Silent Spring for the giant earwig?

[Jan Bosselaers]

Dear Taxacomers,

Reading about all this, I have a small case-related question: what about
the St Helena giant earwig? Has it gone extinct or not?

Best regards,

Jan

> "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.
> ---
> 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
> ---
>
>

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Jan Bosselaers
"Dochterland", R. novarumlaan 2
B-2340 Beerse, Belgium               tel / fax 32-14-615896
home: dochterland at pandora.be  /  hortipes at dochterland.org
work: jbossela at janbe.jnj.com
web: http://www.dochterland.org/ or http://wyith.ch/home/dochterland.org/

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