NOT SO FAST

According to the IUCN Red List, more than 45,000 species on Earth are currently threatened with extinction. Particularly threatened are organisms like amphibians and corals. And, of course, we’ve all been hearing for decades about the threats to our rainforests from deforestation and climate change and how places such as Ecuador have been particularly hard hit, for example.

We've learned about how during the 20th century western Ecuador lost more than 95% of its lowland forests. As we all know, loggers arrived to clear virgin rainforest for cattle, palm oil, and banana plantations, and that soon after only more land was being cleared for the expansion of ever-growing cities and towns. And we learned how, as the century wore on, so much of that country’s coastal cloud forests were removed. As a result of all this, ecologists were quite certain that, due to the rarity and endemicity of Ecuadorian forest species, a mass extinction event had taken place. 

In fact, there was record of ninety species of plants understood to exist nowhere else on planet Earth going extinct when the last cloud forests of the Centinela range, a fog-blanketed mountain ridge in the foothills of the Andes, were cleared to make way for agriculture. Famous ecologist E.O. Wilson, in his book Diversity of Life, coined the term “Centinelan extinction” based on this catastrophe of wholesale habit loss, what he called a “silent hemorrhaging of biological diversity”, resulting in the disappearance of entire populations prior to being formally observed and described.

And this story, and so many others like it, are what I’ve understood to be the case my whole life. Well, it turns out this picture of deforestation-induced catastrophe was not evidence-based but grounded only in assumption. Publishing in Nature Plants, a collaborative project from 21 botanists investigating evidence for the Centinelan extinction just dropped. As explained in Refuting the hypothesis of Centinelan extinction at its place of origin, the authors tell us:

In 1991, botanists Calaway Dodson and Alwyn Gentry, who had worked for years to inventory the site, published a seminal paper reporting a flora that included ‘90 plant species endemic to Centinela’, many of them undescribed. The authors went on to report that the last forests on Centinela had been felled and converted to agricultural land, and that all its unique plants were probably extinct. … A careful reading of Dodson & Gentry, however, makes it clear that their claims of microendemism were not intended as empirical facts but rather as hypotheses to be tested. 

And as these researchers have discovered, through database and literature reviews, analysis of herbarium records, and targeted fieldwork, “several independent lines of evidence reinforce the conclusion that the reports of extreme microendemism at Centinela were an artefact of incomplete exploration.” As a matter of fact, of the ninety species earlier mentioned, all but one of those plants, a tiny epiphytic orchid named Bifrenaria integrilabia, has never been recorded elsewhere; meaning 99% of those “extinct species” never were. And, of course, it could still turn out to be that this flower lives on someplace yet undiscovered.

Speaking to Phys.org via Harvard University, co-author Andrea Fernández (from Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden) shared that even among the clearcuts and agricultural zones, these plant species have found their own little interstitial zones within which to survive. Fernández explained, "They're tiny islands lost in a sea of plantations, but they're still full of astonishing plants."

More than that, these same botanists were not just surprised and delighted to have rediscovered virtually all of those populations previously feared to be extinct, they also uncovered a bounty of new species. Among the more than fifty new plants the team found, Fernández shared that one of the most astonishing was a giant tree, an extremely rare species but one of the tallest around, belonging to the Cotton family. That's right, such is that state of our understanding of the world that one of the largest, most easily spotted tree species in the forest remained undescribed and without a formal name until just now.

Especially when the ecosystems in question and the organisms therein are not in the most remote locations but have roads leading directly to them, when they are easily accessed and so commonly frequented by people, as in this example of Ecuador, I'm only left with all kinds of questions about many of our other assumptions about extinction, ecology, biology, and the state of the world. To be honest, my take-away from all of the above is that it seems we’ve been plagued with a lack of curiosity and insufficient research paired with poor science communication within a culture of catastrophism. Maybe we can do better going forward. And, well, it seems that we can and we must.