Lost Wonders, with Tom Lathan

for one another. Even so, it made sense to tell those in one story, as it were in one chapter. But really the thing that unites the entire book is that these are species that have gone extinct in the twenty first century. The reason why I wanted to write about those species in particular, it's because I really wanted to get into the idea that extinction is unfolding all around us, and that when we tip think of extinction, it can be this this far flung thing from the past.

You know, virtually everyone's first encounter with the word will be in the context of dinosaurs. You know, I was a dinosaur kid. I was obsessed the Jurassic Park. That was, yeah, we look like we're probably the similar age. So you probably had your Jurassic Park phase, but absolutely either that or the Dodo, and these are these are things from the distant past, and I think that we all make an unconscious association there with the word extinction and the past,

but it's it's obviously it's unfolding all around us. And I actually came to the book, came to the idea of writing the book when I learned that one of these species, the Christmas eln in Pipastrell, had actually gone extinct on my twenty third birthday. And when I learned that fact, and I realized that I could remember, you know, what I'd been doing that day, I could remember who I'd been with, you know, I, well, most of most probably can't really remember the evening, but I remember a

lot of the day. I could look back through emails and texts, social media and really kind of get a picture of what my world was like on the day that as species went extinct. It was just a kind of mind blowing realization, and it kind of got me thinking about what else had gone extinct, you know, within my lifetime, within the lifetimes of most people who read the book. So that's what really kind of drove me.

of grab everyone's attention. I think it's really important that we know what's going on, and you know, it probably won't surprise anyone to hear that in all of these stories, we're the cause, either in the here and now or we set off the chain of events that have led to these extinctions.

the book? Where did you? I mean, obviously have you had the one in mind that corresponded with your your twenty third birthday, But how about the rest of them? How this come together?

But one thing, and actually when I when I went into writing the book, it was it was a doubt I had, like, God, is this is anyone going to want to read this? This is just going to be so depressing. But as I actually got into the research, and a big part of that research was actually talking to the people who were there on the ground. In

some cases they may they discovered these species. In other cases they'd taken care of the last individual of a species and kind of dealt with the aftermath of extinction. I actually really found a lot of grounds for hope in that because it's really inspiring the lengths that people

go to in conservation. It's a field that is absolutely jam packed with unsung heroes, people that go above and beyond the call of duty every single day, who have their who have their job, and there are just little things that they do just completely off their own initiative, just because they know they can make a difference. And there are even stories of species being saved by people

who who aren't scientists, who are hobbyists. There's an example in the book of a species of pupfish, which is a tiny little fish from the American West, and also also in Mexico. There are species spread across the arid areas. And one particular one of the people that I spoke to was actually a bus driver from New Jersey who is a hobbyist. He just loves fish, you know, since he was a kid, and he's actually become involved in

the efforts to save endangered species. He's when I spoke to him, he had a critically endangered species just behind him in his fish tank, and it's you know, obviously there's there's no financial incentive for him, and I just think that the more that you learn about these stories Yes, the subjects of this book have gone extinct, but the people who tried to save them have had other successes. They've used the knowledge that they gained from trying to

save these species, which very often is uncharted territory. Some of these extinctions happened because the scientists simply didn't know how do we help this species. But from these experiences, they've learned what they need to do to save other species, and they've had success. And I just find that really inspiring. But sorry to go on to your question. Could you remind me again of what you are?

oversees the conservation status of everything. So they're the they're the people essentially who give the final word and whether something is endangered, critically endangered, extinct, extinct in the world, and so on, And I just I just asked them, you know, for a list of recent extinctions, and they sent me back this enormous, sprawling spreadsheet full of hundreds. I think it was up with the five hundred extinctions.

But thankfully that that spreadsheet included a by date of extinction column, so I filtered by that, and these eleven species are what kind of came out of that, and I really kind of really that's when it really kind of struck me. In fact, that's the moment where I saw the the extinction date of the pipistre being my birthday and made that connection and had that realization.

island of Saint Helena and the Saint Helena Olive. I was not I was vaguely familiar with the island from its prominence in history, but I was not familiar with this organism at all.

certain way. The focus is very much on charismatic species or species that have some kind of quirk or fascinating behavior, and I think that we tend to kind of unconsciously and buy a sort of value system by which we judge species on that basis. But actually, what I found one of the really exciting things about writing a book like this is that you know the decision of what goes in this book It wasn't like I just picked eleven species that fascinated me. It was decided for me.

