Strange planet… though the risk of a 6th species extinction wave is quite real (see my previous post) and that of a future collision with a large asteroid not entirely negligible.

At the same time, native languages throughout the world are vanishing, fast (see the recent feature “Vanishing Voices” in National Geographic magazine and NG’s Enduring Voices project).

But that does not rate as headline news.  If the power of James Fennimore Cooper’s narrative still makes The Last of the Mohicans a most present, although rather erroneous (1) memory, who knows of the recent disappearance of dozens of languages, like Kanoe (Brazil), Iowa (central USA), Mangala (western Australia), or Kamassian (Siberia, Russia) – each replaced by the dominant tongue of their administrative rulers?

There are interesting parallels to draw, up to a point, between linguistic and biological diversity. On a world map, their hotspots are distributed in roughly comparable ways, owing to the same causes and effects: the  protection afforded by dense forests, habitat heterogeneity, forbidding mountain ranges, climate stability, the remoteness of ocean islands, etc.  No wonder then that Papua New Guinea, which combines all these attributes, would emerge as the top location for both species (8% of world total) and linguistic richness, with 830 living tongues (12% of world total). No wonder either that in the high mountains of the Caucasus – another biodiversity hotspot – one finds on a territory no larger than the Iberian peninsula as many as five distinct linguistic families, compared to only three for the whole of Europe.

But the similarities between biological and linguistic diversity end there, as other patterns have nothing in common.  Every ten years, on average, two species of mammals go extinct (a high rate spun by global environmental degradation) compared to … 250 languages that vanish in the same time span. This is not trivial, and it reminds us that the life and death cycle of human tongues has more to do with the historical extension of agriculture, emergence of centralized states, colonialism, cultural imperialism, and global communication networks than with Darwinian evolution.

Close to 7,000 distinct languages are still spoken today, more than half originating from just eight countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, China, Mexico, Cameroon, and Zaire. It is expected that by 2100 nearly half of today’s living tongues will have disappeared. If so, humanity will be considerably poorer. For each time a native language dies out, it is a distinct universe of mental constructs, with unique ecological wisdom acquired through millennia of direct contact with nature, which is lost. Gone is the refined Cheyenne technique of prairie management by fire in the dry mid-summers, almost gone the mysterious understanding of Namibian savanna animals by !Kung San hunters, and highly endangered the immense knowledge of the sea and its resources inherited by traditional fishing peoples from Oceania to the Arctic.

Prairie Meadows Burning. Oil canvas by George Catlin, 1832. National American Art Museum.

Among the thousand languages that will soon vanish, some are incredibly original, ‘language isolates’ on their own, others incredibly complex. Consider the way in which we count cattle, fish, or stars.  By counting on their own fingers (and toes), humans have devised numerical systems with base 5, 10, or 20, which in turn shape how the world around us is expressed. For the Melpa, in the western New Guinea highlands, the word for ’10’ is ‘two-thumbs’ – our eight fingers augmented by two thumbs.

In Central America, the Maya for their part used a base-20 numerical system, the core of complex cycles in their astronomical calendar. This characteristic, together with the very rare VOS (Verb- Object – Subject) word sequence that survives in extant Maya tongues, proved essential to decipher the syllabic hieroglyphs that the pre-Columbian Maya left behind on stelae and temples in the dense Peten and Yucatan jungles.

The complexity, the very richness of a language is not immediately obvious. It is not even a function of the number of distinct words it contains. In so-called ‘polysynthetic languages’ (Caucasus, Himalaya, New Guinea mountains), the sophisticated addition of countless prefixes and suffixes will allow the speaker to express in just one word what would require a full sentence in English. One extreme example of that was related by Georges Dumezil, a French ethno-linguist who studied Ubykh in the 1930s (2). In this north-western Caucasian tongue one word sufficed to say: “If only you had not forced him to take once more all that I had prepared for them.”  One long word, only one, could express that.  I used the past tense as Ubykh died twenty years ago in October 1992, when its last elderly speaker passed away.

If a Museum of Extinct Languages did exist, Ubykh would be in good company. I lost count of the many spoken tongues that vanished during the last century but it must approach one thousand. Today some 600 native languages are just about to go extinct, each spoken by less than fifty elders and no longer transmitted to children.  The diagram below, composed on the basis of the latest available data (3), is cause for worry.

NB: the vertical axis represents the number of nearly extinct indigenous languages; the number in blue its relation (in percent) to the total number of native languages still spoken in same country.

The continental USA, distantly followed by Australia, hold the dubious distinction of having the highest number of vanishing endemic languages. The narrative thread is the same: in recent years, or decades, their First Nations have massively shifted to English.  A few tongues still resist, like Apache, Cherokee, Dakota, or Navajo, each with quite safe population levels above 15,000 speakers. But, as I write these lines, only one or two elders are left to speak Pawnee, Wichita, Osage, etc. Listen to these haunting words by Anita Edrezze, a (half) Yaqui Indian poet, lifted from a dusty issue of the National Geographic (4) that I kept through the years:  ‘All the dark birds, / but one, / rush from the river / leaving only the stillness / of their language.’

