This video was sponsored by Planet Wild.
More about them at the end of the episode. Here’s a hot take: Not enough species are
extinct. Hi, I’m Kate, and this is MinuteEarth. Wait a minute, I’m not saying I
want more species to go extinct. What I mean is that only 902 animal and plant
species have been officially declared extinct worldwide by the IUCN, the organization tasked
with determining which species have gone extinct. And if this seems like a really small number,
that’s because it is; there are actually a lot more than 902 extinct species out there.
For starters, that number only includes species that have gone extinct since 1500, so it
doesn’t account for all the dinos and dimetrodons and whatnot that disappeared long ago.
And even if we just take a look at more recent extinctions, there are still a
lot of species that aren’t being counted. First, because although there are somewhere
around 2 million known species on our planet, the IUCN only has the data and resources to
closely track a tiny fraction of them. So there are almost certainly species we know of
that have gone extinct and we haven't noticed. There are also tons of species out there
that we don’t know exist in the first place – somewhere between 3 million and
100 million, depending on who you ask. So there are definitely species disappearing that
we’ve never even identified in the first place. So lots of extinct species aren't reflected
in the official count. But these extinctions are only part of what I mean when I say not
enough species are extinct; there’s another group of species that should maybe also count.
See, the IUCN only declares a species extinct when there is “no reasonable doubt that the
last individual of a species has died.” But there are 2,100 endangered species which nobody
has spotted in at least a decade. They aren’t “officially” extinct; they’re just…missing. Like
the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, whose last verified sighting was 57 years ago. The Fat Catfish, which
nobody has seen in 65 years. And the Blanco Blind Salamander, which has been MIA for 71 years.
Heck, a full quarter of missing species haven’t been seen in over a hundred years.
We could just take all the species that have been missing for a certain
length of time – say, 50 years – and call them extinct…that sounds pretty reasonable!
But the Seychelles Giant Tortoise was found alive 150 years after its presumed extinction, and the
black-browed babbler showed up after having been missing for 170 years. Then there’s the
Coelacanth, a fish that paleontologists only knew from 240-million-year-old
fossils…until 1938, when a live one was pulled out of the water near Madagasgar.
So we can’t determine whether something is extinct just by how long it’s been missing.
Plus, if we label a species as o-fishally extinct when it might not be, it could end any
environmental protections actually keeping it alive. That’s why the IUCN isn't willing to label
any of these 2100 missing species as extinct, even though most of them probably are!
So maybe it does make sense to keep these missing species in extinction limbo, even
if that means keeping the official number of extinctions way lower than we know
it actually is…like way, way WAY lower. If you care about extinction – in the
anti-extinction kind of way, which I assume our amazing viewers do, then I want to introduce
you to Planet Wild, which sponsored this video. Planet Wild’s not just a great new YouTube
channel, it’s also a rewilding organization that goes out on an incredible mission every
single month to save a species from extinction. The videos about their missions are great – they
combine education with real world environmental action in a super entertaining package. And their
work is all driven by a community that anyone can join. We’ve already joined it – we love that they
tackle actual problems with very specific goals and get real results, like when they removed
every piece of trash and fishing gear off of a species of endangered coral that lives near
the coast of Spain. Check out their most recent video about saving the aptly named Little Owl,
which you can find in a few seconds right here…
