In memory of the Christmas Island shrew | Hacker News Reader

In memory of the Christmas Island shrew

news.mongabay.com

79 pointshexhowells25 comments

> 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

I guess we didn’t care about conservation in 1958 like we do now.

It's hard to imagine an animal like a shrew weighs only 6 grams.

Try the etruscan shrew, they weigh about two grams.

Yes, 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.

The 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.

Incredible 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.

how could they say with any certainty it is extinct? It is tiny.

I'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.

I 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

Maybe 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.

I 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.

This comes to mind: <https://x.com/MNateShyamalan/status/1951252793827729739>

Indeed, I continue to feel humbled by the vastness of the natural world.

> which would help reinforce the idea that what we sacrifice as the price of scientific knowledge, is absolute knowledge.

I don’t think it is possible to have absolute knowledge of anything. Scientific knowledge is the best (only) thing we have.

with a population this low it would be functionally extinct anyway, not enough genetic diversity

At 52 square miles, Christmas Island isn't terribly large either. And, given that shrews have a lifetime of perhaps a year or two and there's been no sightings in 40+ years, it seems unlikely that a stable breeding population has survived unnoticed.

Well it sounds like they replaced their native habitat with a phosphate mine. Seems like a wholesale displacement. Hard to imagine surviving not just your population hit but your entire ecosystem

You’re either severely overestimating the size of the mines or underestimating the size of Christmas Island. On satellite images[0]you can see where there has been phosphate mining, but it’s also very clear that it hasn’t replaced the habitat of the shrew.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/3e55Y1Q3AvMSuccz6?g_st=ic

Unpopular 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.

This doesn’t sound reasonable to me. Why would we?

> 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.

No?

First time it's been scientifically declared extinct.

I thought this was going to an obituary for the resident who got the original goatse.cx taken down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com