The loneliest word, and the extinction crisis

We're in the midst of an extinction crisis. Just two months ago, an international committee known as IPBES released a report, compiled over 3 years by 145 experts from 50 countries, that said 1,000,000 plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, many within the next few decades.

Martha, the very last passenger
pigeon, shown when she was
still alive.

Before getting to that report, I want to introduce a word that I only just learned: endling. An endling (the word was coined in 1996) is the last surviving member of a species. One example was Martha, the very last passenger pigeon, who died in the Cinncinnati Zoo in 1914. Passenger pigeons numbered in the billions in the 19th century, but humans wiped them out.

In 2012 we lost another endling, Lonesome George–the very last Pinto Island tortoise from the Galapagos Islands–who died at around age 100.

If you want to see a particularly poignant example of an endling, watch this rare and heartbreaking video of Benjamin, the very last Tasmanian tiger (or thylacine), pacing around his cramped enclosure in Hobart, Tasmania. This film from 1933 is the last known motion picture of a living thylacine. Benjamin died in 1936.

Two Tasmanian tigers in the Washington, D.C. zoo, in a photo
taken around 1904. Photo credit: Baker; E.J. Keller. from the
Smithsonian Institution archives

We have records of other endlings too: the last Caspian tiger was killed in the 1950s in Uzbekistan, and the last great auks were killed for specimen collectors in 1844.

Unfortunately, we're likely to see more and more endlings in the years to come. The causes of extinction are varied, and many of them are related to human activities. The IPBES ranked the culprits, in descending order, as:

1. changes in land and sea use,
2. direct exploitation of organisms,
3. climate change,
4. pollution, and
5. invasive alien species.

In response to the IPBES report, the House of Representatives held a hearing in May to discuss the findings. Republicans on the committee took the opportunity to display a new form of denialism: extinction denialism. As reported in The Guardian, Representatives Tom McClintock and Rob Bishop used their time to attack the reputations of the report's authors, rather than addressing the very serious consequences of large-scale extinction. They called two climate-change deniers as witnesses, who also used their time to attack the authors.

This is a classic strategy used by deniers: attack the messenger, rather than dealing with the substance of the report. Let's consider just a few of the report's main findings (see much more here):

• Across the planet, 75% of the land and about 66% of the marine environments have been significantly altered by human actions.
• Up to $577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss (bees and other insects)
• In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished.
• Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, covering a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.

The report is a call to action. It explains that transformative change is needed to protect and restore nature, and collective action is needed to overcome special interests such as the fossil fuel industry, which donates heavily to politicians. The Congressional hearing was a vivid demonstration of how effective the anti-environmental lobbyists have been.

Endling is the saddest word in any language. If we humans continue to treat nature as we've done in the past, we're going to see many more videos like the one of Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger. Let's hope we can do better.

Starving science: a petty, shortsighted national "strategy"

This image taken approximately 438 miles above the earth's

surface provides a spectacular view of the Lena Delta in

Russia. Image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, whose

 images are all in the public domain.

150 years ago, passenger pigeons were so numerous that they could black out the sky when their flocks passed overhead. The last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in the Cinncinnati Zoo in 1914. All we have left of this species are specimens held in museum collections.

One of the most extensive collections of animal specimens in the world is managed by a tiny unit of the U.S. Geological Survey, called the Biological Survey Unit. A small group of curators maintains a collection of more than one million animals collected over the past 130 years by scientists and ordinary citizens across the U.S.

Now, for reasons that are at best mysterious, the USGS is planning to eliminate the Biological Survey Unit. The BSU has a very small budget, a mere $1.6 million out of the USGS's budget of $1.1 billion, and an even tinier fraction of the country's $4.4 trillion budget.

What the heck are they thinking? Shutting down the Biological Survey Unit won't save enough money in the vast government budget to even be noticed, but the loss of its precious collections will reverberate through the decades. Does someone in the USGS or the Department of the Interior have a grudge against the BSU? Or are they just petty?

The BSU's collection resides in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, one of the great museums of its type in the world. The collection contains some 370,000 birds, 300,000 mammals, and 390,000 amphibians and reptiles, many of them dating back to the late 19th century. These specimens represent a unique view back in time, illustrating the natural history of our continent and the animals that have lived on it over the years.

It's only through collections like this that scientists can understand how human activities have affected our natural world. For example, historical collections of eggs from wild birds allowed scientists to document the thinning of eggshells caused by the pesticide DDT, which was made famous by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring.

Just a few weeks ago, the presidents of three of the leading animal science societies in the U.S. wrote a letter to Science magazine pleading for the USGS to continue funding its Biological Survey Unit. So far, the USGS has not responded to them.

Museum collections may not be as flashy as some areas science (perhaps we need a new Indiana Jones movie to raise their profile), but that doesn't mean they are not critically important to our understanding of the natural world. Once the BSU disappears, it's not coming back: the curators will retire or find other jobs, and the collection will become inaccessible, even if it still exists somewhere in the bowels of the Smithsonian.

The plan to shutdown the Biological Survey Unit seems indicative of a larger trend of neglecting investment in our future. It may reflect a particular form of neglect by the USGS, as pointed out by Cynthia Ramotnik in a 2015 article. It also reflects the severe cut to the USGS budget proposed by Donald Trump last month: he requested a total budget of $860 million, which represents a 20% cut from the current year's budget of $1.08 billion. But in the case of the BSU, the budget impact is so small that it seems worse than neglectful to cut it: it is shortsighted and petty.

When asked by the Washington Post, former House speaker (and current Trump enthusiast) Newt Gingrich admitted that the cutting the BSU's $1.6 million budget wouldn't matter to the larger budget, but he then went on to comment, “if this collection is that valuable, there are probably 20 billionaires that could endow it.”

Great: let's hand over our national resources to billionaires, and if they're not interested, well, it must be that the resources weren't that valuable in the first place. Not.

This is ridiculous. We're still a rich country, and we shouldn't be eliminating projects like the Biological Survey Unit just to give a massive tax cut to rich people, or just to make a point about budget cutting, or whatever the reason that the USGS and the Department of the Interior might offer. (The USGS hasn't responded to my inquiries.) Maintaining our museum collections not only shows respect for the thousands of people who built them over the years, but it benefits the countless scientists, educators, school children, and others who will learn from these collections in the future.