Species Go Extinct, Get Over It

Near midnight, during an expedition to southwestern Ecuador in December 2013, I spotted a small green frog asleep on a leaf, near a stream by the side of the road. It was Atelopus balios, the Rio Pescado stubfoot toad. Although a lone male had been spotted in 2011, no populations had been found since 1995, and it was thought to be extinct. But here it was, raised from the dead like Lazarus. My colleagues and I found several more that night, males and females, and shipped them to an amphibian ark in Quito, where they are now breeding safely in captivity. But they will go extinct one day, and the world will be none the poorer for it. Eventually, they will be replaced by a dozen or a hundred new species that evolve later.Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years, and scientists agree that we are now in the middle of the sixth such extinction, this one caused primarily by humans and our effects on animal habitats. It is an "immense and hidden" tragedy to see creatures pushed out of existence by humans, lamented the Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson, who coined the term "biodiversity" in 1985. A joint paper by several prominent researchers published by the National Academy of Sciences called it a "biological annihilation."Pope Francis imbues the biodiversity crisis with a moral imperative ("Each creature has its own purpose," he said in 2015), and biologists often cite an ecological one (we must avert "a dramatic decay of biodiversity and the subsequent loss of ecosystem services," several wrote in a paper for Science Advances). "What is Conservation Biology?" a foundational text for the field, written by Michael Soulé of the University of California at Santa Cruz, says, "Diversity of organisms is good ... the untimely extinction of populations and species is bad ... [and] biotic diversity has intrinsic value." In her book The Sixth Extinction, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert captures the panic all this has induced: "Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes that we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos and handjobs on crows."  Continue reading...