Thanks Stephen. This is an important issue, and as you say, we have done well with some species, and I support efforts to continue this, especially where we can get to the nub of the issue and address the real causes of species loss. But at the same time we need to be looking across landscapes and also focus on our ecosystems. It is surely not one or the other. And we should not forsake the funding for one to support the other. Now I'm told that there is just not enough money....

Max and Keith have spoken in defence of landscape conservation. I agree entirely that it should not be either species or landscapes - rather, as I gather Keith is trying to do with Gondwanalink, I think threatened species can be used as key motivators and indicators of success of landscape conservation. But Keith you are also right that the pendulum has swung too far - in fact it almost instantaneously swung too far because it became a means to save money and I am glad that this is now being recognised even among those who thought it necessary.

A too-early death brought the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake a fame and significance that he never received in life. It is the mould of many doomed artists, whose existence was troubled, and whose fate was loaded with unrealised and unrealisable potential. Like all premature deaths, it brings a haunting regret to those it touched: Could it have been prevented?; What if we’d intervened earlier?; What promise was lost?; Whose fault was it?

Extinctions may generate the same reaction. Few knew the Christmas Island Pipistrelle before it faded into extinction in 2009. In the 100-odd years of its known existence to that point, no scientific papers were written about it. In the three years since its demise, there have been at least three, mourning its passing and asking those same questions; imbuing its loss with a more generic significance.

In his recent and welcome conversation piece, the then Minister Peter Garrett was at pains to demonstrate that the fault was not his. I think that, to a degree, he is wrong.

Peter Garrett starts by accusing my colleague Stephen Garnett of gross error in stating that his (the Minister’s) landmark speech in late 2009 led directly to the pipistrelle’s extinction. Given that the speech was less than two weeks before the death of the last pipistrelle, that part of the Minister’s argument is sound (Stephen was wrong in detail but correct in essence). The Minister’s public declaration that not all species could be saved was not the cause of the extinction. But it was a mechanism to legitimise it, to provide the policy framework to sanction failure.

In his piece, Peter Garrett’s argument rests on the fact that he became aware of the pipistrelle’s awkward and near-terminal situation in 2009, and then immediately acted: setting up an independent expert body (of which I happened to be a member) and then attempting to implement the recommendations of that body (recommendations that Stephen Garnett and others consider flawed). In this light, the Minister did everything possible, within reason.

But the argument is not compelling. In 2009, the pipistrelle was probably unsaveable. Early that year, there were probably only four adults left, declining to one (and then none) in August. But in 2007, there were many more individuals: probably several hundred. At that time, its extinction was preventable. At that time, the advice from experts to his department was that its numbers were falling catastrophically and that urgent remedial action was needed. This was not advice kept in-house by his department. In 2007, in public advice to the then Minister, his expert advisory committee (of which I was a member) stated that, for the pipistrelle to avoid extinction, urgent action was required:

“the development of radical conservation action may be required. Radical conservation action could include translocation, captive breeding, habitat sterilization, and reintroduction or population supplementation by means yet to be determined.” (http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/threatened/species/pubs/pipistrellus-murrayi-conservation.pdf)

This was a blunt message. A captive breeding program initiated at that time would have acted as insurance, maintaining some individuals over the period in which the factors driving the species’ decline were identified and remedied. It didn’t happen: and by the time the cogs of Ministerial interest or Departmental concern turned, it was far too late. The Minister could, and should, have done more. Resolute action taken in 2007, or even 2008, would probably have prevented the extinction.

The Minister’s response washes his hands of responsibility: it was perhaps his Department’s fault; or his advisors; or perhaps no-one was responsible. This issue is pivotal (and more generic than for the pipistrelle alone): who is accountable for extinctions? In the case of the Christmas Island pipistrelle, on an Australian territory mostly managed as a national park by his department, accountability should be simple and straightforward: there are no states or federation issues to blur the line of responsibility.

Extinctions should have attribution and accountability. That hasn’t yet happened for the Christmas Island pipistrelle. And if it doesn’t happen in this case, it won’t in future cases.

