The world’s largest bee was presumed extinct before rediscovery in Indonesia in February 2019. The criteria show that to understand whether a species is extinct, we need to know what it was doing in the past. Given all the evidence – or rather, lack of evidence – that’s needed, it’s surprising any species is ever declared extinct. Surveys should be over a time frame appropriate to the taxon’s life cycle and life form”. The Red List has a set of criteria to determine the threat status of a species, which are only listed as “extinct” when there is “no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died”.Īccording to the Red List, this requires “exhaustive surveys in known and/or expected habitat, at appropriate times…throughout its historic range have failed to record an individual. The IUCN Red List collates a global register of threatened species and measures their relative risks of extinction. These rediscoveries suggest we may know very little about some of the world’s rarest species, but they also raise the question of how species are declared extinct in the first place. Between February 21 and March 4, three notable rediscoveries were announced – the Fernandina Island Galápagos tortoise ( Chelonoidis phantasticus), which was last seen in 1906 Wallace’s giant bee ( Megachile pluto), which had supposedly disappeared in 1980 and the Formosan clouded leopard ( Neofelis nebulosa brachyura), which disappeared after the last sighting in 1983 and was officially declared extinct in 2013. Like something out of a zombie movie, species that were once thought extinct seem to be rising from the dead.
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