Lost Wonders, with Tom Lathan
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Hey, you. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and in today's episode, I'm going to be chatting with Tom Lathan, author of the new book Lost Wonders, Ten Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century. It's out June 10th. Without further ado, let's jump right in to the interview. Hi, Tom. Welcome to the show.

Hi there, Rob. Thanks so much for having me. The new book is Lost Wonders, Ten Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century, publishing June 10th here in the States. It came out earlier, what, in November in the UK, right? That's right, yes. It tackles the sixth mass extinction event that we're all living in by chronicling ten different recently extinct species.

You know, we've all read or heard about the ongoing Holocene extinction, but do you find that people have a difficult time truly grasping what's happening or the scale of what's happening? Yeah. And I think it is a difficult thing to grasp. You know, even for people who are following this and who care about this, it

It is kind of crazy, I think mainly because of the timescale that it's happening on. The reason why I really wanted to write this book, which is actually 11 species, it's 10 stories but 11 species. Two of those species, their story is so similar, so intertwined, the two birds are mistaken for one another even. So it made sense to tell those in one story, as it were, in one chapter.

But really, the thing that unites the entire book is that these are species that have gone extinct in the 21st century. The reason why I wanted to write about those species in particular is because I really wanted to get into the idea that extinction is unfolding all around us and that when we typically think of extinction, it can be this far-flung thing from the past.

Virtually everyone's first encounter with the word would be in the context of dinosaurs. I was a dinosaur kid, I was obsessed with Jurassic Park. We're probably the similar age, so you probably had your Jurassic Park phase, but either that or the dodo. These are things from the distant past, and I think that we all make an unconscious association there with the word extinction and the past.

But obviously, it's unfolding all around us. And I actually came to the idea of writing the book when I learned that one of these species, the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, had actually gone extinct on my 23rd birthday. And when I learned that fact, and I realized that I could remember what I'd been doing that day, I could remember who I'd been with, I was

Well, most probably can't really remember the evening, but I remember a lot of the day and I could look back through emails and texts, social media, and really kind of get a picture of what my world was like on the day that a species went extinct. It was just a kind of mind-blowing realization. And it kind of got me thinking about what else had gone extinct within my lifetime, within the lifetimes of most people who read the book.

So that's what really kind of drove me. Yeah, so you're kind of making something that's kind of invisible to many visible and real in a way. Yeah. I think it's understandable that we don't necessarily, as a species, we don't really necessarily think about extinction that much, I would say. And it can be quite a dour subject. And there's very often, you know, we are...

anthropocentric. We're obsessed with our own stories and our own species. So an obscure bat going extinct or a tiny snail going extinct somewhere in the world isn't necessarily going to grab everyone's attention. But I think it's really important that we know what's going on and

It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that in all of these stories, we're the cause, either in the here and now or we set off the chain of events that have led to these extinctions. Now, I don't want to give potential readers the wrong idea, though, because

Each chapter of your book is, I guess, in a very real sense, a tragedy. But each chapter is also about the wonders and improbabilities surrounding these various species. So I definitely want to get into some questions about those wonders and improbabilities.

Uh, this would look at maybe a few examples, but, um, how did you, how did you end up finalizing a list for the book? Uh, where did you, I mean, obviously you had, you had the one, uh, in mind that corresponded with your, uh, your, your 23rd birthday, but, uh, how about the rest of them? How'd this come together?

Yeah, so really when I started the project, or actually before I go into that, I think I'll echo what you said. I think you're right. I think sometimes it's one of those issues that people might not want to think about because, God, it's just terrible, isn't it? Something going extinct, especially something that's millions of years old. It's kind of mind-boggling. Yeah.

But actually, when I went into writing the book, it was a doubt I had. Like, "God, is anyone going to want to read this? Is this just going to be so depressing?" But as I actually got into the research, a big part of that research was actually talking to the people who were there on the ground. In some cases, they discovered these species. In other cases, they'd taken care of the last individual of the species.

and kind of dealt with the aftermath of extinction. I actually really found a lot of grounds for hope in that because it's really inspiring the lengths that people go to in conservation. It's a field that is absolutely jam-packed with unsung heroes.

people that go above and beyond the call of duty every single day, who have their job and there are just little things that they do just completely off their own initiative, just because they know they can make a difference.