Stephen ... I perhaps did not make my concerns about the gap between "categories of threat" in the IUCN criteria and the real risk of threat in terms of the need for immediate conservation action very clear. The problem is not that "national" and "global" assessments should give different results. Saltwater crocodiles are basically extinct in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam but perhaps almost completely recovered here in the NT. It does raise the rather tricky issue that if the Australian population is 100% secure, then the global population cannot go extinct - regardless of whether 10%, 40% or 90% of populations outside a totally secure population do so. The original goal of the Red List was to identify species globally in danger of extinction - of being lost forever - which was part of its innovative appeal. Global extinction is everyone's problem. The situation with hawksbills is similar. The comment about the steady decline in Milman Island nesting, if you look at the available data, with the highly variable nesting efforts and seasons, is hardly significant, and hardly constitutes any room for concern. If such variable scant data indicated a steady increase under the circumstances, it would equally be insignificant. Again, with the crocodile population here, where the population has definitively increased greatly. I can show you nest data over time that were stable from the 1970's until 1994, then essentially doubled in one year, and have been stable since at the new level. But nesting data from a different reference area have increased steadily since the 1970's. A series of factors other than population size per se links annual nest numbers in specific sites with population size. If the monitoring data were sufficiently accurate and precise, to have confidence in a declining trend, then it may constitute evidence to take further survey action - at least to confirm what was going on. The global IUCN assessment of hawksbills, on the other hand, is not science's greatest day. As pointed out by Mrosovsky and Godfrey, there was a current estimate of the wild adult population of 1750, but no historical estimate from 3 generations before. The IUCN assessment, with no justification, derives an historical estimate of >8750 .... which to the decimal point is an 80% decline. This piece of science is then used as evidence for a "critically endangered" status. Ho hum!

While fully supporting the IUCN and its Red List, which brings many benefits, the problem remains that with at least the "decline criteria" it mixes "correlation" (species that have gone extinct had declining populations", with "cause and effect" (therefore species that are declining are going extinct). Furthermore, and what I would argue is the greatest problem, is that there is no feedback mechanisms or reality checks.

The IUCN criteria are essentially a taxonomic key that uses a set of fixed criteria to predict an IUCN general category of "risk of extinction". This serves various important functions, but does not constitute a rationale for allocating resources to overcoming whatever problem may be "implied" by the category in common language use. The IUCN itself emphasises that their categories are only meaningful in terms of the criteria themselves - so technically those involved understand the limitations, but the public and politicians usually do not (for obvious reasons). As pointed out long ago, if you had a green frog from Tasmania in your hand, and the taxonomic key said it was a brown cane toad, you would reexamine the key to find out where the error was, correct it, and so the key would wrk more effectively in the future. There is no logical feedback mechanism within the Red List criteria. No way of assessing how accurate particular predictions are. Hence, if the key says it is a cane toad, it is. Should you then implement a program to eradicate cane toads from Tasmania on this basis?

With the decline criteria, in particular, the problem may be overcome if a category "serious decline" was used, which triggered another mechanism to interpret that decline in terms of risk of extinction (perhaps using the same IUCN categories). But it seems to be impractical to implement at the overall global IUCN Red List level (it could be in the Australian context). The problem of some players "striving" to get species assigned to an IUCN category of threat (critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable), because of its political ramification, remains a problem and is the reason the new criteria were developed. But they too are open to such "striving", as clearly demonstrated by the Brazil example above.

Hence my overall view that scientists need to become better engaged in assessing the risks of species extinction much more accurately, so that politicians can better prioritise where reasonably rare conservation dollars can be best spent, and where cosmetic expenditure can be avoided.

Perfectly valid points Grahame. A couple of papers that might be of interest. The first <DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.00905.x> was an analysis tracking status over time showing that taxa moved through the various IUCN categories at the rate one might expect from Near Threatened to Critically Endangered, but then failed to go extinct at the rate that one might anticipate. At least part of the reason was that a lot of conservation effort is applied to Critically Endangered species so that the most threatened species don't fall over the line. However another reason, as you suggest, may well be because assessors are influenced by the criteria themselves in assessing the population numbers.

The second reference <DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-210X.2012.00221.x> looks at just this issue - eliciting assessments from experts on IUCN Red List status and trying to correct some of the predictable biases, such as what is termed 'anchoring' - which is what you describe for the Hawksbill. You might try the process described in the reference to see what answers you get from a panel of turtle experts. If your results differ from the current listing then there is a process of appeal to the IUCN <http://www.iucnredlist.org/documents/petitions_process.pdf>;

So it is the quality of the science going into the assessments that is the problem. The criteria themselves did, metaphorically, find toads in Tasmania but have been refined repeatedly since - first the criteria themselves, then the rules for applying them. While the final agreed criteria date from 2001, the latest version of the rules are from 2011 <http://www.iucnredlist.org/documents/RedListGuidelines.pdf>;.

