The decline of fruit bats in American Samoa due to hurricanes and overhunting

Craig, Peter; Trail, Pepper W.; Morrell, Thomas E.

doi:10.1016/0006-3207(94)90425-1

Cited by 69 publications

(66 citation statements)

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“…Pest (Dahl 1984a, b;Cocklin and Keen 2000;Steadman and Martin 2003), as well as natural disturbances such as hurricanes (Craig et al 1994a;Elmqvist et al 1994;Pierson et al 1996;Hjerpe et al 2001;Whistler 2002;McConkey et al 2004a). Fossil evidence indicates the majority of Polynesian bird and bat species became extinct or were extirpated in the wake of human colonisation (Steadman 1993(Steadman , 1995Koopman and Steadman 1995).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altered Ecologies: Fire, climate and human influence on terrestrial landscapes: Terra Australis 32

Haberle¹,

Stevenson²,

Prebble³

2010

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terra australis 32Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present.Since the beginning of the series, the basic colour on the spine and cover has distinguished the regional distribution of topics as follows: ochre for Australia, green for New Guinea, red for South-East Asia and blue for the Pacific Islands. From 2001, issues with a gold spine will include conference proceedings, edited papers and monographs which in topic or desired format do not fit easily within the original arrangements. All volumes are numbered within the same series. Copyright of the text remains with the contributors/authors, 2009. This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Among saltbush greyer than seaweed we boardwalk the yeasting waves of the old golden-perch pond. List of volumes in Terra AustralisRabbit dung dots a lake bottom dry since their coming -only once, last century, after seven inches of rain a farmer had to rescue his sheep by boat.The roo bounces down-slope, a brown branch crackling.The professor's eye, noting the local runoff and what the westerlies do, observes seas that rush in and out of a continent's middle, salt lakes spreading and emptying, hills pimpling up and down with cartoon-like speed, or gullying themselves into extinction, rainforests and deserts zipping back and forth like Tom and Jerry. A human mouse plague swiftly swarms, perhaps soon gone.Impermanent planet. Impermanent surface. All under air and water. The lunette is a wave, a dumper of sand, a collapsing tower in the mad rabbit years when its top blew off and old bones winked through, with a vault's worth of fine stone cores.Once so simply mislaid in sand, now so obligingly sluiced out to the un-subincised world that smiles at stone knives. terra australis 32Altered Ecologies: Fire, climate and human influence on terrestrial landscapes v You might as well offer your table knife to a carpenter.Cane grass and the Dreamtime's stone fight the eroding rivulets together. In today's rare downpour each lost core, or blunted scraper crowns some tiny eroding hillock, plops its anchor in the dissolving silts.The bettong whose skin took off the stone tool's edge has vanished -sacrifice to future fertility.Through the softening soil Homo sapiens's skeleton bumps up like a carp's back.Waits for the wind to shave it off in pieces.A D-section and a ti...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altered Ecologies: Fire, climate and human influence on terrestrial landscapes: Terra Australis 32

Haberle¹,

Stevenson²,

Prebble³

2010

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“…Furthermore, while 20th-century specimens of P. samoensis and P. tonganus from Samoa are not uncommon in museums (e.g., AM, AMNH, ANSP, USNM, ZMUC), we know of no museum specimens of P. coxi collected since the type series was taken more than 160 years ago. Regardless of whether more than two species of Pteropus survive today in Samoa, it is clear to us from our own experiences and from our close reading of relevant literature that it is indeed only P. samoensis and P. tonganus that have been regularly encountered by field biologists working in Samoa during the past 15 years (e.g., Wilson and Engbring, 1992;Craig and Syron, 1992;Elmqvist et al, 1992Elmqvist et al, , 1994Craig et al, 1994aCraig et al, , 1994bMorrell and Craig, 1995;Banack, 1995, 1999;Banack, 1996Banack, , 1998Pierson et al, 1996;Grant et al, 1997;Miller and Wilson, 1997;Richmond et al, 1998;Thomson et al, 1998Thomson et al, , 2002Brooke et al, 2000;Nelson et al, 2000;Webb et al, 2000;Brooke, 2001;Grant, 2002, 2003).…”

