states.

The bumble bee has “declined by 89 percent in relative abundance and continues to decline toward extinction due,” it declares, and in the last 20 years, it has “vanished from at least eight states, mostly in the Northeast, and it is in precipitous decline in many more.”

Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon each have zero or close to zero American bumble bees left, it asserts.

A bumble bee goes about the business of collecting pollen from flowers in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC. (KAREN BLEIER/AFP via Getty Images)

“Global climate change poses a major indirect threat to the American bumble bee’s environment,” the petition states, and human activities have “increased global average temperatures 0.8-1.2°C above pre-industrial levels.”

Average temperatures “have already risen across the American bumble bee’s range and temperatures have increased more in areas where this bee has declined including the northern great plains, the midwestern, northeastern, and southwestern parts of the country,” it adds.

“Due to climate change-related temporal shifts in flowering or phenological patterns of these plants, the American bumble bee’s phenology may become mismatched with certain plants and lead to gaps in the availability of food resources,” it declares.

The petition echoes similar claims made last year by researchers from the University of Ottawa.

“Winters are getting warmer, the oceans are rising, and now, bumblebees are dying,” CBS News reported on the study, adding that “climate change is causing one of the world’s most efficient pollinators to be on the brink of mass extinction.”

The largest bumblebee population declines occurred in places where “climate change was pushing species past what they ever had to tolerate before,” the study asserted.

Bumble bees gathering nectar from sunflowers on The Gaddis Farms in Bolton, Miss.  (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

For its part, the BBC trumpeted that a drop in the bumble bee population was driven by “climate chaos.”

The report cited Tim Newbold of University College London (UCL) as saying that bumblebee distributions are moving northwards in Europe and North America, “as you’d expect with climate change.”

“But this was the first time that we have been able to really tie local extinctions and colonisations of bumble bees to climate change, showing a really clear fingerprint of climate change in the declines that we’ve seen,” Newbold said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has responded to the petition to add the American bumble bee to the Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants, saying it presents “substantial scientific or commercial information” indicating that the petitioned action may be warranted.

The service announced plans to initiate a status review of the species to determine whether or not to place the bee under the ESA.