June 19, 2025 • 44 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Tom Lathan, author of “Lost Wonders: 10 Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century.”
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and in today's episode, I'm going
to be chatting with Tom Lathan, author of the new
book Lost Wonders Ten Tales of Extinction from the twenty
first Century. It's out June tenth. Without further ado, let's
jump right into the interview. Hi Tom, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hi that Rov, Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The new book is Lost Wonders, Ten Tales of Extinction
from the twenty first Century, publishing June tenth here in
the States, came out earlier, what in November in the UK? Right,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
It tackles the sixth mass extinction event that we're all
living in by chronicling ten different recently extinct species. You know,
we've all read or heard about the I'm going Holo
scene extinction. But do you find that people have a
difficult time truly grasping what's happening or the scale of
what's happening.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Yeah, and I think it is a difficult thing to grasp,
you know, even for people who are following this and
who care about this. It is kind of crazy, and
I think, you know, mainly because of the timescale that
it's happening on the reason why I really wanted to
write this book, which is actually eleven species. It's ten stories,
but eleven species. Two of those species, their story is
(01:29):
so so similar, so intertwined. The two birds are mistaken
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
(01:51):
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,
(02:13):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:56):
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
(03:18):
the book. So that's what really kind of drove me.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, so you're kind of making something that's kind of
invisible to many visible and real in a way.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, you know, I think it's understandable that you know,
we don't necessarily as a species, we don't really necessarily
think about extinction that much, I would say, and it
can be quite a dour subject, and there's very often
you know, we are anthropercentric. We're obsessed with our own
(03:48):
stories and our own our own species. So you know,
an obscure back going extinct or a tiny snail going
extinct somewhere in the world isn't necessarily going to kind
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,
(04:09):
we're the cause, either in the here and now or
we set off the chain of events that have led
to these extinctions.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Now, I don't want to give potential readers the wrong idea, though,
because each chapter of your of your book is I
guess in a very real sense of tragedy, but there
that each chapter is also about like the wonders and
improbabilities surrounding these various species. So I definitely want to
get into some questions about those wonders and improbabilities as
(04:39):
we look at maybe a few examples. But how did
you how did you end up finalizing a list for
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?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah? So, really, when I started the project, or actually
before I go into that, I think, Carle, echo what
you said. I think you're right. You know, extinction. I
think sometimes it's one of those issues that people might
not want to think about, because, you know, it just God,
it's just terrible, isn't it something going extinct, especially something
that's millions of years old. It's kind of mind boggling.
(05:16):
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
(05:38):
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
(06:01):
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
(06:23):
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
(06:44):
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,
(07:06):
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,
(07:28):
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?
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Oh? I asked just how you ended up coming up
with a list?
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yes, So, I as a journalist. I've been writing about
nature for a few years and it came out of
quite an organic conversation with my partner, who's also a writer,
and I just had this thought. I just wondered, you know,
what's I wonder what's gone extinct? You know, in the
last you know, in my lifetime essentially. So I contacted
(07:59):
the ice UCN, which is the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature, which is the global body that essentially
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,
(08:20):
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
(08:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Well, I want to I'm want to ask about one
that I have to acknowledge that on the surface, this
one might not seem that exciting. And when I was
reading your book, that was my initial response. I was
kind of like, well this, I don't know how enthralled
I'm going to be by this one. But it ended
up being I think my one of my favorite chapters,
and this is the chapter dealing with the Saint Helena
Olive can you tell us a little bit about the
(09:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, that is also one of my favorites. Before I
go into that, I think it's interesting. I was thinking
about this this morning. Actually, I think we're all kind
of conditioned to see wildlife in a certain way. You know,
if I don't know if you guys have I'm presuming
you guys have David Attenborough documentaries. Oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah,
(09:50):
National Hero, so that you know. I was raised on
his documentaries, and I think, as wonderful as they are,
they do condition you see the natural world in a
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
(10:14):
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,
(10:35):
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,
(10:57):
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
(11:18):
the closest neighbors to the residents on Saint Helena.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
And remote islands are a very exciting place for biologists
because due to their isolation, species that end up making
it to those islands end up evolving in fascinating ways,
and you end up with these extraordinary ecosystems, and Saint
Nna is one of those examples. You know, there are
(11:44):
a few species that are capable of making that leap,
you know, crossing thousands of miles of ocean to reach
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
(12:04):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:13):
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
(13:33):
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
(13:54):
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,
(14:17):
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
(14:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, there's a I just love this idea that it's
almost like this plant was not supposed to be there.
