Extinction is rarely a moment. It is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. Discovery, too, is rarely a moment. It is a process of comparison, argument, and waiting—years spent persuading other experts that what you are seeing is, in fact, new.

A year-end review of nature tends to move between those two tempos. One is the closing of accounts. The other is the opening of drawers.

In 2025, a small group of species crossed a final bureaucratic threshold and were formally listed as extinct on the IUCN Red List. For science, the change was technical. For everyone else, it read like a set of obituaries that had been delayed for decades. At the same time, hundreds of organisms were described for the first time in the scientific literature—some collected in recent fieldwork, others hiding in plain sight in museum collections, misfiled by earlier assumptions.

Between those bookends sits the human work: the people who tried to slow the losses, and the institutional decisions that made progress possible in some places and failure likely in others. In my own corner of this story, 2025 was a year of memorials. I wrote more than 80 short obituaries for people who spent their lives protecting parts of the Earth. The volume was not a badge of productivity. It was a measure of how many lives are spent holding the line—and how often the line keeps moving anyway.

The losses that became official

The Red List does not mourn. It records. That can make its updates feel colder than the events they represent. Yet the absence of sentiment is part of the sting. The entries are terse because the harm has already happened.

Several of the species newly listed as extinct carried a familiar pattern: long uncertainty, scattered searches, and then an eventual professional consensus that waiting was no longer a form of caution. It was self-deception.

A few of the losses stand out because they reveal how extinction often works in the real world: not through a single calamity, but through attrition and neglect.

• Slender-billed curlew. A migratory shorebird that once threaded together Siberia, Europe, and North Africa. It was last photographed in Morocco in 1995. For decades afterward, concern outpaced action, and then outpaced evidence.
• Christmas Island shrew. A small mammal that slipped away on a remote Australian island, likely undone by disease carried by introduced rats. By the mid-1980s, its presence had dwindled to an unremarkable record.
• Three Australian bandicoots. The marl, southeastern striped, and Nullarbor barred bandicoots disappeared between the late 1800s and early 20th century, casualties of habitat loss and feral cats. Their formal extinction arrived long after the animals themselves were gone.
• Two plants. A Mauritian tree and a Hawaiian shrub survived only as herbarium sheets, their disappearance noticed years after the landscapes that sustained them were altered.
• A cone snail. Once common along a short stretch of Cape Verde’s coast, it vanished as development remade its shoreline.

What distinguishes these losses is not their drama but their duration. Each species lingered in that uneasy zone where no one can prove it is gone, and no one can say with confidence that it persists. Conservation often fails there: in the gap between alarm and commitment, between what can be felt and what can be funded.

The discoveries that arrived late

If extinction often looks like delay, so does discovery. Each year, science adds names to the living world. Hundreds of species are described, often after years of careful work. The paradox is that the public hears the news at the end of that process, when the “new” species may already be rare.

Biologists estimate that perhaps only a tenth to a fifth of Earth’s species have been documented. The unknown concentrates itself in the small, the nocturnal, the deep, and the easily overlooked. It also concentrates in places under pressure. Many organisms edge toward extinction before they ever receive a Latin binomial.

The species described in 2025 underline this double reality: the planet remains richer than our catalogues suggest, and our margin for error keeps narrowing.

A sample, chosen less for cuteness than for what it implies:

• Marmosa chachapoya (Peru), a mouse opossum from high Andean cloud forests.
• Nothobranchius sylvaticus (Kenya), a killifish confined to seasonal swamps in a 7-million-year-old forest now ringed by farms.
• Tessmannia princeps (Tanzania), towering trees in the Udzungwa Mountains, possibly millennia old, known from only about 100 individuals.
• Iolaus francisi (Angola), a brilliant blue butterfly restricted to a few hundred hectares of threatened forest.
• Thismia selangorensis (Malaysia), a subterranean “fairy lantern” plant found beside a picnic trail.
• Myotis himalaicus (Himalayas), a long-tailed bat from a remote mountain corridor.
• Celestus jamesbondi (Jamaica), one of dozens of newly recognized Caribbean reptiles.
• Leptophis mystacinus (Brazil), a green “parrot snake” pulled from a museum drawer, endemic to the Cerrado.
• Mobula yarae (Atlantic), a newly confirmed manta ray species.
• Ocean Census discoveries, more than 850 new marine species described amid accelerating ocean change.

