Photo: The Canadian Press
Miles’ bandit frog is seen in an undated photo for distribution.
A study shows a less colorful and quieter world with a possible loss of more than 500 species that have not been seen for more than 50 years.
Arne Moors, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University and co-author of the study, said there is a good chance some species will be discovered because they live in hard-to-reach or inhospitable habitats, but others may be lost forever.
“In fact, we found that there are over 500 animals that live on land that have not been seen for more than 50 years,” he said in an interview. “This is almost twice as many as have been declared missing since 1500 AD. There’s a huge pool of species that we don’t know if they’re still around or not. “
Researchers reviewed information on 32,802 creatures on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species and identified 562 of them as lost.
The study was published this month in the journal Animal Conservation.
Moers said they used a computer program that went through the group’s database to identify lost species.
The criterion used to list the lost species is the missing or last seen date or any bills from the first time the animal was collected and named, he said.
“There are a lot of hints of that kind that the species is actually lost.”
One of the lost Canadian species is the Eskimo curly, a coastal bird that nested in the northernmost part of the tundra and migrated all the way to Argentina, Moors said.
There were several Eskimo curls seen in Texas in 1962 and another shot dead in Barbados in 1963, but this was the last confirmed sighting, he said.
“This is our most famous and only, in my opinion, lost species and it has probably disappeared. I think it is one of the saddest,” he said, referring to the Canadian bird.
Researchers point out in the study that many of the lost species come from tropical countries such as Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil.
The species is becoming extinct for a variety of reasons, including man-made threats and pressure, habitat loss and overhunting, Moores said.
Of those 562 species, he said, 75 could be classified as probably extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature defines the extinct as “when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual of a species has died”, which may be a challenge to verify, he said.
“Disappearance means losing the last individual. “As something approaches extinction, it becomes rarer and rarer and rarer until there are very few left, of course, right up to one and then zero,” he said.
“If a species is endangered and lives in a habitat that is difficult to access, or as large as the tundra with few people, or deep in the tropics or tropical islands, people may not look for such species often, then it may remain very rare. And maybe he’s gone, maybe he’s not. “
And that’s the point of the study, he said. The document lists species that people should look for because these animals have not been seen for a long time and it is not known if they are still around, he added.
Moors said he hoped some of the species would be rediscovered.
He pointed to the ivory woodpecker, which researchers say disappeared with the latest sightings in 1944, but a study in April that was not reviewed by partners suggested the bird could still be pecking in Louisiana.
His first reaction to seeing the list of more than 500 lost species was surprise, he said, and then joy when he began reading how some of these animals had been rediscovered.
People get upset when they hear about animals disappearing, Moors said.
“We know that people really don’t like to lose species they’re familiar with in their backyard,” he said. “But people are sad even for the golden frog they have never seen and will see. (This) just makes them sad.”
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