And there are even stories of species being saved by people who aren't scientists, who are hobbyists. There's an example in the book of a species of pupfish, which is a tiny little fish from the American West and also in Mexico. There are species spread across the arid areas. And one particular species

One of the people that I spoke to was actually a bus driver from New Jersey who is a hobbyist. He just loves fish since he was a kid, and he's actually become involved in the efforts to save endangered species. When I spoke to him, he had a critically endangered species just behind him in his fish tank. Obviously, there's no financial incentive for him. And I just think that the more that you learn about these stories, yes,

The subjects of this book have gone extinct, but the people who tried to save them have had other successes. They've used the knowledge that they gained from trying to save these species, which very often is uncharted territory. Some of these extinctions happened because the scientists simply didn't know, "How do we help this species?" But from these experiences, they've learned what they need to do to save other species, and they've had success. I just find that really inspiring.

But sorry, to go on to your question. Could you remind me again of what your question was? Oh, I'd also ask just how you ended up coming up with the list. Yes. So as a journalist, I've been writing about nature for a few years. And

It came out of quite an organic conversation with my partner who's also a writer. I just had this thought, I just wondered what's gone extinct in my lifetime essentially. So I contacted the IUCN, which is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which is the global body that essentially oversees the conservation status of any

So they're the people essentially who give the final word on whether something is endangered, critically endangered, extinct, extinct in the wild and so on. And I just asked them for a list of recent extinctions, and they sent me back this enormous, sprawling spreadsheet full of hundreds. I think it was upwards of 500 extinctions.

But thankfully, that spreadsheet included a by-date of extinction column. So I filtered by that, and these 11 species are what

kind of came out of that. And I really kind of, it really, that's when it really kind of struck me. In fact, that's the moment where I saw the extinction date of the Pippa's Drill being my birthday and made that connection and had that realization. Well, I want to ask about one that I have to acknowledge that on the surface, this one might not seem that exciting. And when I was

And reading your book, that was my initial response. I was kind of like, well, this I don't know how enthralled I'm going to be by this one. But it ended up being, I think, my one of my favorite chapters. And this is the the chapter dealing with the St. Helena olive. Can you tell us a little bit about the island of St. Helena and the St. Helena olive? I was not I was vaguely familiar with the island from its prominence in history, but I was not familiar with this organism at all.

Yeah, that is also one of my favourites. Before I go into that, I think it's interesting. I was thinking about this this morning, actually. I think we're all kind of conditioned to...

see wildlife in a certain way. I don't know if you guys have... I presume you guys have David Attenborough documentaries over there. Oh, yes. Yeah, okay. Yeah, national hero. So I was raised on his documentaries, and I think as wonderful as they are, they do condition you to see the natural world in a certain way. The focus is very much on charismatic species or species that have some kind of quirk or fascinating behavior. And I think that we tend to

kind of unconsciously imbibes a sort of value system by which we judge species on that basis. But actually, what I found, and one of the really exciting things about writing a book like this is that the decision of what goes in this book, it wasn't like I just picked 11 species that fascinated me. It was decided for me.

And what that meant was I had to really kind of approach species that, like you, I wouldn't necessarily think, "Oh, is this tree going to be interesting? Is this snail going to kind of interest me personally?" And I had to find other ways of looking at them and find the fascination and wonder in these species. And that tree, the St Helena olive, is a particularly fascinating species.

because it lived only on a single island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. And this island, St Helena, is extraordinarily remote. It's nearly 2,000 kilometers west of

Africa, slap bang in the middle of the South Atlantic. And it's so remote that when the International Space Station is circling overhead, the astronauts on board are actually the closest neighbors to the residents on St. Helena. Oh, wow. And remote islands are a very exciting place for biologists because

due to their isolation, species that end up making it to those islands end up evolving in fascinating ways and you end up with these extraordinary ecosystems. St. Helena is one of those examples.

There are a few species that are capable of making that leap, crossing thousands of miles of ocean to reach this tiny island, volcanic island. And what you end up with in a place like that are things like trees that have evolved from daisies.