Good points Stephen, and the papers very interesting. The species that I have been dealing with tend to be tenacious survivors that can easily bounce back from an 80% decline if the habitat is intact and the harvest pressure is lifted off them. The crocs that have problems are not the harvested species as such, but rather species that continue to get caught and either drowned or killed in fishing nets and traps, that are operating 24/7 to feed people in so many countries. Protecting the crocodiles (nationally or internationally through CITES) stops legal trade, but just does not stop the killing. They are essentially commercially extinct (not worth hunting for their own right), but very much subject to by catch. Interesting problems!

Let me try to focus on one part of the argument: what responsibility do, or should, we (humankind) have for the natural world, and in particular for trying to prevent the extinction of other species?

In part, as noted by Grahame Webb, this question has been muddied by attention to animal individuals rather than species, following the concerns of philosophers such as Peter Singer who argue for the rights of (and prevention of cruelty to) sentient animals, and of some religious beliefs (such as in Jainism) for the sanctity of all life. These may be worthy concepts, but they are not necessarily helpful for the preservation of species.

I think that there are four possible responses.

1. Stuff nature. We have no obligation or need to consider the fate of other species. Our responsibility is an onion, first to ourselves, then diminishingly to our family, then to our community, nation, race or others of our religious belief, then to all other humans. Non-human life lies beyond this sphere of moral obligations, and it is impertinent to think that we should act as god in attempting to preserve other animal and plant species.

2. We should care about the continuing existence of species that are useful or attractive to us. We can treat nature simply as commodity, and it is hence in our interest only to seek to maintain species that provide us with direct benefits. From such a self-interested perspective, the fate of non-useful species is immaterial.

3. We should aim to avoid direct responsibility for extinction. This concept appears to be the guiding principle underlying most current environmental legislation: we shouldn’t take actions (such as land clearance) that will cause immediately the loss of any particular plant or animal species. Unlike the previous argument, it assumes an interest in or responsibility for even species that are unattractive to us.

4. We should make efforts (have a duty of care) to maintain the existence of all species. This is a far stronger and more pervasive concept than the previous. I think it is altruism; others may think it an arrogance, a pretence to the role of god, or of attempting to fight the inevitable workings of evolution.

I’d argue that this (option 4) is the course needed to honour inter-generational equity - that we pass on to our descendants the assets that we have inherited. I’d argue that we have made ourselves masters of the fate of this planet, and that this mastery should come with a balancing regard for the other life that we have affected: ostensibly that we should be benign dictators. I’d argue that this response is simply a more ecologically robust version of response 3 above, because by far the majority of extinctions in our times are due if not directly to our actions then indirectly because of our actions (or in some cases, inactions). I’d argue that the extinction of species shows definitionally that our way of life is unsustainable, that it is a sign of ecological dysfunction that will in time also detrimentally affect us.

Ah yes, one aside: Grahame happens to be wrong in detail (but not in generality) about the extinction of the Round Island boa. As at October this year there were about 1000 individuals in the wild, and there is an active program for their recovery (including translocation): see http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/boa-round-island.html#cr

John's four options are well articulated, and my guess would be that most biologists would relate to Option 4 as a laudable goal that has a ring of precaution about it. However, it is not biologists, ascribing to Option 4 that are causing extinctions. As I wrote somewhere else: "That poverty is the worst environmental threat is obvious but chilling. Obvious, because if we slipped towards poverty ourselves at some stage we would start killing critically endangered animals to feed our children. Chilling, because the time scale required to solve the problems of global poverty are an order of magnitude greater than those needed to solve today's wildlife conservation problems." Option 1 is probably the only one that is commensurate with poverty, and the chances of motivating the world with Option 4 "in time" are zero. Hence even if you ascribe to Option 4 yourself, as perhaps most involved in this discussion would do, you may need to actively promote Options 2 and 3, in contexts where it may work to undermine Option 1, wherever the chance presents. Great to hear the Round Island boa is not extinct! Wayne King's paper was some years old, and it did bring the moral dilemma of conservation versus animal rights and welfare into clear focus ... oh well ... at least this story has a great ending!