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The ivory-billed woodpecker sought by birders in the Arkansas Bay is gone forever, according to federal officials. So is Bachman’s warbler, a yellow-chested songbird that once migrated between the southeastern United States and Cuba. The song of Kauai O’o, a Hawaiian jungle bird, only exists in recordings. And for the few species of freshwater mussel that once filtered streams and rivers from Georgia to Illinois, there is no hope anymore.
A total of 22 animals and one plant must be declared extinct and removed from the endangered species list, federal wildlife officials plan to announce on Wednesday.
The announcement can also give an idea of the future. It comes in the midst of a worsening global biodiversity crisis. a million species are threatened with extinction, in many decades. Human activities such as farming, logging, mining and damming are taking animals’ habitats and polluting much of what’s left. Humans are hunted and overfished. Climate change adds new dangers.
“Each of these 23 species represents a permanent loss to our nation’s natural heritage and global biodiversity,” said Bridget Fahey, who oversees species classification for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “And a reminder that the extinction was a result of human-induced environmental change.”
The extinctions include 11 birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish, a bat and a plant. Officials and advocates said many of them were likely extinct, or nearly so, when the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, so perhaps no conservation would have been able to save them..
“The Endangered Species Act was not passed in time to save many of these species,” said Noah Greenwald, director of endangered species at the nonprofit group Center for Biodiversity. “This is a tragedy.”
Since the law was enacted, 54 species in the United States have been removed from the endangered list as their populations have recovered, while another 48 species have recovered enough to move from endangered to threatened. So far, 11 listed species have been declared extinct.
A 60-day public comment period for the new 23-member party begins Thursday. Scientists and the public can provide information they want the Fish and Wildlife Service to consider before making a final decision.
Scientists say that without protection, many more species would go extinct. But they add that with humans transforming the planet so drastically, much more needs to be done.
“Biodiversity is the foundation of social and economic systems, but we haven’t been able to resolve the extinction crisis,” said Leah Gerber, ecologist and director of the Arizona State University Center for Biodiversity Outcomes.
Negotiations for a new global biodiversity agreement will accelerate next month. One proposal that has gained attention recently is a plan known as 30×30, to at least protect it. 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans by 2030.
Scientists do not proclaim extinctions lightly. It often requires decades of fruitless searching. About half of the species in this group have already been considered extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global authority on the status of animals and plants. Officials said the Fish and Wildlife Service is moving more slowly, in part because it’s working on the backlog of work and tends to prioritize providing protection for species that need it, over removing protection for those that don’t.
Most of the last confirmed sightings were in the 1980s, but one Hawaiian bird was last documented in 1899 and another in 2004.
No animal in the lot is more passionately sought after than the largest woodpecker in the United States, its ivory beak. Once living in the ancient forests and marshes of the Southeast, the birds declined as European settlers and their descendants cleared the forests and hunted them. The last confirmed engagement was in Louisiana in 1944.
But in 2004, a canoeist named Gene Sparling started a search frenzy when he spotted a woodpecker that looked like him. An ivory bill in the Arkansas swamp. Days after hearing this, two experienced birdwatchers, Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison, flew in to join him on a search. While paddling in their canoe on Day 2, preparing to stop for lunch, a large bird suddenly flew in front of them. “Tim and I said, ‘Ivory-billed!’ we shouted. also,” Mr. Harrison recalled.
In doing so, they frightened the bird away.
But men are determined that they have a crystal clear vision distinctive wing markings what distinguishes the ivory beak from its most similar relative, the pile woodpecker. “It was obvious,” said Mr Gallagher.
A series of Cornell University ornithologists, a few more searches, a few reported sightings, and then a blurred video, 2005 Article published in the journal Science “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus Principalis) Continuing in Continental North America.”
Controversy broke out. Some experts discussed He said the images were of woodpeckers with stakes. Repeated attempts by state and federal wildlife agencies to find the bird failed, and many experts concluded it was extinct.
Amy Trahan, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said that when she completed her latest species assessment for the woodpecker, she should make her recommendation based on the best science available. At the end of the report, he marked the line next to the words “delist on extinction basis.”
“This was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my career,” he said. “I really cried.”
Islands where wildlife evolved in isolation have been particularly hard hit by human extinctions that introduced alien species into the ecosystem, and 11 of the proposed delisting species are from Hawaii and Guam. Pigs, goats and deer destroy forest habitat. Rats, mongoose and brown tree snakes prey on native birds and bats. Mosquitoes, which did not exist in Hawaii until boarding ships in the 1800s, kill birds by infecting them with avian malaria.
Hawaii was once home to more than 50 species of forest birds known as honey reptiles, which are brightly colored with long, curved beaks, some of which are used to drink nectar from flowers. Considering the extinctions suggested in this series, only 17 species remain.
Most of the remaining species are currently under heavier siege. Birds living higher up in the mountains were once safe from avian malaria as it was too cold for mosquitoes. But due to climate change, mosquitoes have spread more.
“We’re seeing very dramatic population declines in conjunction with this increase in mosquitoes, which is a direct result of climate change,” said Michelle Bogardus, assistant field supervisor for the Pacific Islands Fish and Wildlife Office.
He said only a few species are resistant to avian malaria, so most of them are in danger of extinction if mosquitoes are not brought under control all over the land.
Freshwater mussels are among the most dangerous groups in North America, but scientists don’t know enough about the eight species on the list to say with certainty why they disappeared. By essentially turning mussel rivers into lakes, the extinctions were most likely linked to reservoirs humans have built over the past 100 years, federal biologists said.
Did the change in habitat affect some aspect of the carefully choreographed lifecycle? Are filter feeders also damaged by sediment or pollution in the water?
Freshwater mussels rely on jaw-dropping adaptations developed over untold years. Females attract fish with an appendage. looks like minnow, crayfish, snail, bug or worm, depending on the type. The mussels then squirt their larvae, which adhere to the fish, forcing it to shelter and eventually disperse them.
Perhaps the mussels became extinct because their host fish moved or disappeared on their own.
“I don’t think we fully understand what we’re losing,” said biologist Tyler Hern of the Fish and Wildlife Service, whose work includes freshwater mussel recovery. “These mussels had secrets we’d never know.”
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