Each year Australia’s National Threatened Species Day commemorates the loss of the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) on 7 September 1936, when the last one died in captivity at Hobart Zoo. The World Wildlife Fund, Australia’s website says: ‘National Threatened Species Day is a day when we shine a spotlight on all the Australian native animal and plant species that are facing similar fates to that of the Tasmanian tiger.’
Well. Not quite all.
Of course, there are many interpretations of what constitutes a species’ ‘threatened’ status, and there are many different lists in different jurisdictions around the globe. However, it is the IUCN Red List that is considered to be the ‘barometer of life’ and is the list that is used by iNaturalist for its global citizen science observations.
In an earlier blog post from March 2023, which looked at the issue of threatened species lists, I posed the following:
How do you know if something is endangered, threatened or vulnerable if you don’t know what it is?
And if you don’t know what it is, or even if it exists, how can it be classed and protections afforded to it?
Listing something on one list doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes it onto another list, or that we even know about a species’s existence in order to list it. A species could slip beneath the radar and go extinct before we barely realise it exists, which is why citizen scientists can make such an important contribution to conserving our biodiversity.
I have reproduced part of that same blog post here (below), because it is relevant to today’s National Threatened Species Day.
Above: Some of the marine species found on Norfolk Island, classed as threatened according to the IUCN Red List
I start by talking about the Norfolk Island Region, Threatened Species Recovery Plan. Updates from the original blog post are in square brackets.
< Start of post >
I have included alink to the 2010 report [of the NI Recovery Plan] at the bottom of this blog post in the Further reading section. In the introduction, it says this:
The plan covers all of the threatened species in the Norfolk Island Group that are listed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) comprising 46 plant species, five species of land snails, five bird species and two reptile species.
Except where they are also listed as threatened, recovery plans are not required for species listed as migratory or marine under the EPBC Act.
I have been told that the updated version of the Recovery Plan [still in draft on 7/9/2024] has a similar lack of marine species. And the reason for this is a lack of baseline data to inform a vulnerability assessment. [In other words, not enough observations have been made around Norfolk Island.]
Followers of this blog and social media page will know I am a keen advocate of iNaturalist, especially for somewhere like Norfolk Island, which is a biodiversity hotspot. It isn’t perfect, but it is pretty good for what it does. You can find all my observations here. When a contributor (for example, you or I) enters the details of an observation, if it is deemed to be threatened or vulnerable then where you saw that observation, its location, (for example, in Emily Bay, Kingston, Norfolk Island) is automatically obscured from the view of the general public.
This is the explanation given by iNaturalist for obscuring the coordinates of such an observation:
… taxon geoprivacy is a process through which the iNaturalist platform automatically restricts geographic information associated with observations of taxa threatened by location disclosure …
iNaturalist uses a whole range of information to arrive at its classification of species, including among other things the IUCN Red List. Although, for some reason these lists don’t always match the lists of threatened species used elsewhere, such as those listed under Australia’s EPBC Act, for example.
Anyway, for the purposes of this post, below is a list of some of the marine species found here and for which there are iNaturalist records that are classed as threatened according the the IUCN Red List.
Black rockcod
Blotched Fantail Ray
Chevron butterflyfish
Doubleheader
Harlequin filefish
Norfolk Island blenny
Dusky whaler
Galapagos shark
Sandbar shark
Black-mouthed tun snail
Ram’s Horn squid
Green sea turtle
[Hawksbill sea turtle]
Acropora solitaryensis
Hammer coral
Lord coral
Turbinaria heronensis
iNaturalist’s list is far from exhaustive, mainly because it relies on the observations of citizen scientists: some species may simply not have been recorded by anyone for this geographical location yet; some species have not been assessed for vulnerability yet; and there will be some species that we aren’t even aware of their existence, such is our limited knowledge about Norfolk Island’s marine habitat.
Here is an example of a case in point: Professor Andrew Baird, chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies has told me that that up to 30 per cent (a conservative estimate) of the coral species documented on Norfolk Island are as yet undescribed. In other words, a third of our corals could be unique. And the way we are going we could lose them before we even understand what we have. We have no idea if they are new species or not, let alone if they are threatened, vulnerable or endangered.
As I have said before on these pages, if around 30 per cent of our corals are as yet undescribed, then not moving heaven and Earth to save them is tantamount to burning the library before you know what is on the shelves, isn’t it? But unfortunately, because we don’t know what they are, they aren’t protected by a listing under the EPBC Act.
Which in a rather irritatingly circular way brings me back to the questions I began with:
How do you know if something is endangered, threatened or vulnerable if you don’t know what it is?
And if you don’t know what it is, or even if it exists, how can it be classed and protections afforded to it?
But the EPBC Act doesn’t just protect individual species, fortunately for us it protects places, too. [Well that’s the theory.]
< End of post >
Back to today, 7 September 2024. Since that blog post, above, we continue to allow pollutants to flow out directly onto our reef, endangering, species we haven’t even identified properly yet. How many of those corals will die from disease before researchers get to describe them?
And in a bittersweet announcement, the McCulloch's anemonefish has tbeen added to Australia's EPBC threatened species list this year. Bitter, because it should never have to be on that list, but sweet because maybe we can get some protections for it. Although I am always on the lookout for it, I've never seen one inside the lagoons; however, there are records of it around the island. It's also found at Lord Howe Island.
Above: Some of the marine species found on Norfolk Island, classed as threatened according to the IUCN Red List