New paper from Loehle & Eschenbach shows extinction data has been wrongly blamed on climate change due to island species sensitivity

Glad to see Team Watts in print. An article here, an article there, and rays of reality will start to shine. Congrads Willis.

The Great Auk, or gairfowl (Pinguinus impennis) became extinct in the mid-19th century.
The Passenger Pigeon or Wild Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) became extinct at the end of the 19th century.
The Arabian gazelle (Gazella arabica) was hunted to extinction in about 1830.
Hensel’s field mouse (Rhagamys orthodon) disappeared from Britain and Ireland in the last 50 years.
This week the last Vietnamese rhinoceros was killed by poachers, shot through the legs and horn sawed off.

I remember the original “Where are the corpses?” article. Good to see it’s in the literature now. Congratulations.

Once again – no need to panic
“Just the facts” please

Is a published paper really published if no editor resigns over it?
Well done!

Haha, oh wow
Including Australia as an “island” sure is convenient when it also happens to have one of the highest extinction rates, don’t you think?

David A. Evans says:
October 25, 2011 at 8:42 pm
…
Take for instance kites & magpies. They’re now protected & everyone’s wondering what’s happening to all the songbirds. No-one seems to have figured out they’re the prey of kites & magpies!
Animal Liberation Front released loads of mink & then wonder what happened to the otters, similar thing.
…

The obvious solution is to “protect” songbirds and otters, too. Then restraining orders can be issued, and all will be returned to natural …
Oh, wait.

Based on fossil extinction records, 99.99% of extant species are DOOMED anyhow, so what’s the big deal?
;p

The original article was an eye-opener.
Great to hear that your new article was published so easily. Because you do indeed counter ‘conventional wisdom’. That is hopeful.

Worth remembering that there have been no marine extinctions this century – despite the urgent alarms.
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/009807.html
No ocean is an island, so no problems with introduced predators or inability to move.

[snip – fake email address]

Congratulations WIllis
Are there any plans to get your thermostat hypothesis into print?

Some time ago I started to watch one of the otherwise excellent programs about Darwin, made by Andrew Marr for the BBC. Right at the beginning, Marr said something like: “Today we’re in the midst of a great extinction”.
Of course, this is a lie. To hear this outrageous lie linked to Darwin was too much, and I instantly switched off.
As Willis said in his original piece, if so many animals are going extinct, where are the corpses?
Quite so. That was an excellent article and I’m very happy to see it become a part of peer-reviewed science.
Warmest congratulations to both Willis and Dr. Loehle.
Chris

Willis, the semantics of what exactly a species is is complex. However, the The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) and Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) were definitely species which are extinct. Neither were localized in small niches.
After the great Auk was made extinct attempts were made to reintroduce Penguins from the Southern hemisphere into the Northern range that the Auk had lived, these failed.
The Passenger Pigeon ranges across the whole of North America.
Both were Continental species and both are extinct.

Tom Harley says:
October 25, 2011 at 11:48 pm
Thanks to Craig and Willis for this thoughtful paper. Here in the NW of Western Australia, we are about to go through major species reduction due to the advancing cane toad, foxes have just reached the Kimberley, camels and donkeys are now widespread, and introduced weeds are spreading rapidly, it just seems like a never-ending invasion……………
————————————Tom, imagine how the Aborigine felt.

Congrats, and with appreciation!

“richardjamestelford says:
October 26, 2011 at 3:22 am
…….This makes the most important conclusion of the paper very susceptible to questions like “Is the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct?” If it is extinct, that bird alone would increase your continental extinction rates by 1/6………”
That’s a “what if” not supported by the available data and therefore outside the scope of their paper. I am a photographer and one of my specialties is Avian photography. I’ve delved quite a bit into the Ivory-billed woodpecker situation and have been tempted to go on a search for it. It seems to be alive and well in Arkansas: http://www.birdinginarkansas.com/birding/ivory-billed-woodpecker.aspx
And, it is almost impossible to mistake the Ivory-billed with the common Pileated by anyone with enough bird-watching and avian photography experience . Here is an image sequence of a Pileated made by yours truly: http://www.josesuroeditorial.com/Nature/Nonpasserines/Woodpeckers/2791726_kZdGMn#424297743_BqSUA-O-LB
It looks nothing like an Ivory-billed…..
Best,
J.

