Another One Bites the Dust

'Keruing paya' now extinct.

"It is a sad fact that to many people the loss of a plant species is of less moment than the loss of a football match." 

Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1

This is "old news", considering this report is from about a week ago, but it still resonates with me.

Another species of Dipterocarpus. Picture from arkive.org

To be honest, it's amazing it was even reported. So many species slip by unnoticed into the realm of extinction while we are too preoccupied with the latest Facebook post. The keruing paya (Dipterocarpus coriaceus) is just one of hundreds that probably disappeared that day, most still unknown to modern science.

Losing a species is more of a tragedy than most people realize. Even if it is not one at the top of the food chain, it's loss still has a lasting impact on all the other species connected to it. In South America, these survival-oriented symbiotic relationships are to such an extent that if a single species of hummingbird were to go extinct, an entire specie of Heliconia would go with it.

A purple-throated carib, a specie of hummingbird that has evolved to eat almost entirely from a single species of Heliconia (hence the extensively curved beak). Picture by Ethan Temeles via Smithsonian Magazine Online.

Some say that losing a species is part of progress; but development is not the same as progress. We cannot continue to develop so irresponsibly if we want to have something other than a concrete jungle left.

The keruing paya, only one of a staggering 230 species of flora on the brink of extinction in peninsular Malaysia, is a stark reminder that we need to act now if we do not want to lose even more of our own biodiversity.