You end up with giant earwigs, you end up with fluorescent woodlice, a real bizarre kind of hodgepodge. There was a biologist that I spoke to about the ecosystem who described it as, imagine if you just gave evolution another chance. You just reset evolution on an island and allowed it to kind of take a different course. This is the kind of thing you would end up with, just this kind of alien ecosystem.

So the St. Helena olive is a species of hardwood tree. And this family of tree species, they all originate in Southern Africa. And they've made these extraordinary journeys and radiated out of Southern Africa and ended up in islands in the Indian Ocean. And one of the places they ended up was on St. Helena. And it was a mystery that really confounded scientists.

Because to get to somewhere like St. Helena, if you're a tree, your seeds need to have a way to navigate thousands of miles of ocean. And there are potential ways they could do that. Some seed pods can float, so they would float there. The St. Helena olive seed pods didn't float. In fact, they were sterilized by saltwater.

Another way is that seeds might be carried by the wind. They wouldn't do that, they were quite large capsules. And the other way that seeds can disperse is by growing a fruit and being eaten by birds. St. Leon Olive couldn't do any of those things. So the biologists, some of whom I spoke to for the book, they eventually deduced

that the way this species had to have ended up on this remote island was by a bizarre chain of coincidences wherein

an albatross or a similar seafaring bird must have landed somewhere in southern Africa and picked up a seed in its feathers or maybe in some mud coating its foot. And then that albatross would have ranged out over the ocean and eventually ended up at St. Helena. And just by chance, this seed had dropped from the feathers of this albatross, found its way into the soil, and the story of that species on the island began.

which is extraordinary. It's 12 million years old, and it's so genetically unique that a genus had to be created for the species. The genus is the classification that sits above species. And

When you look away from the charismatic species and species that are more often celebrated and featured in nature documentaries, you have to look at species in a different way. I think you find incredible stories when you start to look at the natural world in a different way, and you can find that they're everywhere. I just love this idea that it's almost like this plant

plant was not supposed to be there. It's just such an incredible string of events that we can kind of speculate on that landed it there. And I love the quote that you share about how rare events happen over geological time. So yeah, it's unlikely, but given enough time, things like this do occur and this is the result.

Yeah. It's like, what are the chances? I mean, it's already just a seed being swept up in the feathers of an albatross. It already seems quite an unlikely scenario. But then for it to have dropped out just at the right place, it's kind of insane. And that quote that you just mentioned, that was Mike Fay, who was a geneticist from Kew Gardens in the UK, saying,

And Kew Garns did a lot of work to try and conserve this species. He led the attempt to propagate the species in the end. But yeah, that was an incredible insight from him. He said to me, there were 12 million years for this to happen, and it only had to happen once. But of course, another organism eventually came to the island, and that would be us. Right.

Right. This one was sheltered for quite a while, right? Yeah. I mean, that's one of the... It's a double-edged sword. You know, isolation creates a fascinating breeding ground for evolution, for interesting species to evolve and adapt. But by the same token, when you have...

a species like humans. In the book, I talk about how St. Helena was almost like a castle. It was fortified against the outside world. There were so few organisms who could actually make that trip that the sea kind of acted almost as a moat. And the arrival of humans in 1506 was essentially like lowering the drawbridge, enabling things like

goats, cats, all kinds of invasive species of plants. Rats are obviously a huge problem pretty much everywhere they're introduced.

And that's what happened on St. Helena. And it was an island that in history, after it was discovered, it was compared by many to Eden. It was this verdant spot in the middle of the ocean that was really kind of life-sustaining for sailors who, at that point in time, had to journey all the way around Africa, around the bottom of Africa, the Atlantic.

in order to access Asia and India. So it was a really big problem, you know, fighting off things like scurvy, restocking with water. And St. Helena was just this kind of oasis in the middle of the ocean. But, you know, a few years later, it was decimated. And what led to this decimation?

So, I mean, one thing was the introduction of invasive species. Another thing was habitat destruction. So once the island was settled by the English East India Company,

homes had to be built. Enslaved people were brought to the island in order to create some kind of economic purpose for the island. That's how it was viewed. The English East India Company at the time described places like St Helena as factories. That was their ambition for this place. So everything there was a resource in order to pursue that aim. And so massive deforestation through

Things like goats were a particular problem, eating native vegetation. And once you lose that vegetation, you then get soil erosion. And there are these crazy reports of the soil erosion being so bad that the sea turned black around the island. And once you get into that state, there's very few things that can then kind of grow back and get a foothold in the soil, which has essentially been completely transformed.