Someone asked what about Australia: we did calculations both ways (shows they did not read the paper), but if you count australia as a continent you have to ask why most of the mammal extinctions are marsupials. Marsupials are the losers when they encounter modern mammals, as happened when North & South America joined up 2 million yrs ago and modern mammals moved south.

Jit, if you ever want an example of the complexity of existence and the inability of humans to forecast the future, think on this: The greatest factor in the survival of the rhinoceros over the last 20 years has been the development of a failed heart drug.
Prior to the emergence of Viagra, powdered rhino horn was the de facto anti-impotence treatment throughout the Middle East and South East Asia. Viagra works much better than sympathetic magic and the price of rhino horn dropped through the floor.
However, don’t think that anti-impotence sympathetic magic was restricted to the third world and we sophisticated Westerners didn’t fall for it. The introduction of Viagra also destroyed the market for many psychiatrists and psychotherapists who managed to convince middle aged men that all their troubles stemmed from childhood sexual conflicts.
Amazingly, the same practitioners now focus their laser sharp minds, and peddle their sympathetic magic, on childhood behavioral problems.

Craig, I understand your point, but submit that your classification is too narrow.
I agree that the actual definition of a species and an ‘island’ is problematic.
However, one would suspect that any potential extinction stress would be better modeled using a power law whereby one estimates the actual size of the ecological niche and the species specialization.
Extinction events occur much more frequently in specialist species than in generalist species.
Extinction events occur much more frequently in geographically isolated species than in geographically dispersed species.
I will point out that both the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon were generalist and geographically dispersed species. These two species are extinct due to the impact of humans and are not included in your list.
You may not think that this is unimportant or an illegitimate criticism. I would however like to know why you think that to be the case.
One of the major criticisms leveled at various papers issued by proponents of CAGW is the issue of ‘cherry-picking’. I believe that one can make the same criticism of your criteria for species selection.
I think it reasonable they you address these criticisms, in my own case, why did you not include the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon?

Craig Loehle says:
October 26, 2011 at 6:40 am
People are listing various species extinct to make some sort of point. Many of those listed are subspecies, like a rhino, bear, lion that were mentioned. Some are not officially confirmed–we used a standard database to avoid subjectivity. Many species thought extinct are later found again.
—
It does not matter how good your methods are, if the raw data are inadequate, the results may be meaningless. Many mammal species are listed by the IUCN as data deficient. You have assumed that none of these are extinct. If this enormous assumption is seriously violated, your conclusion that species are robust to habitat loss will be unsupportable.

The point of including Australia as an island is to identify the CAUSES of extinction. The primary cause of extinction is the introduction of foreign species that can take over the ecosystem with no competition. In the past 200 years, dogs, horses, cows, and camels have all been introduced to Australia. Rats killed the majority of Pacific Island flightless birds, and dogs have taken care of much of the rest. The point is that you cannot extrapolate these extinction rates to say X acres of forest loss means Y number of species go extinct.
John, I think that the order of magnitude range in percentage of background rate is a good indication about just how well we know that rate.

John Whitman: we could find no way to quantify the uncertainty of background rates of extinction. We listed all the estimates we could find. They are all very squishy.

Craig, I do apologize, I need new glasses. I didn’t read Table 1 correctly.
I was looking for E. migratorius
In Table 1 you have
Passenger pigeon (C. carolinensis)
Conuropsis carolinensis is of course the extinct Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) mentioned two places above.
The extinct Passenger pigeon would be correctly labeled Ectopistes migratorius.
The Great Auk ranged from Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Norway and Finland.
One could make the argument that all the nesting sites were coastal and they favored islands, but I do not think that they can be counted as an Island species.

