Extinctions

Such a hot topic. Probably related more now to habitat modifications than climate, but maybe we will get into that. I want to start with a graphic of the IUCN red list. Darkest colors are the red-listed species, which seem to have a good chance of winking out. The other two colors are less precarious.

First I mention plants. Some will certainly soon go extinct. If those losers contain disease-curing chemicals, we also lose. But the base of the food chain is humming along.

Because we are mammals, that group gets a lot of attention. Along with birds, they are recent enough to not have been through earlier big extinctions. Have not been "tested" (unlike coral reefs etc.).

Amphibians don't look good. This is a very ancient group and have survived big extinctions.

That insects have a tiny bar is almost certainly false, and I am sure IUCN knows it. They remain understudied in terms of taxonomy, but are famous for having a large number of rare species. Anybody willing to make the effort can go (preferably to tropics), do some collecting, and identify new (rare, potentially at risk) insect species. If the full truth were known, that bar might be quite a but longer.

So is this a topic of interest at PC?

 

Off again tomorrow to 'the field'. Feed the leeches. Apologies for starting new threads, when I may not be able quickly to reply quickly. But ignore or ravish them, at your whim. Somehow PC is part of my packing to-do list.

 

This will add one to the 'red list', but that's better than being extinct eh?

Monkey Presumed Extinct Appears in Congo Forest : Discovery News

 

Yeah I was right about that but it is common knowledge among those with passable understanding of subphylum hexapoda. I am pleased that Dunn agrees (in AustinG's link), but I am no fan of the approach that Dunn used. We do know of extant insect species with very narrow range distributions. We could describe previous (and ongoing) habitat loses in the same way, and combine those to get at the number a different way.

Unlikely that a previously common, widespread insect species has dropped out recently. This has happened for birds (ex. Passenger Pigeons), but a notably large effort was required.

The rare (generally unknown) species are the ones at risk. 'Behind the veil'. Should they be obligate pollinators for an (also rare) plant, well that's just too bad. Insects are not a major source for medically important chemicals, so I can't play that card