And in St. Helena, all of these threats kind of conspired and the landscape was transformed and native species shrank further and further back to the centre of the island, which is where the last St. Helena olive was found.

in the 1970s. And you write about that now we just have an empty pot, right? It's labeled as St. Helena Olive. Yes. So in Kew Gardens Temperate House, which is this fantastic, incredible, decadent Victorian glass house in London, in Kew, there is species from all over the world there. And then in one corner, there's just this empty terracotta pot, which is...

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Yeah, so a lot of these species were island-dwelling species for the reasons we discussed. The Pinter Island tortoise, the goats that came to Pinter Island were introduced by fishermen and they were

three of them deposited in the 1950s, and that population swelled to thousands. In fact, off the top of my head, I can't remember the exact number. But basically, the goats were far more efficient. If you imagine a tortoise versus a goat in terms of grazing and things like that, the tortoises really were no match. The Galapagos, because of its isolation, is a place that

you know, there were never things like goats there. There were never those kind of specially adapted herbivores. And it's a problem not just for tortoises, but also the vegetation that tortoises feed on. Because if you don't have herbivores, plants don't learn to adapt to repel herbivores. So things like thorns,

certain kinds of chemical compounds, all kinds of adaptations that might make native vegetation resilient to goats. That vegetation doesn't have time to adapt when you suddenly release something like a goat.

on the island now with the galapagos tortoises in general i feel like um these are some amazing creatures that we can they're often featured in documentaries the sort of attenborough documentaries that we've been discussing and the sort of documentaries that very much uh were inspired by that kind of content which is great but but we can almost kind of grow numb to them i don't know if you find found this to be the case as well like we see the galapagos tortoises uh

Maybe, if we're lucky, we get to see one in a zoo, or if not a Galapagos tortoise, then maybe an Aldabra tortoise that is in some way similar. But when you really observe them, they are just so fabulously weird and wonderful, right? They are, yeah. I think that's key. I mean, I think appreciating nature is always about looking a little closer. Because I think you're right, with something like a giant tortoise,

We've all seen that many times. I think we think

We always think we understand the things we've seen many times. So, you know, our brain knows how to categorize that, so we can kind of just move on. But, you know, like any species, they are really fascinating. In the case of the giant tortoises or Galapagos, I mean, what fascinated me the most was how they got there, which is similar to St. Helena Olive. It's another incredible dispersal story. So something like a tortoise, something that

large and cumbersome and slow, traversing an ocean is just as unbelievable as a tiny seed. What they discovered is that the tortoises or their ancestors must have been washed out to sea from South America, which is where their most recent ancestor lived.

And the tortoises would have had to have survived for God knows how long just on the ocean with no food. And when this theory was first kind of discussed,

in the early 20th century, was actually put to the test. Researchers would capture giant tortoises, take them out to the ocean, and just drop them into the sea. What they would see is that the tortoises were quite good at swimming. They could float quite easily, they could keep their heads above water, and gradually through genetic analysis, scientists were able to map

how the dispersal had taken place first from South America to one Galapagos island and then later to another. So when you accelerate time and think of it like a time-lapse, there's just this series of odysseys going from island to island from the continent. And these tortoises arriving on new islands, establishing new species,

growing slightly differently into the different species of Galapagos giant tortoise. It's incredible. But it's kind of a less obvious thing. I think it's easy to just be distracted by the size of these creatures.

and for that to be what we associate with them. But then when you learn about their journeys, it's fascinating on a different level. Now, the story of the Pinta Island Galapagos tortoise is also interesting in that it is also a story of rediscovery. Could you tell us a little bit about this? Some folks may have probably heard parts of this tale before. Tell us about Lonesome George.

Yeah. So in 1972, well, Lonesome George, a lot of people will be familiar with that name because he was a celebrity animal. He was world famous. He had

hundreds of thousands of people coming to the Galapagos, visiting him in his enclosure. His species, the Pinter Island tortoise, which is the species I write about in Lost Wonders, was believed to be extinct from the beginning of the 20th century. I think it was 1906, the California Academy of Sciences went to Pinter Island and collected what ended up being the last known female of the species.

