Silent Spring for the giant earwig?

[Fabian Haas]

Dear Jan,

good question! To my knoweldge this species is gone. The last specimens
have been found in the Mid-sixties and specimens are in London, Tervuren
and  (earlier specimens) in Copenhagen. Later, there are rumours that
the British made some expedition to find  it again, but failed. For
information and images see my website: www.earwigs-online.de (all in
English, in the Distribution and Photo databases)

I reckon Labidura herculeana (Fabricius) is now extinct through habitat
destruction. The species is large and paurometabolous, so you should be
able to find adults or nymphs of reasonable size all the year round. But
nowbody did for quite some time.

Best
Fabian

Jan Bosselaers schrieb:
> 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/
>
> "You know I used to lose my mind, but now I'm old, now I'm free...
> I see waves break in foams on my horizons, I'm shining..." The
> Chemical Brothers
>

--
*********************************************************************************

Dr. Fabian Haas, FRES
Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart
Rosenstein 1
D-70191 Stuttgart
Deutschland / Germany / Allemagne

Nationale Kontaktstelle der Globalen Taxonomie Initiative (GTI)
German National Focal Point of the Global Taxonomy Initiative (GTI)
URL: http://www.gti-kontaktstelle.de
email: haas.smns at naturkundemuseum-bw.de

Phone: 0711 8936 172
Fax: 0711 8936 100

The Site on Earwig Biology
URL: http://www.earwigs-online.de

My Photo Site
URL: http://www.fabianhaas.de

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