Portrait: Johannes Gerardus Keulemans

I shared this quite a while back on Thriving Oceans, but thought this would also be an appropriate forum as well considering it is bird and extinction related.  It is a brief poetic retelling of the Great Auk’s demise; a trend that began in the mid 1500s and continued until their disappearance in the 1800s.  I don’t recall the setting or reason for inscribing this in my notebook, but the year was 2003…and by no means do I make any promises as to being a professional (poet that is).  But, perhaps it may shed a little light on the reasons for the extinction of the Great Auk.

The Great Auk
By Scott Artis (Nov. 19, 2003)

In the sixteenth, the year twenty four;
no one could foresee the danger in store.
Being black and white with a beak like a crow;
they’d fly through the water, beneath the surface they’d flow
Thriving in colonies this flightless, penguin-like bird;
a home in the New World, quite undisturbed.
Two decades since the onslaught ensued;
foods, fats and oils the crew they did use.

In the seventeenth, the year thirty four;
their importance to fleets had never been more.
The fishing of Grand Banks were all but unbound;
their continued exploitation came not close to sound.
Eye witness accounts, herded into the holds;
doomed in the bowels, the horrors unfold.
The discourse of time had shown few concerns;
the indiscriminate will of man, who did not discern.

In the eighteenth, the year seventy five;
the Council of Newfoundland a petition they cried.
Penalties delivered for feathers and eggs;
but taking of birds was still used as bait.
Summer on the islands, men they did bunk;
a boat laden with sea birds, from the Island of Funk.
Fowlers would plunder:  eggs, feathers and meat;
a colony diminished, the cost would be steep.

In the nineteenth, the year forty four;
the isle of Eldey, still a few more?
The last two and egg were all that remained;
three men in a boat, the expedition did came.
The male and female went on display;
the last known egg, sold that same day.
Blamed on the naturalists, it was not the fleets;
Victorian science caused their defeat.

In the nineteenth, the year forty four;
a battle was lost, the Great Auk no more.

After stealing some time to read the Fall 2009 issue of ‘Endangered Earth’  (newsletter from the Center for Biological Diversity) that I received earlier this week, I figuratively walked away knowing that the current state of wildlife management will be unable to cope with near-future extinction trends.  And it was the following USGS graph contained within the newsletter that I found quite worrisome.  Plus, it also gives me yet another opportunity to share a favorite quote that I tucked away from my Fish and Wildlife Conservation professor…and with a booming population this statement is unbelievably relevant:

“In other words, to successfully conserve natural resources, you must be a biologist, psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist, economist, and a philosopher all at once.” (Matthew Mahrt, Oregon State University)

Thus, I thought I’d let the graph speak for itself and encourage some reader participation.  Any thoughts?  Can we reverse the trend?

Who cares about insects? Aren’t they just agricultural pests, household nuisances, and harborers of disease?  I surely hope that is simply an attempt at exaggeration or at best an antiquated notion.  Insects are vital to ecosystem management and fill important environmental roles as pollinators, decomposers parasites, herbivores, predators, and prey.  Additionally, as approximately 50% of insects are herbivorous they aid in supporting higher food chain levels and accelerate carbon and nitrogen cycles. Yet, the potential for multi-species extinction gets little press in the shadows of the cute and cuddly.  And I’m not pointing any fingers because this is just a matter of fact and I’m guilty of it as well.

“In fact, in the last 600 years, the extinction of only 70 insect species has been recorded, a strikingly low  figure compared with the number of recorded extinctions for vertebrates.”

So when I happened upon a publication foretelling of rampant insect doom as a result of (you guessed it) habitat loss, I just had to spread it around.  In this particular study the author focused efforts on monophagous insects, which are those that depend on a single plant species for survival, in 34 biodiversity hotspots.  These worldwide hotspots  have been identified as conservation priorities, have at least 1500 endemic plant species, and have been the victim of habitat loss resulting in the disappearance of 70% or more of its original vegetation.  Because monophagous insects rely on a single plant species, they are most vulnerable to the effects of habitat degradation and loss.  The hotspots contain over 150,000 endemic plants and it is estimated that they support between 5.3 and 10.7 monophagous insect species per plant species.