And so for 70-odd years, that was thought to be the end of that species until one day a Hungarian-American malacologist and his wife were on holiday.

They were on Pinter Island looking at snails, and suddenly they looked up and saw this giant tortoise. And they didn't know what they'd seen at the time. But later, when they spoke to other people who were working in the archipelago, it soon became clear that this was the Pinter Island tortoise. This is a species that everyone had thought disappeared. And that ended up...

That precipitated a search, and eventually they found and captured George and took him to a captive breeding centre, hoping that they would be able to save this species by finding a female. And he ended up staying there for four decades,

and eventually died in 2012 after many, many searches. There were no females found, attempts to have him mate with females of closely related species, but to no avail. But the fascinating thing about this story, I mean, there's so many twists and turns, but one of the biologists I spoke to about this species, James Gibbs,

He told me this fascinating story that he and some of his colleagues at the Galapagos Conservancy, a few years ago, they went on a trip to a remote island. And they discovered that there were hundreds of Galapagos giant tortoises of different species living on the side of this volcano on this incredibly remote island.

And eventually they kind of worked out why this had happened. And their theory is that whalers who used to use the Galapagos Islands as basically a meat larder, so whalers out in the Pacific, they would come to the Galapagos, capture tortoises because you

They were a good food source you could keep alive on a boat for weeks. And they were a big part of the decimation of those species. But it's thought that they used to gather at this spot on the side of this remote island. And at some point, they must have thrown overboard some tortoises, or they may have escaped. But you ended up with this

isolated population of these different species. And somewhere in there must have been Pinter Island tortoises, or at least one, because James Gibbs and his colleagues found a few years ago a hybrid tortoise

whose mother or father must have been a Pinter Island tortoise, which is a fascinating prospect. They haven't found the parent, but it suggests that there is or recently was a living Pinter Island tortoise. So this is after George's death, after the species had yet again been declared extinct. And it's still a possibility. So that's a really interesting story. And there is some small hope there. That same expedition did find...

another tortoise that was actually an individual from a species that was also believed extinct. So they reversed another giant tortoise extinction there. Now, how rare are rediscoveries of previously believed extinct species? I can't give you any figures off the top of my head, but it happens more often than you think. It depends on the species. I mean, some species are fairly easy to monitor.

Other species, maybe due to their size, due to where they live, are close to impossible. It really does depend. But I think sometimes...

One of the reasons why there's a little bit of a disconnect between what biologists will say about the species they study in terms of their conservation status and what the IUCN will say. Sometimes scientists will come out and say, "This species, we believe it's extinct. We've done this extensive search for it and we can't find it. No one's seen it for a decade.

But the IUCN will kind of hold fire because there is always that possibility that someone will find a remote population or that the species is especially discrete. So there's very often a kind of like a lagging effect where species aren't actually declared extinct until we can kind of know with certitude. But it does happen. Yeah. Species are rediscovered. Now, I'm not going to ask you about

Every organism that you cover in the book, obviously, but I do want to ask you about one more location and associated organisms. And that would be the two organisms that you profile from Christmas Island. This is a place that I think some of our listeners definitely remember from either episodes they might have listened to or shows they might have watched about the Christmas Island crabs. Right.

But your selections here, of course, not crabs. Remind us a bit about Christmas Island and what makes its ecosystem so special. Yeah, so Christmas Island is another one of those isolated islands on which endemic species just really thrive. But it isn't geographically, strictly geographically isolated so much as the ocean that surrounds it is incredibly deep.

So in some places it's five kilometers deep, you can fit Mount Kilimanjaro in there. It's also surrounded by strong ocean currents. And the place where it sits in the world is quite fascinating. It sits on what's called the Wallace Line, which is the border between two biogeographical realms.