@DocMartyn,
Why don’t you take the data from the paper and reanalyze it the way you want and show if the results change significantly, or not.
Also, definition of species is not difficult. Any two organisms that can interbreed and produce live offspring are a species. There are some caveats that have been used to inflate the number of species by saying some sub populations don’t overlap in geography/breeding time enough to allow proper mixing, but in the end they still do interbreed.
None the less, you can always use -whatever definition you want- and re-do the analysis under those new criteria, and then come to us with the results, why don’t you. I see absolutely nothing in your arguments that were not already considered and addressed both by this paper and the curated source data it’s based on. In short, all you’re saying has no merit as far as I can see, and it’s up to you to prove otherwise with factual data points and outlined criteria.

Willis Eschenbach is a retired polymath
what is a polymath?

Congratulations! Publications always feel good, and I hope that you feel good about this one. Keep up the good work.

“Ged says:
Are you proposing the ratio between island and continent would significantly change under new criteria away from the results of this paper? Show us the evidence by doing the analysis if you believe so.”
If the Great Auk were included then the number of continental species would change by 7/6, so the ratios would be modified somewhat.
The use of a ‘soft’ group of species, like the great Auk which do not fall conveniently into either island/continental classification would allow one to use a statistical estimate.
I did not want to rain on anyone’s parade, nor do I wish to attack either Craig or Willis.
However, I think their classification is too simplistic and lacks the input from an evolutionary biologist/ecologist.
Some nodding aquatance with Hutchinson’s hypervolumic niche description would have greatly helped this paper. With luck this publication will lead an ecologist to build on this work by Craig or Willis.
My criticisms are in no way personal, but if we are going to dissect papers we have a fundamental disagreement with, shouldn’t we do the same to other ones we find general merit with?

Congratulations Willis and Dr. Loehle, It is nice to see real science done with out the alarmism.

Craig wrote:
Defining terrestrial “islands” like caves is much more subjective than physical islands, and these islands are only isolated genetically, not from predators or competitors (with very few exceptions).
The problem here, as DocMartyn has so patiently pointed out, is that vulnerable continental species almost uniformly inhabit “island” habitats. The nine continental extinctions listed in Table 1 include at least five species that inhabited very discrete islands of suitable habitat. Craig’s statement gets dangerously close to circular reasoning (partly because the concept of “habitat” is dangerously close to circular). Because of the prevalence of “island” extinctions on continents, what the paper actually shows is that island/continental is a false dichotomy. This terrain has all been covered in the literature on serpentine specialization, with most of the important work being done in Willis’ home state of California.

Here’s what the late John McCarthy, father of Artificial Intelligence and inventor of Lisp, has to say.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/biodiversity.html
We’ve just lost a genius.(No, I’m not saying that because he essentially agrees with Willis.)

“although DocMartyn doesn’t see it, it seems to make a fundamental difference in the extinctions of birds and mammals. Birds and mammals on islands, where there is little exchange with the outside world, are extremely vulnerable to introduced species. These introduced species have caused ~95% of the world’s extinctions”
Whereas the Great Auk was widespread going from New England, Eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Great Britain and Ireland and the Scandinavian nations. We know that more than 100,000 years ago Neanderthals hunted Great Auks as their bones/egg shells have been found at Neanderthal sites.
The Great Auks were killed off very slowly, by Polar Bears and by Humans. Their eggs and down was so valued by humans that they ended up with only a few Island refuge’s. They were hunted by native North Americans, the colonists, the Inuit,
“All you mean is that they have geographically defined ranges. But that’s not what makes an island species vulnerable”
What makes a species vulnerable? 1) highly restricted location (Island, lake or cave species), 2) shallow genetic pool (Island, lake and cave species), 3) High specialization (not unique to continent or island), 4) Immunological/defensively naivety toward predation (continent or island) and 5) Genetic diversity/population size.
4) is a big one. Dutch Elm disease, loss of the American Chestnut, loss of the European wine-vine, loss of many potato species, loss of much of the Native American population. Introduction of rats into island does wipe out ground nesting birds. However, introducing large fish into lakes can also wipe out birds.
5) the background level of a neutral genetic polymorphism in a population is about 6%. The larger number of individuals you have the wider and deeper the genetic pool. Genetic diversity is the currency of speciation/survival. Richard Lenski’s demonstration of the evolution of a E. Coli citrate utilizing strain was probably the best best example of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
Some time around generation 20,000 there was established a genetically neutral change in one of his populations that predisposed them to being able to utilize citarte, at some future data; around generations 31,000 and 31,500.
The bigger you population, the wider and deeper your genetic pool and the higher the species elasticity.
The species specific size of an ELE will, amongst other things, depend on the ‘range’ of the species, not necessarily where the range is. A cave system, an isolated lake, the Paris underground system represent ‘Islands’; but the nesting of the Great Auk on island does not make them an Island species.
This is why I disagree with your exact methodology.

