The latest news out of Texas is that the DNA of a wolf declared extinct in the wild lives on in a Texas pack.
I am not surprised.
While extinctions are a very serious thing, they are a lot less common than folks would have you believe.
In fact, only a few hundred animals have gone extinct in the last 400 years, and most of these are birds endemic to small Pacific islands decimated by rats and feral cats.
Today, about as many animals are "rediscovered" as BEING NOT EXTINCT as are declared extinct.
Princeton University biologist Elizabeth Heppenheimer says:
Overall, it's incredibly rare to rediscover animals in a region where they were thought to be extinct and it's even more exciting to show that a piece of an endangered genome has been preserved in the wild.
Um. NO. It's actually very very common to find an animal declared extinct to still be living in the area where it was last seen. It literally happens several times a year.
For example this morning I read that the world's loneliest frog has found a possible mate.
Glad to hear it. But all they had to do to find a mate was to spend a few weeks where they had last been seen such a frog in the wild.
This story is so common with "extinct" animals as to be the rule rather than the exception.
Yes, species do go extinct and that is a very serious thing. But let's not overstate things eh?
Bad science is bad science and hyperbole is the WORST THING EVER (See what I did there?).
Folks fanning mass hysteria in this arena are a little too common.
For example, yesterday the nameless faceless person or entity at the @extinctsymbol account on Twitter (YES they have a SYMBOL, hear them!) screamed that the Trump Administration's proposed border wall/fence would mean the EXTINCTION of the Ocelot and the Jaguar.
I replied: "Complete bullshit. The proposed fencing/wall is not near the center of any population center for these cats. Extinction means something. Try to figure out what it means. Amazed at this level of stupidity and ignorance."
And what was the response? I got blocked. Which is fine. I am just amazed that someone who is trying to put themselves out there as an expert on extinction does not actually know what that word means.
If this was a one-off, that would be one thing, but it's not.
For example, over at Bird Life International they have a headline that says: "Spix’s Macaw heads list of first bird extinctions confirmed this decade."
Um, NO. There are breeding Spix Macaws in captivity, plans to release them in the wild, and some evidence that a wild population still exists.
This was never a common bird, and a lot of money and science is going into making sure it continues to stay on the planet no matter the merit or evolutionary success of this particular animal.
Do we need more habitat protection for this species and more birds? YES. But that's being done and that's the REAL STORY. Fake news on extinction is defeatist (and wrong).
Back to the Red Wolf.
There is the little matter of whether the Red Wolf is even a separate and distinct species.
There's actually a considerable body of evidence to suggest that the Red Wolf is simply a long-standing semi-stable hybrid between a Grey Wolf and a Coyote. Wolf-coyote-dog hybrids are increasingly common all over the US.
So was anything actually "discovered" in Texas? Maybe not.
There's not a huge amount of surprise on that score either. As I have noted about extinctions, one important question to ask is whether the animal actually ever existed at all. Hybrids are common (especially with birds and fish) and are genuinely confusing. If an animal's existence is known by only one or two specimens, and it fits withing certain taxa, some skepticism is warranted.
Does skepticism get you headlines and research grants? Nope. But it's still the wise move, and it's more likely to lead you to the truth in the long run.
6 comments:
I agree that some stupid comments are flying around relating to extinction. However Australia and New Zealand are hardly "small Pacific Islands". Both have had native fauna decimated. Here's from Wikipedia on NZ...
Over a period of 750 years New Zealand’s vertebrate fauna has been nearly halved, and there have been uncounted losses of populations and species of invertebrates.
Yes, New Zealand has been hard hit, but most of the hit has come from the small isolated satellite islands where locally endemic species were nailed by rats and cats. A list of extinct species for everywhere can be found here, broken out by phylum, class, etc. >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUCN_Red_List_of_extinct_species
The current list of 53 birds pushed off the edge in NZ, for example, includes a lot from Chatham Islands which are 500 miles from the South Island. Only 15 species of birds have become extinct since 1850. More on all that here >> https://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2015/07/28/extinct-birds-of-new-zealand-part-1-a-diverse-menagerie-sadly-departed/
I wouldn't say most of the NZ extinctions are small island species . I keep running into stories about empty niches... the nine species of moa are the most dramatic. Top predator gone. I was surprised to see the California quail doing well and not being hated as an introduced species. I'm told, "yes, Kiwis kthe people, not the birds) like them. They've taken over the niche once filled by our now-extinct native quail". Two of five native frog species are extinct. The laughing owl and bush wren were both common. The surviving owl species (the ruru) is listed as threatened. I went through a few pages of the links you gave. I'd say well under 1/4 are described as Chatham Island.
Predator naive ground dwelling species fare poorly faced with rats, cats, possums and mustelids. That is as true for North and South Island as for smaller islands. Indeed, the number of modern extinctions would be higher had some species not been able to hang on on smaller islands where they can be protected. And some of the CITES list I species, such as the tuatara, are from relict taxa not for elsewhere.
And then there's the sad tale of Australian carnivorous marsupials.
Island endemics exist because being biologically weak is not necessarily maladaptive. Can't fly? Not a problem if nothing preys on land or land-nesting animals. Bad at catching prey? Not a problem if there's a lot of prey and no competition.
The result is that as soon as an animal that has survived competition hits an island, they tend to do better than those that have never seen competition?
Most islands that have seen extinctions actually have more species on them than ever before. So is it species loss or gain? Locally, at least, it's always a gain.
Folks who wax tragic at the loss of a small bird on a non-descript island in the pacific, tend to sneer at chickens, ducks, pigeons.
Why?
We have created more types of edible and useful chickens, ducks, and pigeons than you can imagine. Ditto for cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and goats. They are scattered across the globe, and are feeding billions. Can we talk about the fact that we are creating more species than we are losing? Is the same thing? No, but let's talk about if the difference is entirely negative. Not sure it is.
Where I disagree is that
1. There are some pretty big islands south of "Wallace's Line". It's inaccurate to call them small Pacific islands
2. Loss of iconics such as the moa and the Tasmanian tiger, or potential loss of relict taxa such as the tuatara are particularly sad. As was the loss of the pigmy mammoth.
I don't much care about the loss of a few species of beetle in Amazonia. Species numbers don't much matter where a genus has split into hundreds or thousands of species. But it's sad to loose a whole genus (or family or order) or to empty a broad niche.
Likewise, I feel we're the poorer for proliferation of weed species. The tens of species I pull from my veggie patch, and commercial growers attempt to control with herbicides, are hardly a boon. Also, proliferation of cattle, goats and sheep have contributed massively to deforestation and soil loss and CH4 from ruminants doesn't help with the problems of greenhouse gas emissions.
You can't turn back the clock, and it's complicated ... But as you have noted in many posts, rearranging the world to accommodate yet another billion people carries its costs.
The mammoth has been gone 4000 years.
It took almost no people to wipe out the Moa as is noted here >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-people-meant-less-moa.html
The Tuatara are a good example of an animal that was made to go extinct: just really poor at hunting and living. Like a hot house rose, some of these island endemics simply cannot compete outside of a sealed box.
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