Silent Spring

[Robert Mesibov]

"Well, how can you be so defeatist?  I mean, there's no question that
some things will turn out to be un-saveable and will inevitably go
extinct shortly after they're discovered.  But concentrating on them to
the exclusion of those that can be seems like bad priorities."

Karl, not having read the article, you may have misunderstood me:

 (1) I've been working in invertebrate conservation for the past 20 years.
Lots of things can be "saved", and I like to think I've helped "save" some,
through species-, area- and habitat-focussed conservation efforts. I'll
continue to do this. This is _not_ what salvage sampling is about. Salvage
sampling isn't an "instead of", it's an "also". The fact that so little is
done is what Halliday and I are unhappy about.

(2) Some things won't be saved, because as Harry Recher here in Australia
likes to say, the Earth is finite and every time we grab and convert a bit
of Nature for human purposes, we lose some Nature. Even if humanity suddenly
gets religion and stops expanding and fixes global warming, there is still
an immense, powerful and unstoppable wave of translocated species causing
havoc in natural ecosystems.

(3) To recover specimens and bigeographical information which are likely to
be lost, the prioritising is very simple. As I said in my 2004 article, "The
smaller and more isolated the remnant, the less sampled its surround, and
the closer the bulldozer, the greater the need for salvage sampling".

Just as a PS, determining the real, current range of cryptic species like
millipedes is a lot of work. Time and time again here in Australia,
invertebrates and inconspicuous plants have been listed as threatened
because they were only known from a few neighbouring localities. Having been
listed, they then attracted funding for species-focussed surveys, and hey!
guess what? The damned things were actually much more widespread, abundant
than previously thought. In fact, they weren't threatened. Lesson?

After 2 and a half weeks of field work, I'm as confident as I can be that
the millipede I mentioned is really and truly down to its last 50 ha. Those
hectares are not a Happy Acres sanctuary, they're very ordinary-looking bush
with no other special values, and I give them maybe 20 years at most before
the developers convince a bug-indifferent community that the land will be
_much_ more valuable as suburb.
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Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
and School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 6437 1195

Tasmanian Multipedes
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/zoology/multipedes/mulintro.html
Spatial data basics for Tasmania
http:/www.geog.utas.edu.au/censis/locations/index.html
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