“Monophagous insects are particularly susceptible to habitat loss because to survive without their hosts they would need to exhibit improbable evolutionary host shifts.”

If we are to assume that the insects will be unable to undergo an “improbable evolutionary host shift” ahead of the pace of plant and habitat loss currently exhibited in the hotspots, then extinction of these resources will be inevitable. And that is precisely what the author found after applying a species–area relationship (SAR) model, which is and has been used to predict decreases in species diversity with reductions in the geographic area of plants.

And the outcome of all that data, described as conservative results, is a total of 213,830 insects in danger of extinction if trends continue.

“The estimated range of 213,830–547,500 species extinctions is three to four orders of magnitude higher than the 70 insect species known to have become extinct globally in modern times, despite the fact that the model was intentionally fed with very conservative parameters. On average my results showed that one monophagous species became extinct when 37–94 square kilometers of habitat was lost.”

It’s so easy to forget that there is more to habitat loss than the disappearance of high profile mammals and birds, but an array of plants and hundreds of thousands of insect species we desperately need.

FONSECA, C. (2009). The Silent Mass Extinction of Insect Herbivores in Biodiversity Hotspots Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01327.x

If you haven’t yet heard, the Nature Conservancy recently released a report that documented a staggering decline in oyster reefs.  According to the report, “Globally, 85% of oyster reefs have been lost, making oyster reefs one of the most severely impacted marine ecosystem on the planet (Shellfish Reefs at Risk, Nature Conservancy, 2009).”

But as oysters grab their 15 minutes of media fame, the decline of other mollusks has gone and continues to go largely unnoticed. Knowing that mollusks have been deemed the group most affected by extinction (IUCN Red List 2007) and observing a potential disconnect between the number of researchers studying mollusks and the number of species, which is estimated to be 100,000-200,000, Claire Régnier wanted an answer to her question of ‘what proportion of species that are known to be extinct by specialists is captured by the IUCN Red List?’ 

Of all of the invertebrates, mollusks are perhaps the most varied in terms of body form and include gastropods, bivalves, cephalopods, chitons, and monoplacophorans and are found in both terrestrial and aquatic habitats.  Yet, the diversity to publicity and researchers is inversely proportional and is leading to a lag in recorded extinctions as is evident with the findings.  Preliminary data from the IUCN provided a known global extinction number of 850 species of which 278 were correctly listed as extinct. But, further investigation revealed that the actual number of extinct mollusks was 566 species.  The listed number and actual number increased by a whopping 49% after consultation with experts and obtaining published references for the status of each species.

• 278 species/subspecies – Already listed on the IUCN Red List
• 278 species/subspecies – Extinctions recorded neither in literature nor on the IUCN Red List
• 14 species/subspecies – Recorded as extinct in the literature but not on the IUCN Red List

Indeed, there is a mismatch between the number of scientists working on birds and mammals and the very few taxonomists specializing in invertebrate taxa. If one adds to this the unbalanced repartition of human effort and funding in relation to the richest biodiversity locations, it becomes clear that these two phenomena are influencing this uneven number of documented extinctions.

Moreover, there is a huge taxonomic bias in the assessment of species’ conservation status. According to Baillie et al. (2004), the conservation status of almost 90% of mammal species and of all bird and amphibian species has been evaluated, whereas only 3% of mollusk species and 0.08% of insect species have been assessed. Indeed, invertebrates receive much less attention than vertebrates, and our knowledge of them is sparse.

With high profile members of the Mollusca phylum garnering recent attention for their incredible declines I hope that additional efforts and monies will become available to entice researchers to continue this enormous taxonomic task and ensure extinctions do not continue to go unnoticed.

Reference:
RÉGNIER, C., FONTAINE, B., & BOUCHET, P. (2009). Not Knowing, Not Recording, Not Listing: Numerous Unnoticed Mollusk Extinctions Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01245.x