A year after Australia’s wildfires, extinction threatens hundreds of species
More than 500 species may now be endangered — or extinct — due to the natural disaster
Glossy black-cockatoos (pictured) on Australia’s Kangaroo Island are one species that weathered the country’s 2019–2020 wildfires thanks to a great fledgling year.
When Isabel Hyman heads out in coming weeks to the wilds of northern New South Wales, she’s worried about what she won’t find. Fifteen years ago, the malacologist — or mollusk scientist — with the Australian Museum made an incredible discovery among the limestone outcrops there: a tiny, 3-millimeter-long snail, with a ribbed, dark golden-brown shell, that was new to science.
Subsequently named after her husband, Hugh Palethorpe, Palethorpe’s pinwheel snail (Rhophodon palethorpei) “is only known from a single location, at the Kunderang Brook limestone outcrops in Werrikimbe National Park,” she says. Now it may become known for a different, more devastating distinction: It is one of hundreds of species that experts fear have been pushed close to, or right over, the precipice of extinction by the wildfires that blazed across more than 10 million hectares of southeastern Australia in the summer of 2019–2020.
“This location was completely burnt,” says Hyman, who is based in Sydney. “We expect the mortality at this site could be very high and … there is a possibility this species is extinct.”
A year after the last of the fires were doused, their toll on species is becoming increasingly clear. Flames devoured more than 20 percent of Australia’s temperate forest cover, according to a February 2020 analysis in Nature Climate Change. Even if plants and animals survived the flames, their habitats may have been so changed that their survival is at risk (SN: 2/11/20). As a result of the scale of the disaster, experts say that more than 500 species of plants and animals may now be endangered — or even completely gone.
A wallaby licks its burnt paws after escaping a bushfire near Nana Glen in New South Wales on November 12, 2019.Wolter Peeters/The Sydney Morning Herald via Getty Image
Australia’s iconic koala became the poster child of the crisis as images of rescuers carrying these singed marsupials out of the flames went global: As many as 60,000 of the nation’s estimated population of 330,000 koalas perished in the fires, ecologists concluded in December in a report for World Wildlife Fund Australia. While there’s no doubt that such charismatic megafauna suffered enormously, the greatest toll is likely to have been in other groups of species, such as invertebrates and plants, which often escape the public’s attention.
As Kingsley Dixon, an ecologist at Curtin University in Perth told the Associated Press last year: “I don’t think we’ve seen a single event in Australia that has destroyed so much habitat and pushed so many creatures to the very brink of extinction.”