It's just such an incredible string of events that we
can kind of speculate on that that landed it there.
And I love the quote that you share about how
rare events happen over geological time. So, yeah, it's unlikely,
but given enough time, things like this do occur. In
(15:11):
this is the result.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, it's like, what are the chances. I mean, you know,
it's already just a seed being swept up in the
feathers of an albatross is already you know, it seems
quite an unlikely scenario. But then for it to have
dropped out just at the right place, it's kind of insane.
And that quote that you just mentioned, that was Mike Fay,
who was a geneticist from Q Gardens in the UK,
(15:33):
and Q Gardens did a lot of work to try
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.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
But of course another organism eventually came to the island,
and that would be us. This one was sheltered for
quite a while, right.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Yeah, I mean that's one of the it's a double
edged sword. You know, Isolation creates a fascinating breeding ground
for evolution, for interesting species to evolve and adapt. But
by the same token, when you have a species like
humans in the book I talk about how Saint Helena
(16:25):
was almost like a castle. It was fortified against the
outside world. You know, there were so few organisms who
could actually make that trip that the sea kind of
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
(16:46):
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
(17:07):
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
(17:28):
oasis in the middle of the ocean. But you know,
a few years later it was decimated.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
In what led did this decimation, So, I mean.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
One thing was the introduction of invasive species. Another thing
was habitat destruction. So once the island was settled by
the English East India Company, homes had to be built.
Enslaved people were brought to the island in order to
create some kind of economic purpose for the island. That's
(17:57):
how it was viewed as the English East India comp
at the time described places like Saint Helina as factories.
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,
(18:17):
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,
(18:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
You read about that. Now we just an empty pot, right,
it's labeled as Saint Helena.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yes, So in Q Garden's Temperate House, which is this fantastic, incredible,
decadent Victorian glasshouse in London and Q there is you know,
species from all over the world there, and then in
one corner there's just this empty terracotta pot, which is
an extraordinary kind of symbol of what could have been.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Now, you mentioned goats and the destructive powers of goats
when they're introduced to places like this, they factor into
at least one of the other extinction stories that you share,
and that is the Pinta Island tortoise of the Galapagos Islands.
This is another far flong island dwelling species, right.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Yeah, yeah, so a lot of these species were island
dwelling species. For the reasons we discussed the Pinter Island tortoise.
It's yeah. The goats that came to Pinter Island were
introduced by fishermen and there were three of them deposited
in the nineteen fifties and that population swelled to two thousands.
(20:18):
In fact, you know, I actually don't off the top
of my head. I can't remember the exact number, but basically,
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.
(20:41):
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.
(21:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Now, with the Galapagos tortoises in general, I feel like
these are some amazing creatures that we can They are
often featured in documentaries, the sort of Attenborough documentaries that
we've been discussing in the sort of documentaries that very
much were inspired by that kind of content, which is great,
but we can almost kind of grow numb to them.
(21:33):
I don't know if you've found this to be the
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.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yeah, I think that's key. I mean, I think appreciating
nature is it's always about looking a little closer because
I think think you're right with something like a giant tortoise.
You know, we've we've seen that, We've all seen that
many times. We kind of I think we think we
always think we understand the things we've seen many times,
(22:14):
so you know, our brain knows how to categorize that
so we can kind of just move on. But you know,
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
(22:39):
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
(23:01):
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
(23:22):
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
(23:45):
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
(24:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Now, the story of the Pinta Island Glabgirl's tortoise is
also interesting in that it is also a story of rediscovery.
Could you tell us a little bit about this Some
folks may have probably heard parts of this tale before.
Tell us about Lonesome George.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, so in nineteen seventy two, well, loans from George.
A lot of people will be familiar with that name because,
you know, he was he was a celebrity animal. You know,
he was he was world famous. He had hundreds of
thousands of people, you know, coming to the Galapagos visiting
him in his enclosure. His species, the Pinter tortoise, which
(25:00):
is the species I write about in Lost Wonders, was
believed to be extinct from the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
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,
(25:20):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:52):
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
(27:13):
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,
(27:35):
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.
