What's your favorite "lost" species?

A single female was found. The species is still lost.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dire-situation-for-the-last-fernandina-giant-tortoise-301508538.html#:~:text=The%20Fernandina%20Giant%20Tortoise%20was,covered%20by%20recent%20lava%20flows.

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If there’s an individual known, isn’t the species by definition no longer lost?

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Even with a single individual it can still be deemed extinct. Until a male is found I consider it lost. Without a population to keep the species going, should we stop looking? They have spent 3 years looking for more after finding her with nothing. When she dies the species is again, lost or extinct. Like Lonesome George, Fernandina is likely looking at her final days with no one from her species to share it with.

Some species who are endangered and used to range to certain areas are considered extirpated from that area, even if one shows its face on occasion. But because only one is there, they don’t get species protections because it is not a viable population.

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recently came across Urania sloanus (in the literature). The species of day-flying moth is super beautiful, was an endemic of Jamaica, but hasn’t been seen there after 1895. I would be most amazed, if that species could be found on some neighboring islands, like Cuba or Hispaniola!
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1070613-Urania-sloanus


(picture taken from French Wikipedia)

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No, a species cannot be extinct if there is still an individual left. The Oxford definition of extinct is:

(of a species, family, or other group of animals or plants) having no living members; no longer in existence.

I agree there is no known viable population, but it is not extinct by definition.

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This is why I used the term “lost” instead of “extinct” - for the purposes of the thread, I just want to hear about species that are being searched for and we’re having difficulty finding! It doesn’t matter if they’re technically extinct or not.

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And if you can get the Chestnut back, there are a few ambitious cloners who would like to try to resurrect the passenger pigeon from DNA samples

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It looks like Ray Hale’s story of Friula wallacei has a couple more episodes:

https://www.theborneopost.com/2020/05/10/swak-spiders-and-a-160-year-old-mystery/

https://www.theborneopost.com/2020/05/24/sarawak-spiders-and-a-160-year-old-mystery/

It’s definitely worth reading to the end. He doesn’t rediscover Wallace’s spider, but that doesn’t mean there are no discoveries.

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There is absolute extinction (no individuals of a taxon are still alive) and there is functional extinction (too few individuals left for a taxon to be viable or to allow rescue). Sometimes the latter taxa are referred to as the “walking dead.”

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My heart weeps every time I think about Steller’s sea cows (Hydrodamalis gigas) and the brutal end of the last known population. The accounts of members of their groups trying to block the whalers from killing their friends, or to just visit their dead herd members is just heartbreaking. I would do almost anything to be able to dive in the kelp forests with them…

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I’m with you. It would be amazing, especially to think that we hadn’t just willfully, purposefully destroyed such an iconic bird. Sadly, I think it’s lost, despite the community of people who seem to have hope still.

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It’s a hard question. I’ve always sort of day dreamed about rediscovering one of those species like the Bachman’s Warbler or especially the Imperial Woodpecker. But I feel like I would have to say the Pohnpei Starling, I only learned about it 2 years ago but it’s a sad sorry, mostly because it’s a classic one, it began to become rare around the 1970s, which then drove rare bird collectors to go to Micronesia and shoot them, making them even more rare. Until the last one was shot in 1995. Other factors included rats, and the clearing of about 75% of it’s habitat. I just think that the fact that it went extinct (still listed as critically endangered) so recently makes it possible it could be rediscovered. but I mean Pohnpei is a small island so who knows.
Honorable mentions to the Bahamian Nuthatch and the Cozumel Thrasher. As well as the Manitoba Wolf, though I doubt it’s still out there.

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I have two that I think of.

The Golden Toad from the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. There are three iNaturalist observations, all from the 1980s, which means that when I visited Monteverde in the early 1990s, there were still rumors that they might exist; rumors that some of the local guides knew where they were, but (wisely) refused to reveal the whereabouts.

Saint Helena Giant Earwig from the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena (where Napoleon was exiled). I find it to be a fascinating example of island gigantism, as this was an earwig more than three inches long. That one has no iNat observations, and has not been seen since 1967, although there have been four searches since.

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Pieris wollastoni would be my favorite find. There are still habitats left and many places are rather diffult to reach, so just maybe…

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Schomburgk’s deer Rucervus schomburgki was last seen in the wild in 1932. It would be wonderful if there might yet be a remnant population in the wilder parts of central Thailand, but in reality the chances of this are sadly extremely remote - although with ‘new’ species of large mammals like the large-antlered muntjac and saola only coming to light in the last quarter century or so anything’s possible.

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That’s awesome!
Speaking of seapills, can you recommend any resources for identification for a relative newbie? I’ve recently been finding a lot of them, but I’m having trouble figuring out what they are beyond “some kind of seapill”

I just looked that one up - what a beautiful animal! Sadly, the fact that it seems to have preferred open grasslands and avoided dense vegetation probably makes it unlikely to still be out there undetected, but you never know. In more rural areas, species can certainly exist that the locals know about, but no scientist who studies them has ever happened to wander through and ask about them, so the info doesn’t get out.

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Not “lost” naymore, but apparently Northern Elephant Seals were thought to be extinct multiple times and people kept rediscovering them and killing them. See this blog post based on Elephant Seals Population Ecology, Behavior, and Physiology.

Thankfully there’s a large population of them now, numbering in the tens of thousands. So you never know…

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pretty cool one is Hoplodactylus delcourti, also commonly known as kawekaweau. its only known from one specimen that appeared one day in a french museum however has existed for ages in māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) oral histories for ages as kawekaweau. however no-one knows where the specimen was collected from or who by and if it even came from New Zealand (there is some speculation it came from New Caledonian however its very hard to differentiate NZ (new Caledonian geckos and NZ geckos evolved from the latter.) where ever it is from however it is the largest gecko in the world… but is still a massive ( ;) get the pun) mystery.

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Off topic a bit, but do any of y’all know of lost species from delmarva that I can keep an eye out for?