When I read an article like this one on extinction debt, or "dead clade walking" as it's come to be known in the rather flippant scientific vernacular, I think countries should start appointing panels to see what may be done in terms of habitat restoration (or other changes) which may reverse the "extinction debt" for currently doomed species. Maybe even suggesting such a herculean task is going against the grain of nature. Maybe it's hubris to think we are the gods of nature. Often, preserving one species means the assured destruction of another or several other species. Welcome to the unsolvable world of amoral nature. And we seem to have a problem with preserving human life, let alone other species, apparently because of our species' innate violent tendencies. So why should I dream that we could ever be such good wardens of the planet that we could help those species unable to help themselves? And what criteria would we use to decide which species would be singled out for help? I'm guessing it would be a self-serving process which would focus on those animal and plant species which most benefit us. How many species will end up on "life support," in a captivity which will never accord with the lives they once lived. It's so sad to think about (in some cases) that you wonder whether extinction isn't the better option. Probably, in many instances, the DNA of these vanishing species will be harvested before they go, to be added to our new genomic Book of Banked Life.
I characterize this venture as a quixotic and perhaps unrealistic one. Yet isn't this what W.S. Merwin is doing with his fostering of otherwise doomed species of trees in his conservancy? That strikes me as a heroic thing to do. Maybe the individual can make a difference.
I find that article on extinction debt fascinating. It's so strange to think that a particular species' extinction debt may be a matter of decades or tens of thousand or even millions of years (see the example of the Caribbean bryozoans). It can vary so wildly. I had to wonder why those few millions of years weren't sufficient time for the bryozoans affected by the rise of the Panamanian isthmus to simply evolve away from the need for those particular Pacific nutrients. I would think this gradual diminution of that resource would just eventuate in the typical Darwinian processes. You would expect selection for less picky bryozoans at the marine buffet. I would have expected that deprivation (at "worst") to have resulted in a pseudo-extinction, where a "daughter species" would remain.
I characterize this venture as a quixotic and perhaps unrealistic one. Yet isn't this what W.S. Merwin is doing with his fostering of otherwise doomed species of trees in his conservancy? That strikes me as a heroic thing to do. Maybe the individual can make a difference.
I find that article on extinction debt fascinating. It's so strange to think that a particular species' extinction debt may be a matter of decades or tens of thousand or even millions of years (see the example of the Caribbean bryozoans). It can vary so wildly. I had to wonder why those few millions of years weren't sufficient time for the bryozoans affected by the rise of the Panamanian isthmus to simply evolve away from the need for those particular Pacific nutrients. I would think this gradual diminution of that resource would just eventuate in the typical Darwinian processes. You would expect selection for less picky bryozoans at the marine buffet. I would have expected that deprivation (at "worst") to have resulted in a pseudo-extinction, where a "daughter species" would remain.
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