Research shows catastrophic invertebrate extinction in Hawai'i and globally

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.hawaii.edu/news/2015/08/10/research-shows-catastrophic-invertebrate-extinction-in-hawaii-and-globally/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Research shows catastrophic invertebrate extinction in Hawaiʻi and globally[/font]

August 10, 2015

[font size=3]Hawaiʻi has been called the “extinction capital of the world.” But, with the exception of the islands’ birds, there has until now been no accurate assessment of the true level of this catastrophic loss. Invertebrates (insects, snails, spiders, etc.) constitute the vast majority of the species that make up Hawaiʻi’s formerly spectacularly diverse and unique biota. A team of researchers, including scientists from the Pacific Biosciences Research Center (PBRC) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Howard University in Washington DC, and the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, recently published in Conservation Biology the first rigorous assessment of extinction of invertebrates in Hawaiʻi.

The team focused on the most diverse group of Hawaiian land snails, known as the family Amastridae, of which 325 species have been recognized—all known only from Hawaiʻi. The researchers determined that only 15 of these species could still be found alive, and estimated that the rate of extinction may have been as high as 14 percent of the fauna per decade.

[font size=4]The global view[/font]

In a companion study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, members of the team, in collaboration with mathematics and bioinformatics specialists at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, addressed invertebrate extinction globally.

…

“We showed, based on extrapolation from a random sample of land snail species from all over the world, and via two independent approaches, that we may already have lost 7 percent (130,000 extinctions) of all the animal species on Earth,” said Robert Cowie, research professor at PBRC and co-author of the two studies.

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[GliderGuider]

1. "we may already have lost 7 percent of all the animal species on Earth"

Gulp.