The editor of this journal, Charles Sheppard, also published an article on this subject in the same year as me (Sheppard, 2007). In that editorial, Sheppard, who researches coral reef ecosystems, pointed out that on reefs in the Arabian/Persian Gulf which were once thriving, in the reporting year of 2007 living coral heads occurred at distances of between 20 and 50 m in any direction from each other. He went on to argue that these reefs had zero coral cover if recorded to the nearest

whole number but, even so, the corals could not be called extinct because they may occur elsewhere in the Indo-West Pacific. Moreover, if you were to measure cover over the reef to ∼0.0001% using a 1 km long transect you would, on the basis of the Sheppard counts, probably record one individual coral head and, thus, to some nitpickers, selleck chemical the reef could not be called dead nor the species extinct. This pedantic and contrarious position selleck compound to the scientifically blindingly obvious, typically asserted by politicians, bureaucrats or their functionaries, with agendas of their own, has vexed me for, it seems, almost all of my professional life.

Nevertheless. Because of their hobby, shell collectors and dealers place highest values on the rarest species – and, hence, give us an ability to ascertain, approximately, which one became extinct and when, as suggested by Dulvey for four marine snails. Although, such a suggestion of rarity should also be tempered with a pinch of salt for obvious financial reasons – involving, one could also suggest, an element of causality! Which brings me nicely to my interest in a particular group of bivalves. For 40 years I have been studying a group of bivalve molluscs belonging to the sub-class Anomalodesmata, which are characterised by really weird adaptations. Just to give one example. All the species of four superfamilies are predators

at abyssal depths in the sea. Yes, bivalve predators. In particular, however, representatives of one superfamily comprising two convergent families are called watering pot shells because the true shell is reduced to millimetre proportions and embedded in a large, Tolmetin adventitiously-produced, tube that in some species, for example, Nipponoclava gigantea, may reach a length of 33 cm. An impressive animal – even for a bivalve. One other feature of the two families is that, in both cases, all their constituent genera are represented by but a few species, in many cases only one. Not just this but each species is so rare it is only occasionally identified in museum collections and is never mentioned in benthic samples or ecological studies. Over the years, however, and by networking friends and colleagues, I have been able to examine preserved museum specimens of every constituent watering pot genera – save one, the monospecific Japanese genus Stirpulina represented by S. ramosa.