Your instinct isn't wrong - predators are the classic island story. In the
32 extinct species I've documented the causes come out: hunting and
collecting 10, introduced disease 9, habitat loss 6, introduced predators 5.
What surprised me is how cleanly disease sorts by place. All nine disease
cases are Hawaiian, and all nine Hawaiian species are disease cases.
One-to-one, no overlap in either direction.
Rats and cats show up hardest in the flightless birds, and they got there
early. The flightless species in the set have a median last record of 1662,
against 1946 for the ones that could fly - and nothing flightless has a
last record after 1899.
The Wolbachia work is further along than most people realise: drone delivery
on Maui from April 2025, past 40 million males released by mid-2025.
What surprised me is how cleanly disease sorts by place. All nine disease cases are Hawaiian, and all nine Hawaiian species are disease cases. One-to-one, no overlap in either direction.
Rats and cats show up hardest in the flightless birds, and they got there early. The flightless species in the set have a median last record of 1662, against 1946 for the ones that could fly - and nothing flightless has a last record after 1899.
The Wolbachia work is further along than most people realise: drone delivery on Maui from April 2025, past 40 million males released by mid-2025.