And what that meant was I had to really kind of approach species that, like you, I wouldn't necessarily think, Oh, is this tree going to be interesting? Is this snail going to kind of interest me personally? And I had to find other ways of looking at them and find the fascination and wonder in these species and that tree. The Saint Lena olive is a particularly fascinating species because it lived only on a single island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. And this island, Saint Helena,

is extraordinarily. It's nearly two thousand kilometers west of Africa, slap bang in the middle of the South Atlantic and when the it's so remote that when the International Space Station is circling overhead, the astronauts on board are actually the closest neighbors to the residents on Saint Helena.

this tiny island, volcanic island. And what you end up with in a place like that are things like trees that have evolved from daisies, you end up with with with earwigs, you end up with fluorescent wood lice, a real bizarre kind of hodgepodge. There was a biologist that I spoke to about the ecosystem who said he described it as imagine if you just gave evolution another chance, you just reset evolution on an island and allowed it

to kind of take a different course. This is the kind of thing you would end up with, just this kind of alien ecosystem. So, the Saint Lena olive is a species of hardwood tree, and this family of tree species, they all originate in Southern Africa, and they've made these extraordinary journeys and radiated out Southern Africa and ended up

in islands in the Indian Ocean. And one of the places they ended up was on Saint Helena, and it was a mystery that really confounded scientists, because to get to somewhere like Saint Helena, if you're a tree, your seeds need to have a way to navigate thousands of miles of ocean, and there are potential ways they could do that. They might some seed pods can float, so they would float there. The Saint Helena olive seed pods didn't float. In fact, they were sterilized by saltwater and

other ways seas might be carried by the wind. They wouldn't do that. They were quite large capsules. And the other way that seeds can disperse is by growing a fruit and being eaten by birds, same thing that olive

couldn't do any of those things. So the biologists, some of whom I spoke to you for the book, they eventually deduced that the way this species had to have ended up on this remote island was by a bizarre chain of coincidences, wherein an albatross or a similar seafaring bird must have landed somewhere in southern Africa and picked up a seed in its feathers or maybe in some mud coating its foot, and then that albatross would have ranged out over the ocean and eventually ended up at

Saint Helena, and just by chance, this seed had dropped dropped from the feathers of this albatross, found its way into the soil and the story of that species on the island began, which is extraordinary. It's twelve million years old, and it's so genetically unique that a genus had to be created for the species. So the genus is the

classification that sits above species. And when you look away from the charismatic species and species that are more often kind of celebrated and featured in nature documentaries, you have to kind of look at species in a different way, and I think you find incredible stories when you start to look at the natural world in a different way and you can find that they're everywhere.

and conserve this species. He is, he was, he was actually he led the attempt to propagate the species in the end. But yeah, that was an incredible insight from him, you know, he said, he said to me that, you know, there were twelve million years for this to happen, and it only had to happen once.

acted almost as a moat. And the arrival of humans in fifteen oh six was essentially like lowering the drawbridge. Enabled things like goats, cats, all kinds of invasive species of plant. Rats are obviously a huge problem pretty much everywhere they're introduced, and that's what happened on Saint Helena, and it was an island that in history are it

was discovered, it was compared by many to Eden. It was this verdant spot in the middle of the ocean that was really kind of life sustaining for sailors who at that point in time had to journey all the way around Africa, around the bottom of Africa in order to access Asia and India. So it was a really big problem, you know, fighting off things like scurvy, restocking with water, and Saint Helena was just this kind of

oasis in the middle of the ocean. But you know, a few years later it was decimated.

