In this photo taken Saturday, Aug. 23, 2014 and provided by the Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF), an adult Aldabra Banded Snail (Rhachistia aldabrae) is examined at the discovery site in dense mixed scrub forest on the coastal fringe of Malabar island, Aldabra Atoll, Seychelles. The Seychelles Islands Foundation says the Aldabra banded snail, previously thought to be extinct, has been rediscovered “alive and well” at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles. (AP Photo/SIF, C. Onezia)
Seychelles snail, believed extinct due to climate change, found ‘alive and well,’ says group
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A snail once thought to have been among the first species to go extinct because of climate change has reappeared in the wild.
The Aldabra banded snail, declared extinct seven years ago, was rediscovered on Aug. 23 in the Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles. The mollusk, which is endemic to the Aldabra coral atoll — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — had not been seen on the islands since 1997, said the Seychelles Islands Foundation.
Conservationists are celebrating the banded snail’s reemergence.
…
The snail’s apparent demise was linked to declining rainfall on Aldabra, and was widely considered to be among the first species whose extinction could be directly tied to global warming, said biologist Justin Gerlach, a scientific coordinator for the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles.
Full story here (h/t to WUWT reader O2bnaz2)
Did you know that snails are the most prolific livestock animal producing more than 150 eggs at a time in one clutch? Its also the livestock that requires less stress in breeding them. You can buy a baby snail for less than N30 and make more than N200 as profit on such snail when it reaches table size.
The prolific aspect is that you can decide to breed 4 snails and before a year runs out you will have more than a thousand snails in your snail farm.
http://www.nairaland.com/1326621/wealth-snail-farming-business
headline – “Climate Change Causes Virgin Birth” – lock up your daughters. It is worse than we thought.
That’s gotta be wrong- it must be an entirely new species that simply resembles the recent departed.
OMG! Climate Mutations… Oh the humanity…
It worse than we thought!
Snails are hermaphrodites. Some snails play both roles at once and fertilize each other simultaneously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliciculture
Diane Debinski — a biologist at Iowa State University who researches the links between climate change and extinctions — grimly observed, it certainly won’t be the last: “I think what we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg in terms of extinction events. I expect that we’re going to be seeing more stories like this.”
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Diane is worried that even more species will come back from the dead. Totally invalidating her work. Zombie snails, feasting on the living.
For most of the 20th century there was a trend to assign species status to just about everything that was slightly different. With DNA testing so readily available, they are beginning to find out that a number of so-called species may not even deserve sub-species status…race, breed or variety would be good enough. As such the ‘parent’ species grows in number and many of these ‘endangered’/nearly extinct outlying populations disappear.
Not saying that this is the case with this snail, but if it is just a variant of a more common species, that can account for its supposed extinction and return.
About the only thing that has gone extinct due to climate change is rational thought…and it can be conclusively proven this is so…just look at the daily headlines claiming the phenominal cosmc powers of CO2 and the never ending list of things CAGW/CAGCC have done, could do or maybe, someday, at some uncertain time, in the future may possibly be able to be able to do something simlar to…
“Only time will tell if they can survive the threats of climate change and sea level rise,” Gerlach said.
He’s worried about sea level rise…when the snail is endemic to the Aldabra coral atoll. <.<
Yet another claim by climate obsessed extremists is proven wrong.
I think they need to strap a GPS to the snail and see where he goes.
I hope they remembered to tag it.
I can see it now. The Aldabra Banded Snail re-extinct as the last known specimen is crushed under the weight of a GPS tracking device.
How about a GoPro?
I am your plants,I grow best in a greenhouse where I am warm. I need & get lots of CO2 & water to grow. I love sunlight .I am your food.
I am God ,I control the weather; Genesis 9:11-15. Man-made global warming is blasphemy!
This snail is obviously a denier.
I think maybe, dinner for some other creature.
I wonder what kills the little guy?
Terrible tragedy for the alarmists.
Let’s hope that it becomes extinct very soon for their sakes…
Truthia Ethicae was the first casualty of Climate change. Circa, Mike’s Nature Trick.
There was a Brown University report last week that claimed “Extinctions During Human Era One Thousand Times More Than Before.” I know they blame the extinctions of many large mammals on early humans, but have there really been that many species that have gone extinct recently, say since global warming became the latest alarmist fad? Is there a list somewhere?
Since CAGW was responsible for the snails demise, doesn’t the snail’s re-emergence mean CAGW is over? Before you scoff at that logic, compare it to current Climate ‘Science’.