Section: Specimensmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…These extinctions are not well understood, and they have been tentatively linked to overhunting and habitat destruction especially (Flannery and Schouten, 2001). As oceanic island specialists, many species of Pteropus are especially vulnerable to natural population perturbations, such as tropical storms and epidemic disease (Flannery, 1989;Elmqvist et al, 1994;Pierson et al, 1996;McConkey et al, 2004;Esselstyn et al, 2006), and human impacts such as hunting and deforestation for agriculture can severely amplify the effects of these natural impacts (Wiles and Payne, 1986;Mickleburgh et al, 1992;Craig et al, 1994b;Brooke and Tschapka, 2002;Struebig et al, 2007). Any of these factors may have been involved in the decline to extinction of these various insular flying foxes.…”

Section: Ecology and Extinctionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pacific Flying Foxes (Mammalia: Chiroptera): Two New Species of Pteropus from Samoa, Probably Extinct

Helgen¹,

Helgen²,

Wilson³

2009

American Museum Novitates

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Two new species of flying foxes (genus Pteropus) from the Samoan archipelago are described on the basis of modern museum specimens collected in the mid-19th century. A medium-sized species (P. allenorum, n. sp.) is introduced from the island of Upolu (Independent Samoa), based on a specimen collected in 1856 and deposited in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. It has not been collected again, and we regard it as almost certainly extinct. This species is smaller bodied and has much smaller teeth than both extant congeners recorded in the contemporary fauna of Samoa (Pteropus samoensis and P. tonganus). The closest relative of this new species may be Pteropus fundatus of northern Vanuatu. The disjunct historical distribution of these two smalltoothed flying foxes (in Vanuatu and Samoa) suggests that similar species may have been more extensively distributed in the remote Pacific in the recent past. Another species, a very large flying fox with large teeth (P. coxi, n. sp.), is described from two skulls collected in Samoa in 1839-1841 during the U.S. Exploring Expedition; it too has not been collected since. This robust species resembles Pteropus samoensis and Pteropus anetianus of Vanuatu in craniodental conformation but is larger than other Polynesian Pteropus, and in some features it is ecomorphologically convergent on the Pacific monkey-faced bats (the pteropodid genera Pteralopex and Mirimiri). On the basis of eyewitness reports from the early 1980s, it is possible that this species survived until recent decades, or is still extant. These two new Samoan species join Pteropus tokudae of Guam, P. pilosus of Palau, P. subniger of the Mascarenes, and P. brunneus of coastal north-eastern Australia as flying

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“…On such an island, mass deforestation could have occurred quickly after human settlement-a scenario that was played out on many islands across the Pacific (Rolett and Diamond 2004). Although human predation is clearly a major reason for the disappearance of flying foxes in Samoa (Craig et al 1994) and probably most oceanic islands, small insular populations are also very susceptible to abrupt landscape changes, whether human induced (Kirch 1983) or the result of drought or hurricanes (Craig et al 1994). These climatic perturbations must be considered when determining the causes of insular extirpations and extinctions, and it is noteworthy that drought is not an important problem in the Australs, but hurricanes have been known to do considerable damage historically.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Eastern Limit of the Pacific Flying Fox, Pteropus tonganus (Chiroptera: Pteropodidae), in Prehistoric Polynesia: A Case of Possible Human Transport and Extirpation

Weisler¹,

Bollt²,

Findlater³

2006

Pacific Science

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Five bones, representing one adult of the Pacific Flying Fox, Pteropus tonganus, were recovered from an archaeological site on Rurutu (151 21 0 W, 22 27 0 S), Austral Islands, French Polynesia, making this the most eastern extension of the species. For the first time, flying fox bones from cultural deposits were directly dated by accelerator mass spectrometry, yielding an age of death between A.D. 1064 and 1155. Their stratigraphic position in an Archaic period archaeological site and the absence of bones in the late prehistoric to historic layers point to extirpation of the species. No flying fox bones were found in prehuman deposits and human transport of the species cannot be ruled out.

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The decline of fruit bats in American Samoa due to hurricanes and overhunting

Cited by 69 publications

References 4 publications

Altered Ecologies: Fire, climate and human influence on terrestrial landscapes: Terra Australis 32

Altered Ecologies: Fire, climate and human influence on terrestrial landscapes: Terra Australis 32

Pacific Flying Foxes (Mammalia: Chiroptera): Two New Species of Pteropus from Samoa, Probably Extinct

A New Eastern Limit of the Pacific Flying Fox, Pteropus tonganus (Chiroptera: Pteropodidae), in Prehistoric Polynesia: A Case of Possible Human Transport and Extirpation

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