The Butterfly (or Flycatcher) Effect
Jason Houston’s 7th post from Africa- and 3rd from Terence Vel’s Pride campaign in the Seychelles.
Over the last two days we spent time at the school on La Digue Island doing several different programs with the students. Terence gave a basic conservation biology lecture to one class and started another in on making puppets for a puppet show about the Seychelles Paradise Black Flycatcher.
Terence gives a conservation biology lecture to school children
As has been the case with most of the community, the students here are well aware of the situation: They have a rare and special bird, they perceive its value, and they understand how various threats, such as destruction of the habitat, effect it. Knowledge for and appreciation of the bird is not the problem.
The effort here with the kids—again as with the rest of the community—is focused on the conservation science so that when critical decisions need to be made by the community (such as approval for translocation) they can be made consistent with our best scientific knowledge on how to save this species.
School children design a backdrop for their puppet show
…a unique species, with a tiny population of around 250 individuals, on a faraway remote island, in a community that sometimes seems as though they might just as well see it go extinct than share it with another island…why bother? Just so the bird watchers can ogle?
Islands are special places for biodiversity and deserve special attention. Consider these statistics (thanks to Rachel Bristol):
• Only about 3% of Earth’s land mass is islands
• 10% of Earth’s population are islanders
• 17% of Earth’s species are restricted to islands
• 61% of all animal species extinctions have occurred on islands
• 85% of all bird species extinctions since the 1600′s and 90% of all known bird species extinctions have happened on islands…
Just like how the islands show us the extremes of resource competition between people and wildlife, islands are important ecosystems that tend to concentrate biodiversity and even experiment with evolution. While islands tend to be low in total number of species, they are typically rich in endemic species, especially on the older continental islands where species have been able to evolve in isolation (and divergently) for literally sometimes millions of years. The Seychelles specifically are small and isolated, making them species poor, but parts of the island group have been around (and continuously above water) for over 65 million years, making them proportionally very high in endemic species: Of the 67 regular breeding bird species on the island, 23 are endemic, 40% of the approximately 200 native plant species are endemic, and an astonishing 11 of the 12 amphibian species here are endemic. Even the non-scientific can recognize that these are very high ratios.
So, even though we’re looking at a lot of effort going into a small population of a single species, the amount of uniqueness at stake, and then standing to benefit with any improvement of the Seychelles’s environment, is huge. And as part of a global effort to protect biodiversity on our planet, no one instance swings the tide, but every single success gets us one step closer to that goal. (And this is a great opportunity for those of you working more regularly in conservation biology to comment on the various ways of quantifying endangered species preservation—please do.)