Will a few of the ‘major’ languages now spoken by millions and millions of people ultimately dominate and squash all others?  Only the future will tell.  But it would be an ironic twist of history if our world, in the end, resembles the gigantic Tower of Babel where – founding myths tell us – only one tongue prevailed.

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(1)  J.F. Cooper used literary license, distorting the name of the Mahican people, an Algonquian tribe originally living in the Hudson Valley and now settled in Wisconsin. Mahican was spoken until the 1930s and is now extinct.

(2) Nicholas Evans. Dying Words. Endangered languages, what they tell us. Wiley, 2010

(3) This analysis is based on data extracted from the 2009 edition of Ethnologue – Languages of the World and the Atlas of the World’s Languages by Christopher Moseley, Routledge, 2007.

(4) National Geographic, October 1991. Special issue ’1491 – America before Columbus’.

That question frankly had never crossed my mind until I stumbled in the late ‘70s into a remote forest station based in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. The sea had turned quite nasty, and there was no point going on that day with my field work at the Discovery Bay Marine Lab. So I decided to explore the rugged east side of the island instead.

It took a while, I remember, to reach the forest cabin about mid-range, lost amidst the dense tropical vegetation. The place was not huge but it was well kept, providing vistas of the northern coastline, way down below, plus bird songs from every corner of the sky-high canopy. With patience, and a pair of good binoculars, one would soon be observing those birds real close — the hummingbirds, the woodpeckers, the mockingbirds, the parrots — one after another.

The Jamaican Woodpecker, Melanerpes radiolatus, one of 28 birds endemic to the island

Biologists, ‘even’ marine biologists like me, like to put names on the animals they come across in the wild, and so I sought assistance from the forest ranger. He handed me a sizable field guide — ‘the very best’ he said. Actually there was no other choice: this was the only book on Caribbean birds available at that time, and for a long time (1). That copy had seen better days for sure; it was worn out, some pages were missing. But it contained hundreds of drawings and annotations depicting the diverse bird fauna of the Caribbean islands. A pioneering study. The name: Birds of the West Indies. The first year of publication: 1936 — there were many editions to follow. The author: a certain James Bond, a leading American ornithologist, working at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Cover jacket of first edition (1936).

James Bond! So there was a ‘second’ one, a serious ornithologist bearing the same name as ‘our’ Agent 007. Since the Park ranger knew his birds but nothing, absolutely nothing about spy movies, I did not pursue my line of questioning very long and quickly forgot all about it.

It was not until years later that I was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I had read somewhere that Ian Fleming, the British journalist who created and developed the fictional James Bond character through the course of twelve novels, was a keen birdwatcher who possessed a home in Jamaica.

Then it all came back to me, James Bond the leading expert on the Caribbean avifauna; the scenario of the first 007 movie, Dr No, based and shot in Jamaica; and in particular this ‘cultissime’ scene where a bikini-clad Ursula Andress emerges from the waves holding a conch. A scene perhaps, just perhaps responsible for more vocations in marine science than the full set of Cdt Cousteau’s documentaries…

Ursula Andress, as a professional shell collector in Dr. No.

A little bit of ‘research’ uncovered a few interesting points:
• Ian Fleming did start writing the Bond series in 1952, from his home base in Port Maria, north shore of Jamaica, where he worked as foreign manager of a newspaper group.
• Birdwatching was a serious hobby for the English author, who would often take to the outdoors, a copy of the Bond field guide tucked in his pocket.
• Fleming’s candid acknowledgment (2) that he had deliberately ‘stolen the name’ of that James Bond and used it, as he was looking for a ‘very flat name, without any romantic overtone’.
• He elaborated further, at a late stage of his life (3), that this was ‘the dullest name’ he could find, and thus perfectly suited for an anonymous, secret agent.

Today the bird fauna of Jamaica appears to be ok, thanks i) to a healthy allergy of the mountain islanders to mass tourism, mostly confined to coastal spots, ii) to the protection of large tracks of undisturbed forests, and iii) to the enactment of legal instruments. Jamaica is a biodiversity hotspot, ranking fifth in the world among islands in terms of endemic species. Let’s hope that Jamaica can resist the silly, growing pressures of our century for a very long time.

Happy Birthday, Mr Bond! Nobody does it better.
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(1) In 1998 would appear A Guide to the Birds of the West Indies by H. Raffaele et al.; and recently Birds of the West Indies by N. Arlott in June 2010.
(2) see rare appearance on : youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=n_IzoKbNktY
(3) from an interview published in the 21 April 1962 issue of The New Yorker.

Baiji used to live in the Yangtze River until very recently but are now extinct. Image: Alessio Marrucci, Wikimedia Commons

If we think for a minute about species driven to extinction during the course of human history, chances are most of us will come up with names of large, terrestrial species like the dodo, the mammoth or the Aurochs. And there are good reasons for that: in the past 500 years alone hundreds of conspicuous terrestrial species – including at least 130 birds, 30 reptiles, 75 mammals, 60 insects, 100 plants – disappeared altogether from the surface of the Earth (1), a process duly noticed.