And a biogeographical realm is basically the border between two places where radically different species and organisms will live. So the Wallace Line separates to its west, you've got Southeast Asia, you've got things like monkeys, all sorts of species that live there. And to its east, you've got Australia, and you've got the incredible marsupials and things like that. And it's separated by this intergalactic

invisible divide, invisible to us anyway. And so Christmas Island is a hodgepodge of those two biogeographical realms. And the two species that I wrote about in Lost Wonders from Christmas Island are an example of that because one of them is from the east of the line and one of them is from the west. But Christmas Island itself, another reason why it's such a fascinating place is that it wasn't settled for a long time. It's quite unique. It

It was cited on maps, it was cited by navigators.

But no one really thought there was much point in taking ownership of Christmas Island. It was a rock covered in rainforests in the Indian Ocean. It was surrounded by impenetrable cliffs, very few places to land. So no one really bothered until the end of the 19th century when phosphatic rock was discovered on the ocean floor. And it was...

determined that Christmas Island would be a source of phosphatic rock used to make fertilizer.

which was obviously a huge economic incentive to settle there and colonize it, which is what happened. And as usual, that brought with it a raft of invasive species, habitat destruction, which really kind of had the effect you would expect. The two species that I write about, one of which is the prune-sized bat,

the Christmas Island Pipistrelle that went extinct on my birthday. That was, by all accounts, a very cute little organism. It had a tiny quiff. It was the size of a prune, so it could fit comfortably in your hand. And the forest skink was a metallic brown skink that was extremely common. Both of these species were extremely common. Researchers

seeing as many as 80 of the forest skink basking in the sun on a single log. So it really was everywhere. And the Pipistrelle, similarly, I think the first population count estimated between 5,000 and 10,000 on quite a small island.

It was so common that islanders would find them fluttering around inside their homes hunting insects. There were accounts of them tumbling into people's dinner, eating soup, and suddenly a bat crash lands in your soup bowl. So they really were everywhere. And then in the late 80s, suddenly people noticed that they were starting to disappear. And

Essentially, what happened is these species disappeared in an east-to-west pattern. So from the east of the island to the west, they gradually faded out. And at the same time, it was realized that

a particularly dangerous and invasive species of snake, the wolf snake, had been introduced, which is believed to be the primary cause of both extinctions by the majority of scientists. There were other things like giant centipedes, cats, rats, yellow crazy ants, which are their own fascinating phenomenon.

But really, it's the introduction of the wolf snake and you see this fascinating correlation with the retreat of these two species and the advance of this invasive species.

the wolf snake, this was an accidental introduction to the island or was this one of these cases where, uh, an organism was introduced to attempt to solve a particular problem or anything? No, this was, this was an accident. It was a bit of a problem on Christmas Island. The biosecurity was not quite there from what I've heard. Um, but this is a snake or, or, uh, a few, I don't know how many it would have been, but it could have been one or it could have been several that basically snuck aboard a cargo ship, um,

And this happens a lot. Now that we've connected the isolated parts of the world, we've created a transport network for invasive species. That's why biosecurity is so important, but sometimes it's not followed or it's lacking. On Christmas Island, there were species that were introduced in this manner, and the wolf snake's one of them. But it's

a specialized skink hunter, but it's partial to bats and things like that. But it decimated this species with frightening ferocity.

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declare independence from dirty, outdated furniture. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. There are three species in this book that lived in Australian territories. So there were these two from Christmas Island and there was another species called the Bramble Cay Melamis, which was a species of rodent that lived on a sand cay in the Torres Strait, which is just north of Australia, but it's an Australian territory. And

All three of these species really suffered from governmental neglect. There were opportunities to save them that weren't taken. The people that I spoke to who worked with all three of these species, in the case of the Christmas Island species, they've warned the authorities, "This species is going extinct." The skink is a really horrifying example of that because David James, who was

a wonderful ecologist who worked on the island and was essentially in charge of monitoring basically everything that lived there. He raised the alarm about this species in 2005 and was ignored. He recommended it be categorized as threatened in Australia's equivalent of the endangered species list.

But he wasn't listened to, and it was only classified as threatened four months before the extinction of the species in 2014. The reason why I think it's important to mention that is what's happening right now in America with the attempts to water down the Endangered Species Act, the

the unleashing potentially of the God Squad, I think is the name. The small body of people who are given the unique power to override environmental protections, even if it causes an extinction. I think in the best of circumstances, politicians are neglectful of environmental issues. But the situation in America now is just apocalyptic.