(27:55):
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
(28:22):
individual from a species that was also believed extinct, so
they reversed another giant tortoise extinction.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
There now, how rare are rediscoveries of previously believed extinct species.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
I can't give you any figures off the top of
my head, but it happens more often than you think,
you know there are known kind of it depends on
the species. I mean, some species are fairly easy to monitor.
Other species, you know, maybe due to their size, due
to where they live, are you know, close to impossible.
(28:55):
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
(29:16):
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
(29:40):
actually declared extinct until we can kind of know with certitude.
But it does happen. Yeah, species are rediscovered.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Now, I'm not going to ask you about every organism
that you govern in the book, obviously, but that I
do want to ask you about one more location and
associated organisms, and that would be the two organisms that
you profile from Christmas Eyeland. This is a place that
I think some of our listeners definitely remember from either
episodes they might have listened to or shows they might
(30:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Yeah. So Christmas Island is another one of those isolated
islands on which endemic species just really thrive. But it
isn't geographically strictly geographically isolated so much as the ocean
that surrounds it is incredibly deep, so in some places
it's five kilometers deep. You can fit Mount Kilimanjaro in there.
(30:43):
It's also surrounded by strong ocean currents, and the place
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
(31:05):
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.
(31:28):
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.
(31:50):
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,
(32:11):
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
(32:35):
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
(32:58):
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,
(33:20):
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
(33:41):
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
(34:02):
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.
(34:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
The wolf snake. That this was an accidental introduction to
the island or was this one of these cases where
an organism was introduced to attempt to solve a particular
problem or anything.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
No, this was an accident and there was a bit
of a problem on Christmas Island. The biosecurity was not
there from what I've heard. But this is a snake
or or a few, and I don't know how many
it would have been, but it could have been one,
or it could have been several that basically snuckerboard a
cargo ship. And this happens a lot. You know, now
(35:14):
that we've kind of connected the isolated parts of the world,
we've we've sort of created a transport network for 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
(35:39):
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
(36:01):
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
(36:24):
save them that weren't taken.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
You know.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
The people that I spoke to who worked with all
three of these species, they in the case of the
Christmas Island species, they'd warned the authorities this species is
going extinct. The skink is a really horrifying example of
that because David James, who was wonderful ecologist who worked
on the island and was essentially in charge of monitoring
(36:48):
basically everything that lived there. You know, he raised the
alarm about this species in two thousand and five and
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
(37:11):
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
(37:32):
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
(37:54):
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.
(38:14):
I was quite sure.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Oh, by all means.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
So here's what he said, this is Chris Martin, who
is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in pupfish. He works
at UC Berkeley, and this is what he had to
say about this. This government is attempting to strip habitat
protections provided by the Endangered Species Act, among many other
(38:39):
threats and cuts to the federal agencies that protect and
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,
(39:03):
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
(39:25):
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
(39:47):
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
(40:09):
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
(40:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
I mean this is you know, not the first guest
this year or too to bring some version of this
issue up. And yeah, in the past there has been
bipartisan support to a large degree to help maintain biodiversity.
I don't think it's something that needs to be a
politicized topic. And yet here we are. So that's right,
(41:20):
you're sharing these starts.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
But I do want to add as well, just to
add a little note of hope, because I know, you know,
this must be such a demoralizing situation for many Americans
to be in. One of the people I spoke to
you for this book was a fantastic ornithologist, a bird
ecologist from Brazil, and he talked to me about what
it was like working under the bolscenario regime, so, you know,
(41:43):
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,
(42:03):
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
(42:24):
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
(42:46):
ever now.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, yeah, Well, we recently talked with Mark Undinko, who
runs the Amphibian Foundation here in Atlanta, and that was
one of the things he brought up is in the
past they've had to they have leaned on the federal
agencies for helping some of their research, and a lot
of that has been going away. And this is just
(43:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Yeah, it's important to preserve hope. And I think the
situation is incredibly demoralizing, But there are people who are working.
There are people to do the right who are trying
to do the right thing, and I think, you know
where if we can support them where we can, I
think that's a really good thing.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Well, Tom, thanks for coming on the show to chat
with me. The book again is Lost Wonders ten Tales
of Extinction from the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me Rob. It's it's
been a real pleasure, and thank you all for listening.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Thanks once more to Tom for taking time out of
his day to chat with me. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily as Signed and
culture podcasts with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and
on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Thanks
as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show.
