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Alex Wild

Things are going extinct before we even know they exist, is my executive summary of the environmental crisis and the biodiversity funding deficit.

There isn’t enough time. There are large parts of Texas that haven’t been properly sampled, and we’re out of time. It’s horrifying watching this all unfold as a museum curator.

@alexwild right? I'm basically the Lorax and even I'm taken aback. Instead of a century it took 2 years...

@alexwild. An individual is present at the end. Then what is the proper hospice contribution for an extinction? For example bleaching of the Florida coral reef system in the next weeks.

@alexwild

Whenever I think about the biodiversity crash, I get stuck on the rabbitbrush in my yard. I've got five acres in Colorado I'm restoring, and rabbitbrush is one of my favorite native plants. It's everywhere, it's a huge pollinator attractant, and on a good day you used to be able to brush against it and count dozens of species flying out. I say used to because the past few years, there's been almost nothing. A few honey bees, and once I saw a butterfly.

This past winter was enough to pull us out of drought for the first time in decades, and I've already seen more inverts this summer than years past. But I fear that's only temporary.

Anyway, I live in the middle of nowhere and there's not really any good ecological data, especially for invertebrates. Like three really dedicated photographers on iNaturalist have done more for surveying the local species than the sum total of literature I've found. No doubt if anything unique lives here, it will perish long before it is discovered.