It’s 1972, and on the frozen flesh of a mammoth found embedded in the thawing permafrost of the Siberian tundra, Russian scientist K Grunin has just discovered something remarkable.
Buried in the mummified intestines of the woolly mammoth are twelve small but plump bodies. They are shorter than a pin, but beneath the microscope, they appear spiny and segmented.
Once, they would have been soft and wriggly, thriving from the nutrients provided as their woolly host roamed and browsed its way across the vast Steppe. Now, they are rigid in thousands-year-old ice, frozen in time before they could escape the elephantine innards they call home to pupate into their adult form.
Everyone has heard of the extinction of the woolly mammoth. But who has heard of Cobboldia russanovi, the parasitic botfly that went extinct alongside it?
The extinction of a species seldom happens in isolation. All of life on Earth is embedded in a complex, bewitching tapestry of interdependencies. Pull out one thread and others begin to untangle.
As the giant moas of New Zealand declined, so did their stomach-dwelling trematodes.
The extinction of the giant vampire bats, Desmodus draculae and D. stocki, are thought to be tied to the disappearance of the megafauna whose lifeblood sustained them.
And as Madascar’s giant lemur dwindled, so did many of the large-bodied dung beetles that evolved alongside them. Extinct species means extinct faeces.
In our fight to staunch future extinctions, then, it’s always worth bearing in mind that the battle to save each organism is often bigger and more important than we usually think. Each species contains multitudes. It doesn’t just shape the ecosystem around it, but is often an ecosystem in and of itself.
The struggle to stop the critically endangered Sumatran rhino from going the way of the dodo is probably also the struggle to save Dicerorhinus sumatrensis–another stomach-dwelling botfly known only from a batch of larvae crapped out by a captive rhino in Hamburg zoo in 1884.
The Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, the critically endangered Western long-beaked echidna, Galapagos’ marine iguana and the Malayan pangolin–just four species listed as at risk of extinction on the IUCN Red List that harbour their own species of endangered, hard-bodied tick.
Every step taken to save species ripples across ecosystems. We’re not just fighting to stop individual extinctions, but also the cascading co-extinctions that go alongside them.
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