That was their ambition for this place. So everything there was a resource in order to pursue that aim, and so massive deforestation things like goats were a particular problem, eating native vegetation, and once you lose that vegetation, you then get soil erosion, and there are these crazy reports of the soil erosion being so bad that the sea turned black around the island. And once you get into that state, there's very few things that then can then kind of grow back and get a foothold in the

soil which has essentially been completely transformed. And in Saint Helena, all of these threats kind of conspired and the landscape was transformed and native species shrank further and further back to the center of the island, which is where the last Saint Helena olive was found in the nineteen seventies and.

you know, the goats were far more efficient. If you imagine a tortoise versus a goat in terms of grazing and things like that, the torses really were no match. You know. The Galapagos, because of its isolation, is a place that you know, there were never things like goats there. There were never those kind of specially adapted herbivores. And it's a problem not just for tortoises, but also the vegetation that tortoises feed on, because if you don't have herbivores,

plants don't learn to adapt to repel herbivores. So things like thorns, certain kinds of chemical compounds, that all kinds of adaptation that might make native vegetation resilient to goat. It just it doesn't have that vegetation doesn't have time to adapt when you suddenly release something like a goat on the island.

case as well. Like we see the Galapagos tortoises, maybe if we're lucky we get to see one in the zoo, or if not, a Galapago's tortoise and maybe an aldabra tortoise that is in some way similar. But when you really observe them like they are just so fabulously weird and wonderful, right they are.

like any species, they are really fascinating there. In the case of the giant tortises of Glapagos, I mean, what fascinated me the most was how they got there, you know, which similar to the same thing, not olive. It is another incredible dispersal story. So something like a tortoise, something that large and cumbersome and slow traversing an ocean, is just

as unbelievable as a you know, tiny seed. What they've discovered is that the tortoises or their ancestors must have been washed out to see from South America, which is where their most recent ancestor lived, and the tortoises would have had to have survived for god knows how long, just on the ocean with no food. And when this theory was first kind of discussed in the early twentieth century,

it was actually put to the test. And so, you know, researchers would would take capture giant tortoises, take them into the ocean, and just drop them into the sea. And what they would see is that the tortoises were quite good at swimming, They could float quite easily, they could keep their heads above water, and gradually, through genetic analysis, scientists were able to map how the dispersal had taken place, first from South America to one Galapagos island and then

later to another. So there's just this when you kind of accelerate time and think of it like a time lapse. There's just this series of odyssees going from island to island from the continent, and these tortoises arriving on new islands, establishing species, growing slightly differently into the different species of Galapagos trying torsis. It's incredible, but it's it's it's kind of a less obvious thing. I think it's easy to just be distracted by the size of these creatures and

for that to be what we associate with them. But then when you learn about their journeys, it's really it's fascinating on a different level.

I think it was nineteen oh six the California Academy of Sciences went to Pinter Island and collected what was ended up being the last known female of the species, and so for seventy odd years, you know, that was thought to be the end of that species, until one day a Hungarian American malacologist and his wife were on holiday. They were on Pinter Island looking at snails, and suddenly

they looked up and saw this giant tortoise. And they didn't know what they'd seen at the time, but later when they spoke two other people who were working in the archipelago, it soon became clear that this was the

Pinter Island tortoise. You know, this is a species that everyone had thought disappeared, and that ended up that precipitated a search, and eventually they found and captured George and took him to a captive breeding center, hoping that they would be able to save this species by finding a female, and he ended up staying there for four decades and eventually died in twenty twelve. After many many searches, there were no females found. Attempts to have him mate with

females of closely related species but to no avail. But the fascinating thing about this story, I mean, there's so many twists and turns, but the biologists. I spoke to one of the biologists I spoke to for this about this species, James Gibbs, he told me this fascinating story that he and some of his colleagues at the Galapagos Conservancy.

They a few years ago they went on a trip to a remote island and they discovered that there were hundreds of Galapagos trying torses of different species living on the side of this volcano on this incredibly remote island. And eventually they kind of worked out why this had happened. And their theory is that whalers who used to use

the Galapagos Islands as basically a meat lader. So whalers out in the Pacific they would come to the Galapagos capture tortoises because you know, they were a good food source. You could keep alive on a boat for weeks, and there were a big part for the decimation of those species.

