It’s just that scientists who were updating the information about conservation status for the whole of the handfish group Brachionichthyidae seem to have decided to call it for this particular species, hence the update and announcement. So perhaps this is why this announcement didn’t make the headlines as much as I’d initially expected when finding out about this species, it’s the first (second) marine fish to have its status changed on the IUCN Red List recently to extinct but could have gone extinct at any time between 1802 and recently. The smooth handfish is known from a single specimen collected in 1802 and hasn’t been seen since – with the important rider that extensive surveys in the intervening 200 years have determined. So what’s the story of the smooth handfish? Again, thanks to the information highway of the Internet and the IUCN Red List there’s a nice summary on the relevant species page. To my mind this doesn’t change the announcement much: second rather than first perhaps takes away from the ‘newsworthiness’ of it but it’s still surprising that only two marine fish species are listed as extinct when we’re constantly reminded of how fragile and exploited our marine resources are. So we could contest the fact that the smooth handfish is the first marine fish to be declared extinct, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few other contenders too but at the moment they aren’t obvious from the Red List. So I think it’s in this sense that ‘modern’ extinction is used to filter out the New Zealand Grayling. The New Zealand Grayling was listed as extinct in 2014 but hasn’t been reliably seen since the 1920s. However, filter out all the non-marine species and we’re left with two extinct fish species, the smooth handfish and the New Zealand Grayling Prototroctes oxyrhynchus which looks to be erroneously listed as marine on the database aside from one reference to the fact that this species is amphidromous (they spend their life in marine and freshwater environments). It’s not the first fish to go extinct, you can easily check the IUCN Red List yourself to see that there are currently 65 species listed as globally extinct and 10 further species listed as extinct in the wild. Later coverage added words to the effect ‘in recent times’. But let’s get back to why this is so significant.įrom that first tweet, Sympterichthys unipennis was described as the first ever marine bony fish to be listed as #extinct. I can’t help but think that if it were a mammal or bird more would have been made of it or perhaps there are too many caveats needed in order to squeeze this news into a nice clickable headline. I don’t know why there was the delay and I haven’t been able to find a press release that would explain the sudden interest a few months after the IUCN Red List update. Reconstructing the announcement of the news of the smooth handfish’s extinction (status) and it seems that there were a few tweets in March starting with this one from the Handfish Conservation Project but that science news networks didn’t really pick it up until July including Scientific American, LiveScience and err a cartoon in the Guardian. Let’s unpick what this status change means and delve into a topic that genuinely keeps me up at night: how do we know a species is extinct? Hopefully this will help clarify why this is an important milestone and why it absolutely doesn’t mean that worrying claims about biodiversity loss are overly cautious or unwarranted. etc.) fish is being declared extinct? Have scientists been alarmist all this time? One extinct fish out of the tens of thousands of living species doesn’t seem too bad, does it? Surely you’d expect more if we are in the midsts of the sixth mass extinction? There’s a bit of weaselling there to turn it into a more notable fact but given how we’re inundated with information – about biodiversity loss, changes we should all be making to benefit nature – how is it only now that the first (marine, modern etc. But why was this particular bit of news such a landmark? The listing of Sympterichthys unipennis as extinct by the IUCN is the first marine bony fish to be declared extinct in modern times. The milestone got a bit of coverage in the news but given the nature of news cycles these days it’s sort of understandable that a database updating to declare an obscure and not especially photogenic animal extinct, a fish no less, got a bit buried. I was rather miffed with myself to have completely missed an important but sad conservation biology milestone back in March this year when the IUCN Redlist of Threatened Species was updated to list the smooth handfish Sympterichthys unipennis as officially extinct.
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