And if you would like to reach out with any questions,
comments or suggestions, you can email us at contact at
(44:17):
stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and in today's episode, I'm going
to be chatting with Tom Lathan, author of the new
book Lost Wonders Ten Tales of Extinction from the twenty
first Century. It's out June tenth. Without further ado, let's
jump right into the interview. Hi Tom, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hi that Rov, Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The new book is Lost Wonders, Ten Tales of Extinction
from the twenty first Century, publishing June tenth here in
the States, came out earlier, what in November in the UK? Right,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
It tackles the sixth mass extinction event that we're all
living in by chronicling ten different recently extinct species. You know,
we've all read or heard about the I'm going Holo
scene extinction. But do you find that people have a
difficult time truly grasping what's happening or the scale of
what's happening.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Yeah, and I think it is a difficult thing to grasp,
you know, even for people who are following this and
who care about this. It is kind of crazy, and
I think, you know, mainly because of the timescale that
it's happening on the reason why I really wanted to
write this book, which is actually eleven species. It's ten stories,
but eleven species. Two of those species, their story is
(01:29):
so so similar, so intertwined. The two birds are mistaken
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
(01:51):
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,
(02:13):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:56):
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
(03:18):
the book. So that's what really kind of drove me.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, so you're kind of making something that's kind of
invisible to many visible and real in a way.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, you know, I think it's understandable that you know,
we don't necessarily as a species, we don't really necessarily
think about extinction that much, I would say, and it
can be quite a dour subject, and there's very often
you know, we are anthropercentric. We're obsessed with our own
(03:48):
stories and our own our own species. So you know,
an obscure back going extinct or a tiny snail going
extinct somewhere in the world isn't necessarily going to kind
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,
(04:09):
we're the cause, either in the here and now or
we set off the chain of events that have led
to these extinctions.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Now, I don't want to give potential readers the wrong idea, though,
because each chapter of your of your book is I
guess in a very real sense of tragedy, but there
that each chapter is also about like the wonders and
improbabilities surrounding these various species. So I definitely want to
get into some questions about those wonders and improbabilities as
(04:39):
we look at maybe a few examples. But how did
you how did you end up finalizing a list for
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?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah? So, really, when I started the project, or actually
before I go into that, I think, Carle, echo what
you said. I think you're right. You know, extinction. I
think sometimes it's one of those issues that people might
not want to think about, because, you know, it just God,
it's just terrible, isn't it something going extinct, especially something
that's millions of years old. It's kind of mind boggling.
(05:16):
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
(05:38):
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
(06:01):
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
(06:23):
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
(06:44):
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,
(07:06):
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,
(07:28):
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?
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Oh? I asked just how you ended up coming up
with a list?
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yes, So, I as a journalist. I've been writing about
nature for a few years and it came out of
quite an organic conversation with my partner, who's also a writer,
and I just had this thought. I just wondered, you know,
what's I wonder what's gone extinct? You know, in the
last you know, in my lifetime essentially. So I contacted
(07:59):
the ice UCN, which is the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature, which is the global body that essentially
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,
(08:20):
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
(08:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Well, I want to I'm want to ask about one
that I have to acknowledge that on the surface, this
one might not seem that exciting. And when I was
reading your book, that was my initial response. I was
kind of like, well this, I don't know how enthralled
I'm going to be by this one. But it ended
up being I think my one of my favorite chapters,
and this is the chapter dealing with the Saint Helena
Olive can you tell us a little bit about the
(09:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, that is also one of my favorites. Before I
go into that, I think it's interesting. I was thinking
about this this morning. Actually, I think we're all kind
of conditioned to see wildlife in a certain way. You know,
if I don't know if you guys have I'm presuming
you guys have David Attenborough documentaries. Oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah,
(09:50):
National Hero, so that you know. I was raised on
his documentaries, and I think, as wonderful as they are,
they do condition you see the natural world in a
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
(10:14):
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,
(10:35):
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,
(10:57):
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
(11:18):
the closest neighbors to the residents on Saint Helena.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
And remote islands are a very exciting place for biologists
because due to their isolation, species that end up making
it to those islands end up evolving in fascinating ways,
and you end up with these extraordinary ecosystems, and Saint
Nna is one of those examples. You know, there are
(11:44):
a few species that are capable of making that leap,
you know, crossing thousands of miles of ocean to reach
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
(12:04):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:13):
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
(13:33):
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
(13:54):
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,
(14:17):
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
(14:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, there's a I just love this idea that it's
almost like this plant was not supposed to be there.
