14
September 2017
By Chelsea
Whyte
The
Christmas Island pipistrelle, a bat species found only on an Australian island,
has been declared extinct. The final nail in the coffin was hammered in as part
of the latest update to the Red List of Threatened Species, which is maintained
by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“It’s
very difficult to decide when a species definitely has gone extinct,”
says Craig
Hilton-Taylor, head of the IUCN’s Red List unit.
But the
last Christmas Island pipistrelle was seen in 2009. “It’s not a cryptic
species, it’s got a distinctive call,” says Hilton-Taylor. “We probably could
have declared it extinct earlier, but we’ve been waiting for surveys.”
The
Thongaree’s disc-nosed bat, a newly-discovered species that lives in a small
region of Thailand, entered the list as critically endangered – just one step
from going extinct. “If we’d known about it earlier, it would have moved
through the categories. That’s just what happened unseen until now,” says
Hilton-Taylor.
The new
list isn’t all bad news for bats. The Rodrigues flying fox moves from
critically endangered to endangered. Hilton-Taylor says that’s due to
coordinated actions by the government and local organisations, including legal
protection and habitat restoration.
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