Sorry to get depressing. Actually, there was something, if you don't mind, I got in touch with one of the scientists I spoke to for this book because I knew I was coming on here and I wanted to ask him if he had any thoughts and feelings about the current state of things. I think it's quite important. So I don't know if you'd mind if I read it out. It's quite short. Oh, by all means. So here's what he said. This is Chris Martin, who is an evolutionary biologist who

specializes in pupfish. He works at UC Berkeley, and this is what he had to say about this. "This government is attempting to strip habitat protections provided by the Endangered Species Act, among many other threats, and cuts to the federal agencies that protect and conserve our biodiversity, national parks, and natural spaces.

The Endangered Species Act was signed by Nixon with strong bipartisan support and has inspired the world with its successes in bringing back so many species from the brink of extinction.

including the bald eagle, condor, and even the devil's hole pupfish, which was recently rescued from a catastrophic decline this winter only through a decades-long efforts of the US Fish and Wildlife Service to establish a refuge population. We must fight to protect everyone in our country and all the unique species that have made the United States their home for millennia. He also mentioned to me, obviously, you know, there's a broader context where

scientific institutions and universities are being stripped of funding and there are layoffs. And it sounds horrendous. As an outsider, it sounds absolutely... It's a doomsday scenario. But I think it's really important that we learn and we understand what happens when people stop caring. When governments turn a blind eye or when, in the case of the current administration, when they seem to be

actively advocating biodiversity loss and things like that. I think Chris is right. I think now is the time to fight in whichever way anyone can. I'm probably preaching to the choir here. I don't know what your listener base is like, but hearing all of this from Chris, it really kind of made me sort of realize that

the bipartisan history of the Endangered Species Act. I'd heard that from researching this book. I'd spoken to people who occupied all kinds of positions across the political spectrum, but they did believe in the importance of conserving species. And your podcast, being a science podcast, I think regardless of anyone's political affiliations,

One thing I think we can all realize is that the administration at the moment is profoundly unscientific. And regardless of how you feel about any other kind of policies,

You know, it's just insanity. Absolutely. I mean, this is, you're not the first guest this year to bring some version of this issue up. And yeah, in the past, there has been bipartisan support to a large degree to help maintain biodiversity. I don't think it's something that needs to be a politicized topic anymore.

And yet here we are. So I appreciate you sharing these thoughts with us. But I do want to add as well, just to add a little note of hope, because I know this must be such a demoralizing situation for many Americans to be in. One of the people I spoke to for this book was a fantastic ornithologist, a bird ecologist from Brazil. And he talked to me about what it was like working under the Bolsonaro regime. So they had a right-wing government organization

I think it was around the same time as the first Trump term, which was actively pursuing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. And he told me essentially what happened in that time was organizations and conservationists learned to turn away from the federal government where they could. Things became a lot more localized. Local administrations and local organizations would band together and try and solve the problems together, knowing they couldn't rely on their government.

And I know that conservation is, as I said earlier, it's full of unsung heroes, it's full of everyday heroism. So I really do think that people across the country will be doing their best to save what they can. And I think they need our support. So I'd encourage anyone who cares about this or feels to

depressed or demoralized by it to try and get involved however you can so there are very often ways that you can volunteer and you can help in even small ways it's it's more important than ever now yeah yeah we um we recently uh talked with mark mendinka who runs the amphibian foundation here in atlanta and uh that was one of the things he brought up is in the past they've had to uh they have they

leaned on federal agencies for help in some of their research, and a lot of that has been going away. And this is just one example, a local example for us of an organization where people can now turn and try to help support their work if they can't depend on funding or assistance from governmental agencies. Yeah. It's important to preserve hope, and I think the situation is...

incredibly demoralizing, but there are people who are working. There are people who are trying to do the right thing. And I think if we can support them where we can, I think that's a really good thing. Well, Tom, thanks for coming on the show to chat with me. The book, again, is Lost Wonders, Ten Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Rob. It's been a real pleasure, and thank you all for listening.

Thanks once more to Tom for taking time out of his day to chat with me. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Thanks, as always, to the excellent J.J. Possway for producing the show. And if you would like to reach out with any questions, comments, or suggestions, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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