It's just such an incredible string of events that we
can kind of speculate on that that landed it there.
And I love the quote that you share about how
rare events happen over geological time. So, yeah, it's unlikely,
but given enough time, things like this do occur. In
(15:11):
this is the result.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, it's like, what are the chances. I mean, you know,
it's already just a seed being swept up in the
feathers of an albatross is already you know, it seems
quite an unlikely scenario. But then for it to have
dropped out just at the right place, it's kind of insane.
And that quote that you just mentioned, that was Mike Fay,
who was a geneticist from Q Gardens in the UK,
(15:33):
and Q Gardens did a lot of work to try
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.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
But of course another organism eventually came to the island,
and that would be us. This one was sheltered for
quite a while, right.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Yeah, I mean that's one of the it's a double
edged sword. You know, Isolation creates a fascinating breeding ground
for evolution, for interesting species to evolve and adapt. But
by the same token, when you have a species like
humans in the book I talk about how Saint Helena
(16:25):
was almost like a castle. It was fortified against the
outside world. You know, there were so few organisms who
could actually make that trip that the sea kind of
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
(16:46):
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
(17:07):
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
(17:28):
oasis in the middle of the ocean. But you know,
a few years later it was decimated.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
In what led did this decimation, So, I mean.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
One thing was the introduction of invasive species. Another thing
was habitat destruction. So once the island was settled by
the English East India Company, homes had to be built.
Enslaved people were brought to the island in order to
create some kind of economic purpose for the island. That's
(17:57):
how it was viewed as the English East India comp
at the time described places like Saint Helina as factories.
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,
(18:17):
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,
(18:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
You read about that. Now we just an empty pot, right,
it's labeled as Saint Helena.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yes, So in Q Garden's Temperate House, which is this fantastic, incredible,
decadent Victorian glasshouse in London and Q there is you know,
species from all over the world there, and then in
one corner there's just this empty terracotta pot, which is
an extraordinary kind of symbol of what could have been.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Now, you mentioned goats and the destructive powers of goats
when they're introduced to places like this, they factor into
at least one of the other extinction stories that you share,
and that is the Pinta Island tortoise of the Galapagos Islands.
This is another far flong island dwelling species, right.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Yeah, yeah, so a lot of these species were island
dwelling species. For the reasons we discussed the Pinter Island tortoise.
It's yeah. The goats that came to Pinter Island were
introduced by fishermen and there were three of them deposited
in the nineteen fifties and that population swelled to two thousands.
(20:18):
In fact, you know, I actually don't off the top
of my head. I can't remember the exact number, but basically,
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.
(20:41):
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.
(21:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Now, with the Galapagos tortoises in general, I feel like
these are some amazing creatures that we can They are
often featured in documentaries, the sort of Attenborough documentaries that
we've been discussing in the sort of documentaries that very
much were inspired by that kind of content, which is great,
but we can almost kind of grow numb to them.
(21:33):
I don't know if you've found this to be the
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.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yeah, I think that's key. I mean, I think appreciating
nature is it's always about looking a little closer because
I think think you're right with something like a giant tortoise.
You know, we've we've seen that, We've all seen that
many times. We kind of I think we think we
always think we understand the things we've seen many times,
(22:14):
so you know, our brain knows how to categorize that
so we can kind of just move on. But you know,
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
(22:39):
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
(23:01):
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
(23:22):
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
(23:45):
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
(24:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Now, the story of the Pinta Island Glabgirl's tortoise is
also interesting in that it is also a story of rediscovery.
Could you tell us a little bit about this Some
folks may have probably heard parts of this tale before.
Tell us about Lonesome George.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, so in nineteen seventy two, well, loans from George.
A lot of people will be familiar with that name because,
you know, he was he was a celebrity animal. You know,
he was he was world famous. He had hundreds of
thousands of people, you know, coming to the Galapagos visiting
him in his enclosure. His species, the Pinter tortoise, which
(25:00):
is the species I write about in Lost Wonders, was
believed to be extinct from the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
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,
(25:20):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:52):
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
(27:13):
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,
(27:35):
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.
