Thom van Dooren – “In Search of Lost Snails: Storying Unknown Extinctions”

The Hawaiian Islands were once home to one of the most diverse assemblages of terrestrial snails found anywhere on earth, 754 described species. Today, however, the majority of these species are extinct and most of those that remain are headed swiftly in the same direction. But this is just the crisis that we know about. Here, and all over the world, a diversity of species—many of them invertebrates—are being lost while they still remain entirely unknown to science. In fact, for every described species that blinks out—perhaps not even with any fanfare, simply recognized as a species, and therefore as an extinction, even if only by a handful of people—roughly another five extinctions likely take place entirely unknown to us. This article focuses on the particular case of Hawai‘i’s snails and the efforts of taxonomists to catalogue them as a way into this broader unknown extinction crisis. Snails have particular lessons to offer in understanding and responding to this situation. This article seeks to draw out those lessons, thinking through some of the challenges for storytelling in summoning up these unseen others and opening up a space for ethical encounters with living and dead beings that must remain beyond the edges of our knowledge.