Willis,
Calm down. Your main conclusion was “conservation strategies for birds and mammals on continents should not be based on island extinction rates and that on islands the key factor to enhance conservation is to alleviate pressures from uncontrolled hunting and predation.” My point is that at least five of the nine continental extinctions were functionally island extinctions, and that conflicts with your conclusion. If you want to understand the extinction of the slender-billed grackle, the Omilteme cottontail rabbit, or the Atitlan grebe, you want to approach these extinctions as island-type events (staying away from extra quotation marks here).

Willis, you are not taking it this well. I think you and Craig are essentially correct, but I think your classification leaves much to be desired.
I have not being attacking you, Craig nor your approach or goal.
What I actually think you are describing is the propensity of species to develop a ‘glass-jaw’.
Normally, the majority of selection pressure is within a species, not without. Almost every aspect of a species morphology, behavior and biochemistry represents a metabolic/temporal opportunity cost. Cave species show that the removal of a selective advantage from a niche rapidly leads to genetic/phenotypic atrophy; cave species lose eyes, pigmentation and the repair mechanisms for repairing uv induced DNA damage.
Humans, and other great apes, are the result male sexual selection.
Monkeys gain an enormous advantage in their ability to climb trees, they are able to evade predators and access food sources unavailable on the ground.
The cost is big brains, long tails and forward facing eyes.
Monkeys also have a problem with sex. There is male competition for females, and the largest males tend to have more progeny. In the long run, males become larger and larger. The tail can no longer support the Super-Sized Monkey and becomes a bit of a pin in a Male-Male fight, so that goes. After a while the males are so big they can hardly (Chimps/Bonobos) or simply can’t climb trees (Humans, Gorillas and Orang’s). Luckily, the arboreal small to medium size transition seems to have allowed the apes to leap the majority of predators, and in our case the big brains came in very useful.
Male African elephants use their tusks in fighting other males, they are a product of sexual selection.African elephant populations have been very damaged by Ivory hunters, some 13% of males now do not have Tusks. Having tusks is the largest negative selection pressure on the elephant and the length of tusks in the tusk has collapsed over the last 150 years. The elephants are losing their ‘glass-jaw’. They could, because they had a very large number of starting numbers, a deep/wide genetic pool and can physically move about.
Island species typically lose a major predator or many major predators, so there is often a switch from tree to ground nesting and a major down regulation in their immune systems. One would expect that intraspecies selection pressure would be much greater than in larger niches, especially sexual selection.
These species become fitted to their, very small, niche and so a change in their niche can be devastating.
I absolutely agree that a small rise in temperature is completely different from suddenly be presented with a new super predator. I also think it reasonable to attempt to try to estimate how different these selection pressures are. However, I think you classification system if not as useful as it could be.
I actually think the best way to do this would be experimentally.
Myself, I would grow bacteria, take 10 single founder E. Coli cultures and 10 genetically diverse E. Coli cultures. Grow them on a really, really rich medium for a year, under the same every other day splitting routine.
After a year test their sensitivity to a range of diverse stressors; pH, heat, Paraquat, osmotic stress, salinity, e.t.c.
At worst, this will give you an idea of the loss of elasticity one gets from a founder effect.

As for “species robustness”, that’s one of the major areas of revision in the field. It seems to be much higher in general than assumed by the boxy constrained habitat parameters of all the best models.