But it's thought that they used to gather at this spot on the side of this remote island, and at some point they must have thrown over overboard some tortoises, or they may have escaped, but you ended up with this isolated population of these different species, and somewhere in there must have been Pinterer Island tortoises, or at least one, because James Gibbs and his colleagues found a few years ago a hybrid tortoise whose mother or father must have

been a Pinter Island tortoise, which is a fascinating prospect. They haven't found the parent, but it suggests that that there is or re simply was, you know, a living Pinter Island tortoise. So this is after George's death, after the species had yet again been decloit extinct, and it's still a possibility. So that's a really interesting, interesting story,

and you know, there is some small hope there. That same expedition did find another tortoise that was actually an individual from a species that was also believed extinct, so they reversed another giant tortoise extinction.

It really does depend But I think sometimes you know one of the reasons why, there's a little bit of a disconnect between what biologists will say about the species they study in terms of their conservation status and what the IUCN will say. So sometimes scientists will come out and say, this species, we believe it's extinct, We've done this extensive search for it, and we can't find it.

No one's seen it for a decade. But the IUCN will kind of hold fire because there is always that possibility that someone will find a remote population or that this species is especially discrete. So there's very often a kind of like that, a lagging effect where species aren't actually declared extinct until we can kind of know with certitude. But it does happen. Yeah, species are rediscovered.

have watched about the Christmas Island crabs. But your selecting ser of course night crabs remind us a bit about Christmas Island and what makes its ecosystem so special.

where it sits in the world is quite fascinating. It's it sits on what's called the Wallace line, which is the border between two biogeographical realms and a biogary graphical realm is basically it's the border between two places where radically different species and organisms will live. So the Wallace Line separates to its west you've got Southeast Asia, You've got things like monkeys, all sorts of species that live there. And to its east you've got Australia and you've got

you know, the incredible mussupials and things like that. And it's separated by this invisible divide, invisible to us anyway. And so Christmas Island is a hodgepodge of those two biogeographical realms. And the two species that I wrote about in Lost Wonders from Christmas Island they're an example of that because one of them is from the east of the line and one of them is from the west.

But Christmas Island itself, another reason why it's such a fascinating place is that it wasn't settled for a long time. You know, it's quite unique. It was sighted, it was cited on maps, it was cited by navigators, but no one really thought there was much point in taking ownership of Christmas Island. It was a rock covered in rainforest

in the Indian Ocean. It was surrounded by impenetrable cliffs, very few places to land, so no one really bothered until the end of the nineteenth century when phosphorus was discovered, sorry, phosphatic rock was discovered on the ocean floor, and it was determined that Christmas Island would be a source of phosphatic rock used to make fertilizer, which was obviously a huge economic incentive to settle there and colonize it, which

is what happened. And as usual, that brought with it a raft of invasive species habitat destruction, which really kind of had the effect you would expect. The two species that I write about, one of which is the one of which is the prune sized bat, the Christmas Island pipistrell that went extinct on my birthday. That was, by all accounts, are very cute little organism. It had a tiny quiff, It was the size of a prune, so

it could fit comfortably in your hand. And the forest skink was a metallic brown skink that was extremely common.

Both these species were extremely common. You know, researchers described, you know, seeing as many as eighty if the forest skink basking in the sun on a single log, so it really was everywhere, and the pipistrell similarly, I think the first the first population count estimated between five and ten thousand on quite a small island, and it was so common that you would islanders would find them fluttering

around inside their homes, you know, hunting insects. There were accounts of them tumbling into people's people's dinner, you know, beating soup and suddenly a back crush lands in your suit bowl. So they really were everywhere, and then in the late eighties suddenly people noticed that they were starting to disappear. And essentially what happened is these species disappeared in the east to west patterns, so from the east of the islands of the west, they gradually faded out.

And at the same time it was it was realized that a particularly dangerous and invasive species of snake, the wolf snake, had been introduced, which is believed to be the primary cause of both extinctions by the majority of scientists.

