> by 1908 the shrew was thought extinct... Brief rediscoveries in 1958 and 1984 brought fleeting hope So 2025 might be the 4th time the shrew has been declared extinct.
First time it's been scientifically declared extinct.
In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
#22It's hard to imagine an animal like a shrew weighs only 6 grams.
Incredible that they have the same general hardware as any other mammal, compare a shrew to a blue whale, potentially 50,000,000X heavier - they both have one heart, two eyes, hearing, smell, lungs, sex organs, kidneys, brain, spine, etc.
It's fascinating.
Re: In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
#23Unpopular opinion: hundreds of years from now, loss of mammalian species will seem like sentimental naval gazing when our descendants consider the millions of strains of fungi, bacteria, archaea, and viruses we could have saved, were it not for our micro-blindness.
Re: In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
#24how could they say with any certainty it is extinct? It is tiny.
Well it sounds like they replaced their native habitat with a phosphate mine. Seems like a wholesale displacement. Hard to imagine surviving not just your population hit but your entire ecosystem
You’re either severely overestimating the size of the mines or underestimating the size of Christmas Island. On satellite images[0]you can see where there has been phosphate mining, but it’s also very clear that it hasn’t replaced the habitat of the shrew.
Re: In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
#25Unpopular opinion: hundreds of years from now, loss of mammalian species will seem like sentimental naval gazing when our descendants consider the millions of strains of fungi, bacteria, archaea, and viruses we could have saved, were it not for our micro-blindness.
This doesn’t sound reasonable to me. Why would we?
Re: In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
#26> Yet it was not quite gone. Half a century later, in 1958, two shrews appeared as bulldozers tore into the forest for phosphate mining. They were seen, released, and forgotten. I wonder how many thought-to-be-extinct species were not seen before it was too late. It's also wild that they were simply released instead of being moved to captivity to try to breed
I guess we didn’t care about conservation in 1958 like we do now.
Re: In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
#27how could they say with any certainty it is extinct? It is tiny.
I'm a scientist, and I work in a setting where there are a lot of non-scientists including engineers, managers, etc. A word like "extinct" sounds like an absolute, and a rigorous statement would include a detailed disclaimer about the limitations of talking in absolute terms, such as "within the limits of our knowledge, and we could be wrong, yadda yadda." When talking amongst scientists, those disclaimers are unnece…
> which would help reinforce the idea that what we sacrifice as the price of scientific knowledge, is absolute knowledge.
I don’t think it is possible to have absolute knowledge of anything. Scientific knowledge is the best (only) thing we have.