Farewell, Java stingaree: Scientist declare the first marine fish extinction | Hacker News Reader

Farewell, Java stingaree: Scientist declare the first marine fish extinction

news.mongabay.com

48 pointsrwmj19 comments

So there was a single specimen ever seen - in 1862. Can we really be confident that this was a separate species and not some mutation of some other species?

It sounds like the species was well known to the locals at the time, for it to be a "delicacy". In that case it would have been a distinct species with noticeable numbers at some point before 1862.

No, a single specimen was catalogued by a scientist.

> Coming upon a strange little stingray, a popular delicacy in Indonesia, Martens purchased the dead fish.

It was apparently fairly widely eaten and prized as food.

This was my first thought as an armchair expert. I'm sure the real experts have considered this possibility.

I'm sure they've considered it, but have they considered it enough? I dunno, the back-and-forth over the extinction status of the ivory-billed woodpecker gave me pause about this sort of thing. It was considered extinct for many years, then was declared not-extinct based on a single video of a single bird flying away from the observer at a fair distance through the trees. (Or at least that was the only 'hard' evidence. There were also testimonials from expert ornithologists that they had seen it, and/or heard its call.) All of this made me think that the standard of evidence for these things is not all that high.

Not. Could be an hybrid but also a totally original species. We can't be really sure

DNA tests would be unreliable. This ray has being swimming in formaldehyde for more than a thousand years; The DNA is damaged beyond recognizable and many morphological aspects could had been seriously damaged also (Specially if improperly fixed).

stingrays are specially sensitive to overfishing, but we need to remember that 90% of the ocean is still basically unknown, and the number of marine biologists expert in this family are... like four or so for the whole area?.

Right? How long was it until they figured out that one triceratops was a juvenile rather than a separate species?

Though if they still have dna from that specimen it should be pretty easy to tell

I was very much hoping to read in the article that they'd managed to extract some DNA and sequence it. I guess if that was still possible then we'd also be able to know how closely related it is to the other stingarees and rays.

> the first marine fish extinction

I have one problem with this wording:

I feel confident that as an absolute minimum several thousands of fish species (even "marine fish" species) have faced extinction throughout history and prehistory.

The second line in the article clarifies:

  > It’s the first marine fish confirmed to have gone extinct due to human actions

I wonder how many other species of marine fish have gone extinct due to other factors/evolution.

Are you thinking about the times when something like 90% of all species on the planet went extinct?

Was that the time algae took off, covered the oceans, and oxygenated the atmosphere? Which then allowed mammals and eventually humans, because then there was oxygen. The byproduct being a huge mass extinction of everything that could not survive in oxygen.

I often think humans are like the algae, the human species is just naturally overtaking the planet and producing CO2 like the algae created oxygen. We're terraforming Earth for the next species that will evolve out of it when we are gone.

> Was that the time algae took off, covered the oceans, and oxygenated the atmosphere?

Yep, the Oxygen Catastrophe, or I think it has several other names. It was so far back that we don't really have a great way to know what it killed off, but it almost had to be a lot. Oxygen is reactive as hell.

> We're terraforming Earth for the next species that will evolve out of it when we are gone.

Pretty much, though we may very well survive it ourselves. We already have a name for the extinction event we're causing, it's called the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction depending on which you prefer.

You don't need a global catastrophe for species extinctions. Millions of species have probably gone extinct just because they got out-competed by another species. If you believe in evolution you also have to believe in natural extinction, because species don't just adapt to be optimal, they adapt to survive, and that doesn't always work.

Yeah, exactly.

"We don’t know the species’ range around Indonesia. We don’t know anything about its reproduction, though its closest relatives are slow breeders and therefore vulnerable to overfishing and other threats."

"The Java stingaree was likely pushed to extinction by “unregulated fishing,” according to Constance, who said fishing pressure was so high that catches of many species were already dropping in the Javan Sea by the 1870s."

Color me impressed about science then.

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