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In memory of the Christmas Island shrew
- WorkerBee28474 11mo ago> by 1908 the shrew was thought extinct... Brief rediscoveries in 1958 and 1984 brought fleeting hope So 2025 might be the 4th time the shrew has been declared extinct.
- cactusplant7374 11mo agoIt's hard to imagine an animal like a shrew weighs only 6 grams.
- WastedCucumber 11mo agoTry the etruscan shrew, they weigh about two grams.
- pregseahorses 11mo agoYes, abundant on Socotra island. I recently explored Socotra on Google Earth and and was surprised I had never heared about this isolated, prestine Island. One of its caves is a treasure trove of writings/drawings by travellers from various parts of the world over the centuries.
- yareally 11mo agoThe bee hummingbird weights 2 grams and it's 6cm long (about 2 inches) including the tail. I always thought my budgerigar weighed nothing at 30grams (about an ounce), but he's not even close.
- pants2 11mo agoIncredible that they have the same general hardware as any other mammal, compare a shrew to a blue whale, potentially 50,000,000X heavier - they both have one heart, two eyes, hearing, smell, lungs, sex organs, kidneys, brain, spine, etc. It's fascinating.
- deadbabe 11mo agohow could they say with any certainty it is extinct? It is tiny.
- analog31 11mo agoI'm a scientist, and I work in a setting where there are a lot of non-scientists including engineers, managers, etc. A word like "extinct" sounds like an absolute, and a rigorous statement would include a detailed disclaimer about the limitations of talking in absolute terms, such as "within the limits of our knowledge, and we could be wrong, yadda yadda." When talking amongst scientists, those disclaimers are unnecessary because scientific thinking is taken for granted. Thus we talk in abbreviated terms, for instance where "extinct" implies "extinct, with all of the usual disclaimers." But I think scientists have to remember that this is a habit, and most normal people don't get it. And then our words get filtered through the press. I think an article like this could include a brief working definition of "declared extinct" which would help reinforce the idea that what we sacrifice as the price of scientific knowledge, is absolute knowledge.
- swagmoose 11mo agoI think I knew this deep down, but I am curious if there's "extinct (with the usual disclaimers)" and "extinct (it ain't comin back)". i.e. the Christmas Island Shrew vs. the Dodo
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoMaybe the difference between the Dodo and the Christmas Island Shrew is 350 years. Which is to say, the certainty of the Dodo's extinction is related to how long we've not seen one. Every year that passes then without the shrew will be to underscore its extinction, I suppose. Sad.
- analog31 11mo agoI have a feeling that it depends to some extent on the organism. It would be hard for a breeding pair of Dodo's to hide for very long, whereas a colony of little shrews could creep around in the bushes without notice. "Last seen on X date" would cover both cases.
- NedF 11mo ago[dead]
- HotGarbage 11mo agoI thought this was going to an obituary for the resident who got the original goatse.cx taken down.
- culi 11mo ago> Yet it was not quite gone. Half a century later, in 1958, two shrews appeared as bulldozers tore into the forest for phosphate mining. They were seen, released, and forgotten. I wonder how many thought-to-be-extinct species were not seen before it was too late. It's also wild that they were simply released instead of being moved to captivity to try to breed
- ornornor 11mo agoI guess we didn’t care about conservation in 1958 like we do now.
- fritzo 11mo agoUnpopular opinion: hundreds of years from now, loss of mammalian species will seem like sentimental naval gazing when our descendants consider the millions of strains of fungi, bacteria, archaea, and viruses we could have saved, were it not for our micro-blindness.
- bl0rg 11mo agoThis doesn’t sound reasonable to me. Why would we?