Now, thanks to the unmatched skills of our species for destroying what is left of our unique biodiversity (overfishing, seabed mining, massive forest clearing, sea bottom trawling, persistant contaminants, introduction of invasive species, are all doing a very good job!), scientists fear that an extinction crisis is in progress, predicting a further 10-fold increase in global extinctions before this century is over. Which would bring us at the tipping point of the sixth great wave (2) of mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth.

The oceans support an estimated 80% of the world’s biodiversity, most of it made of small, inconspicuous species of which we know very little. In the face of that, what can we say with some degree of certainty about modern marine extinctions? About the types and number of species having disappeared from the world ocean in recent centuries? About those next on the list? Well, at least two or three things of interest.

• One is that a species disappearance, which is hard enough to confirm in the jungles and in other remote corners of continents, is even harder to spot in the immensity of the open ocean and in the dark abyss. Only if a marine species is ‘cute’, or of major commercial importance, will its ‘disappearance’ be noted.

The powerful novel Cannery Row by John Steinbeck is there to remind us all of the dramatic collapse of the sardine fisheries, which hit the North American West Coast so hard in the 1930s. Today we have no Nobel Prize winner in literature to relate the collapse of northern cod fisheries off Newfoundland (1992) and now in Icelandic waters … As shown below (3), when a highly connected species such as cod disappears, this will affect in direct and indirect ways at least one hundred species, bringing down a few of them with it. Since we know from foodweb research that an oceanic species interacts on average with more other species than a terrestrial or a freshwater species, the cascading impacts of overfishing under the sea surface are vastly underestimated.

Cod are connected to many other species. Taken from the 2011 RSA open lecture ‘The Power of Networks’

• A second observation is that mammals have fared so far better in the sea than on land. In the last 500 years roughly 100 species of mammals were driven to global extinction, three of them marine, all seals: the Steller’s sea cow, declared extinct in 1768, and closer to us the Japanese sea lion, and the Caribbean monk seal. But this picture is fast changing. Earlier this year, China announced the extinction of the baiji, a dolphin that used to thrive in the Yangtze River, and the first cetacean species to disappear in modern times. A sign of things to come? Surely. The next cetacean facing global extinction is likely the Mexican vaquita, which now survives in low, fast decreasing numbers in the northern Sea of Cortez.

The larger whales are slightly better off, thanks to the moratorium on commercial whaling set in place 25 years ago by the IWC (4) once it had become clear that the whaling industry had decimated most stocks worldwide. Today the whales’ problems are not over, as they face (a) large-scale uncontrolled industrial whaling operated by a couple of nations under the pretense of ‘scientific research,’ (b) the absence of legal protection in the High Sea (5) , and (c) increasing damages due to entanglement in fishing gear, submarine noise, and worldwide pollution. As for the hundred species of ‘small’ marine mammals, many of them are doing poorly, the seals in particular, due to their dependance on coastal waters where man’s impact is magnified. If nothing serious is done soon at an international level, a number of these species will risk global extinction in the course of this century.

• A third factor – data deficiency – concerns many small, inconspicuous marine species long considered common, but obviously not subject to the same level of attention as marine mammals. Upon closer inspection it turns out that many of them in fact have not been recorded or seen in decades. These species, which ought to be formally listed as ‘missing,’ can sadly disappear without being remarked upon. As information improves, a large number of them will end up in the column ‘Extinct.’

The Caribbean monk seal was driven to extinction. Image: U.S. National Museum

In the world ocean this problem concerns mostly, but not only, the invertebrate fauna. Who knows for sure that this mollusk or that polychaete, nicely illustrated in my field guide but not seen in 50 years, is not extinct by now? Surprisingly, as a recent workshop of the Mediterranean Science Commission (6) on marine extinctions concluded, many fish species are concerned by this under-reporting as well. In particular the popular sharks and rays. These are not target species in Mediterranean fisheries but increasingly threatened, as unreported bycatch, by highly intensive fishing and bottom trawl. The status of many of them is unclear, even for species as conspicuous as the sawfish Pristis pectinata (last seen in 1902), the mako shark Isurus oxyrinchus, or the sandtiger sharks Carcharias taurus and Odontaspis ferox, once abundant and now presumed locally extinct.

Clearly the time has come to carry systematic surveys – using networks of researchers, fishermen and the public at large – to draw a reliable catalogue of missing, ‘most wanted’ species, starting with our coastal waters and regional seas.
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(1) See IUCN Red List
(2) The previous wave, which swept away the dinosaurs and many other forms of life, occured in the Cretaceous about 65 million years ago.
(3) Illustration taken from the 2011 RSA open lecture ‘The Power of Networks’ – download from http://www.thersa.org/events/video/animate/rsa-animate-the-power-of-networks
(4) International Whaling Commission
(5) see http://www.ciesm.org/news/mscience/090712.htm
(6) www.ciesm.org