A lot of nonsense as usual.
a) Aldabra is not part of the Seychelles, its an isolated atoll 400 miles away.
b) There have been a lot of invasive species introduced (rats, cats, goats) causing extensive habitat deterioration and at least one extinction (Aldabra Bush Warbler Nesillas aldabrana).
Unfortunately extinction of native snails (and other organisms) on oceanic islands through introduced predators is a very common occurrence.
Extinction by climate change, on the other hand, has as far as I know never been reliably observed.
Louis says:
“have there really been that many species that have gone extinct recently, say since global warming became the latest alarmist fad? Is there a list somewhere?”
Depends on what you mean by “recently”, but oh yes, there has been a lot of extinctions, most of them on islands and the “small continents” (Australia, Madagascar, New Zealand)., but there have been quite a few on the continents too. For example a large proportion of the fresh-water mussel species in eastern North America. Causes: human-introduced predators, habitat destruction and overhunting, probably in that order. Through climate-change, no. For example North America has lost six birds species in the last 150 years:
Labrador Duck (overhunting)
Eskimo Curlew (overhunting)
Carolina Parakeet (overhunting)
Passenger Pigeon (overhunting and habitat destruction)
Ivory-billed Woodpecker (habitat destruction)
Bachman’s Warbler (habitat destruction)
One of the many pernicious effects of the CAGW hysteria is that in this area too, a lot of attention is focussed on a non-issue while more pressing problems get ignored.
It’s a ‘may be extinct’ on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker…
http://www.fws.gov/ivorybill/
Anyway, for ‘verifiable’ extinctions due to climate change you’d probably have to go back to the last glaciation to find them, either at the beginning or the end.
Unfortunately not much of a “maybe”, I’m afraid. It has not been reliably observed for half a century, and those large Campephilus woodpeckers are pretty noticeable.
“Anyway, for ‘verifiable’ extinctions due to climate change you’d probably have to go back to the last glaciation to find them, either at the beginning or the end.”
Not that many extinctions can be assigned to glaciations either, and those usually happen at maximum glaciation (as you might expect), not at the beginning or end.
There was a lot of extinctions back at the beginning of the Pleistocene c. 2.5 million years ago as glaciation got started, and another wave about 0.8-1.0 million years ago as glaciations shifted from relatively low-amplitude 40,000 year cycles to much higher amplitude 100,000 year cycles (“the Mid-Pleistocene turn-over”).
Not much since then, though the tree flora in Europe typically loses one or two species each glaciation. We don’t have very many tree species left by now, compared to North America or East Asia..
Here is an interesting paper on climate variability on oceanic islands written back in 1992, before CAGW became hip. It notes that this part of the Indian ocean has very variable rainfall and recurring drought periods (for example in 1949 Aldabra only got 41 mm of pecipitation in a 6 month period):
http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/atollresearchbulletin/issues/00356.pdf
It would thus seem likely that organisms living there can’t be very sensitive to drought.
Can you tell us more about this? I’d want to find out some additional information.
This looks like a spam address….same kind of spam I get at one of my blogs…
It’s actually at the Smithsonian Institution. I don’t think they are very big in the spam business.
“Conservationists are celebrating the banded snail’s reemergence.”
Shouldn’t that be ‘resurrection’? After all, we were told they were ‘extinct’ and AGW killed them…..
The folks who perpetrated this fr@ud should be forced to return all funds associated with it…. but you’d never be able to collect it. They would just repeat the age old evasion
“The checks in the snail mail now!”
Durn critters keep refusing to read the memos ordering them to report for census.
(How the heck can people be confident there aren’t any of a small thing living in mud?)
The analogy to penicillin is glib.
I’ll take mine with hot butter, and be sure to include one of those little spoons to pop it out of the shell
I propose an experiment. Maybe just a thought experiment but it’s interesting nonetheless. Some people think a species extinction is a tragedy beyond price. Let’s find out.
I will make a new snail species if I can get a government grant. What will the feds pay for a new snail species? My guess – not much.
It shouldn’t be hard. I take some snails and I divide the colony into two parts. One I feed and water well and the other I starve. After a couple generations I should have two snails – fat ones and thin ones. If they can’t interbreed, I have created a new species. Dog breeders have been doing stuff like this for millennia although they try to avoid fertility isolation.
If I got two mutually infertile strains of snail what would be the payoff? None actually. No one needs another snail species. So why is it so terrible when we think we’ve lost a snail species? We can always make more.
http://www.thegwpf.com/royal-society-in-trouble-over-false-extinction-claim-paper/
“However, the Royal Society admitted this week, after questions from The Times, that the referees who had rejected the rebuttal were the same referees who had approved Mr Gerlach’s paper for publication”