![]() ![]() ![]() Even though the local fishery collapsed more than 50 years ago, the remaining handfish species are still critically endangered, so this extinction should serve as an important wake-up call to save them.Ħ5 North American plants - This past year researchers set out to determine how many plants in the continental United States had been lost. Bottom fishing, pollution, habitat destruction, bycatch and other threats are all listed as among the probable reasons for its extinction. The smooth species, which hasn’t been seen since 1802, lived off the coast of Tasmania and was probably common when it was first collected by naturalists. Handfish are an unusual group of species whose front fins look somewhat like human appendages, which they use to walk around the ocean floor. ![]() Smooth handfish ( Sympterichthys unipennis) - One of the few extinctions of 2020 that received much media attention, and it’s easy to see why. 19th century drawings of orchid species recently declared extinct in Bangladesh. A similar paper published just days later suggested that nine more orchid species from Madagascar may have also gone extinct. Some of these still exist in other countries, but even regional extinctions (or extirpations, as they’re called) tell us that we’ve taken a toll on our ecological habitats. With that in mind, here are the species that scientists and the conservation community declared lost in 2020, culled from media reports, scientific papers, the IUCN Red List and my own reporting.ģ2 orchid species in Bangladesh - One of the first papers of 2020 to report any extinctions announced the probable loss of 17% of Bangladesh’s 187 known orchid species. We can mourn them and vow to prevent as many others as possible from joining their ranks. We don’t just have to sit there and cry,” says conservation scientist Stuart Pimm, founder of the organization Saving Nature.īut at the same time, we need to recognize what we’ve lost, or potentially lost. This year the IUCN - the organization that tracks the extinction risk of species around the world - announced several conservation victories, including the previously critically endangered Oaxaca treefrog ( Sarcohyla celata), which is now considered “near threatened” due to protective actions taken by the people who live near it. The new paper warns that many of the species remain critically endangered, or could still go extinct, but we can at least stop the bleeding.Īnd sometimes we can do better than that. Another recent paper found that conservation actions have prevented dozens of bird and mammal extinctions over just the past few decades. A study published in 2019 found that conservation efforts have reduced bird extinction rates by 40%. Because of that, and because many of these species live in hard-to-survey regions, many of the announcements this past year declared species possibly or probably lost, a sign that hope springs eternal.Īnd there’s reason for that hope: When we devote energy and resources to saving species, it often works. Do it too soon, they warn, and the last conservation efforts necessary to save a species could evaporate, a problem known as the Romeo and Juliet Effect. Of course, proving a negative is always hard, and scientists are often cautious about declaring species truly lost. The causes of these extinctions range from diseases to invasive species to habitat loss, but most boil down to human behavior. Most of these species haven’t been seen in decades, despite frequent and regular expeditions to find out if they still exist. This past year scientists and conservation organizations declared that a long list of species may have gone extinct, including dozens of frogs, orchids and fish. That damaging effect is, in reality, impossible to deny. A few months ago a group of scientists warned about the rise of “ extinction denial,” an effort much like climate denial to mischaracterize the extinction crisis and suggest that human activity isn’t really having a damaging effect on ecosystems and the whole planet. ![]()
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