(27:55):
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
(28:22):
individual from a species that was also believed extinct, so
they reversed another giant tortoise extinction.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
There now, how rare are rediscoveries of previously believed extinct species.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
I can't give you any figures off the top of
my head, but it happens more often than you think,
you know there are known kind of it depends on
the species. I mean, some species are fairly easy to monitor.
Other species, you know, maybe due to their size, due
to where they live, are you know, close to impossible.
(28:55):
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
(29:16):
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
(29:40):
actually declared extinct until we can kind of know with certitude.
But it does happen. Yeah, species are rediscovered.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Now, I'm not going to ask you about every organism
that you govern in the book, obviously, but that I
do want to ask you about one more location and
associated organisms, and that would be the two organisms that
you profile from Christmas Eyeland. This is a place that
I think some of our listeners definitely remember from either
episodes they might have listened to or shows they might
(30:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Yeah. So Christmas Island is another one of those isolated
islands on which endemic species just really thrive. But it
isn't geographically strictly geographically isolated so much as the ocean
that surrounds it is incredibly deep, so in some places
it's five kilometers deep. You can fit Mount Kilimanjaro in there.
(30:43):
It's also surrounded by strong ocean currents, and the place
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
(31:05):
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.
(31:28):
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.
(31:50):
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,
(32:11):
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
(32:35):
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
(32:58):
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,
(33:20):
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
(33:41):
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
(34:02):
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.
(34:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
The wolf snake. That this was an accidental introduction to
the island or was this one of these cases where
an organism was introduced to attempt to solve a particular
problem or anything.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
No, this was an accident and there was a bit
of a problem on Christmas Island. The biosecurity was not
there from what I've heard. But this is a snake
or or a few, and I don't know how many
it would have been, but it could have been one,
or it could have been several that basically snuckerboard a
cargo ship. And this happens a lot. You know, now
(35:14):
that we've kind of connected the isolated parts of the world,
we've we've sort of created a transport network for 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
(35:39):
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
(36:01):
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
(36:24):
save them that weren't taken.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
You know.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
The people that I spoke to who worked with all
three of these species, they in the case of the
Christmas Island species, they'd warned the authorities this species is
going extinct. The skink is a really horrifying example of
that because David James, who was wonderful ecologist who worked
on the island and was essentially in charge of monitoring
(36:48):
basically everything that lived there. You know, he raised the
alarm about this species in two thousand and five and
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
(37:11):
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
(37:32):
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
(37:54):
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.
(38:14):
I was quite sure.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Oh, by all means.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
So here's what he said, this is Chris Martin, who
is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in pupfish. He works
at UC Berkeley, and this is what he had to
say about this. This government is attempting to strip habitat
protections provided by the Endangered Species Act, among many other
(38:39):
threats and cuts to the federal agencies that protect and
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,
(39:03):
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
(39:25):
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
(39:47):
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
(40:09):
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
(40:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
I mean this is you know, not the first guest
this year or too to bring some version of this
issue up. And yeah, in the past there has been
bipartisan support to a large degree to help maintain biodiversity.
I don't think it's something that needs to be a
politicized topic. And yet here we are. So that's right,
(41:20):
you're sharing these starts.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
But I do want to add as well, just to
add a little note of hope, because I know, you know,
this must be such a demoralizing situation for many Americans
to be in. One of the people I spoke to
you for this book was a fantastic ornithologist, a bird
ecologist from Brazil, and he talked to me about what
it was like working under the bolscenario regime, so, you know,
(41:43):
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,
(42:03):
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
(42:24):
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
(42:46):
ever now.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, yeah, Well, we recently talked with Mark Undinko, who
runs the Amphibian Foundation here in Atlanta, and that was
one of the things he brought up is in the
past they've had to they have leaned on the federal
agencies for helping some of their research, and a lot
of that has been going away. And this is just
(43:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Yeah, it's important to preserve hope. And I think the
situation is incredibly demoralizing, But there are people who are working.
There are people to do the right who are trying
to do the right thing, and I think, you know
where if we can support them where we can, I
think that's a really good thing.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Well, Tom, thanks for coming on the show to chat
with me. The book again is Lost Wonders ten Tales
of Extinction from the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me Rob. It's it's
been a real pleasure, and thank you all for listening.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Thanks once more to Tom for taking time out of
his day to chat with me. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily as Signed and
culture podcasts with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and
on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Thanks
as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show.
And if you would like to reach out with any questions,
comments or suggestions, you can email us at contact at
(44:17):
stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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