There were other things like giants, centerpedes, cats, rats, yellow crazy ants, which are another you know, they're their own fascinating phenomenon, but really it's the introduction of the wolf snake, and you see this correlations fascinating correlation with the retreat of these two species in the advance of this invasive species.

and that's why biosecurity is so important. But sometimes it's not followed or it's lacking, and on Christmas Island it Yeah, there were there were species that were introduced in this manner, and the wolf snake is one of them. But it was it's a specialized skin hunter, but it's it's partial to bats and things like that. But it, but it's decimated this species with frightening ferocity. There are three species

in this book that lived in Australian territories. So there were these two from Christmas Island, and there was another species called the bramble came melmus, which was a species of rodent that lived on a sand k in the Torres Strait, which is which is just north of Australia, but it's an Australian territory. And all three of these species really suffered from governmental neglect. There were opportunities to save them that weren't taken.

was ignored. You know, he recommended it be categorized as threatened in Australia's equivalent of the endangered species List, but he wasn't listened to, and it was only classified as threatened four months before the extinction of the species in

twenty fourteen. The reason why I think it's important to mention that is what's happening right now in America with the attempts to water down the Endangered Species Act, the the unleashing potentially of the God Squad, I think is the name the small body of people who are given the unique power to override environmental protections even if it causes an extinction. I think, you know, in the best of circumstances, you know, politicians are neglect full of environmental issues,

but the situation in America now is just apocalyptic. Sorry to get sorry to get depressing, but actually there was something, if you don't mind, there was I got in touch with someone, one of the scientists I spoke to for this book because I knew I was coming on here and I wanted to ask him, you know, if he had any thoughts and feelings about the current state of things. You know, and I think it's quite important. So I don't know if you'd mind if I read it out. I was quite sure.

can serve our biodiversity, national parks, and natural spaces. The Endangered Species Act was signed by Nixon with strong bipartisan support and has inspired the world with its successes in bringing back so many species from the brink of extinction, including the old Eagle condor and even the Devil's Whole pupfish, which was recently rescued from a catastrophic decline this winter only through a decade long efforts of the US Fish

and Wildlife Service to establish a refuge population. We must fight to protect everyone in our country and all the unique species that have made the United States their home for millennia. He also mentioned to me, obviously, you know there's a broader context where scientific institutions and universities are being stripped of funding and there are layoffs, and it sounds horrendous. As an outsider. It sounds, you know, absolutely

it's a doomsday scenario. But I think it's really important that we kind of learn and we understand what happens when when people stop caring, you know, when governments turn a blind eye, or when you know, in the case of the current administration, when they seem to be actively advocating by diversity loss and things like that. I think Chris is right. I think now is the time to fight in whichever way anyone can. I'm probably preaching to

the choir here. I don't know what your listener base is like, but hearing all of this from Chris, it really kind of made me sort of realize that the bypasss and history of the Endangered Species Act and how you know, I'd heard that from you know. Researching this book, I've spoken to people who, you know, occupied all kinds of positions across the political spectrum, but they did believe in the importance of conserving species and your podcast being

a science podcast. I think, I think, regardless of anyone's political affiliations, one thing I think we can all realize is that the administration at the moment is profoundly unscientific, and regardless of how you feel about any other kind of policies. You know, it's just insanity, absolutely.

they had a right wing government. I think it was around the same time as the Trump first Trump term, which was actively pursuing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. And he told me, you know, essentially what happened in that time was organizations and conservationists to learn to turn away from the federal government where they could you know,

things became a lot more localized. You know, local administrations and local organizations would kind of ban together and try and solve the problems together, knowing they couldn't they couldn't rely on their government. And you know, I know that conservation is as I said earlier, it's full of unstung heroes. It's full of everyday heroism. So I really do think that people across the country will be doing their best to kind of to save what they can, and I

think they need our support. So I'd encourage anyone who who cares about this or feels depressed or demoralized by it to try and get involved however you can. So there are very often ways that you can volunteer and you can help, even small ways. It's more important than ever now.

of that has been going away. And this is just one example, you know, a local example for us of an organization where people people can now turn and try to help support their work if they can't depend on funding assistance from governmental agencies.

And if you would like to reach out with any questions, comments or suggestions, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.