There is also a tacit correction embedded in any list like this. Many species newly described to Western science are long known to Indigenous peoples and local communities, named and understood within systems of knowledge that do not require journal citations to be real. Scientific recognition can expand protection and funding. It can also arrive late, and unevenly credited, to those who have been living with the species all along.

The guardians we lost

The people I write about are often described as conservationists, scientists, activists, or defenders. Those labels are accurate, but incomplete. What unites them is less a profession than a posture: they stood between something living and the forces wearing it down. They did so for decades, usually without much recognition and often at personal cost.

Public memory tends to reward visibility. Conservation tends to depend on endurance. The mismatch becomes obvious in obituary writing. Many of the most consequential figures in environmental protection spend their lives doing work that does not translate easily into headlines: negotiating land boundaries, training rangers, maintaining fragile agreements, collecting data, calming disputes, or staying put when conditions deteriorate.

Writing about death has a clarifying effect. It strips away what is temporary and leaves a record of choices. Again and again, the lives I wrote about this year had a similar shape: an early encounter with a place or species, followed by years of persistence inside systems that were underfunded, politically constrained, or openly hostile. Progress was usually slow. Setbacks were common. Quitting was always an option, and usually declined.

These pieces are not meant to sanctify their subjects. They are also not meant to induce despair. Taken together, they offer something more practical: evidence that stewardship is not an abstraction. It is a daily practice, carried out by people with families, doubts, tempers, and limits—people who showed up anyway.

The progress that mattered

Year-end lists of “wins” can feel like consolation prizes, or public relations. In conservation, it may be worth treating them as something else: field reports. The details matter because they reveal what worked, where, and why.

Some of the most meaningful developments of 2025 shared a common feature: they treated protection as a governance problem, not a branding exercise.

In Australia, the proposed Great Koala National Park would—if delivered in full—create a 475,000-hectare protected area, incorporating state forests and existing reserves across a region estimated to hold more than 12,000 koalas. The political bargain was blunt: a moratorium on logging within the proposed boundaries and funding for worker transition, coupled with promises of tourism infrastructure and potential carbon-credit revenue. The argument for scale was ecological: linked habitat is more resilient than scattered fragments.

In South America, ambition also took institutional form. Suriname’s government pledged to formally conserve 90% of its rainforest by creating new protected areas and demarcating Indigenous and Maroon territories, drawing early donor support while also facing the hard work of boundary-setting and consent. Colombia created a landmark territory—more than a million hectares—designed specifically to protect the uncontacted Yuri-Passé people, prohibiting economic development and forced contact. It was an explicit statement that some places should remain beyond the reach of markets and outsiders.

Colombia also announced it would no longer approve new oil or large-scale mining projects in its Amazon biome, framing the decision as an ethical and scientific commitment to prevent forest degradation and river contamination. Whether such declarations endure depends on enforcement and political continuity, but the trajectory matters in a region where extraction is often treated as inevitable.

A broader shift appeared in the global recognition of land rights. Nine tropical governments pledged to recognize 160 million hectares of Indigenous and other traditional lands by 2030, alongside renewed donor commitments to fund land tenure—an area where the gap between money promised and money delivered directly has long been the story.

The ocean, which often suffers from diplomatic delay, saw significant movement. Two multilateral treaties reached enough ratifications in 2025 to trigger legal entry into force: the High Seas Treaty (entering into force in January 2026) and the World Trade Organization agreement to curb harmful fisheries subsidies. Neither is a panacea. Both are examples of multilateralism doing something practical after years of negotiation.

Protection also expanded through large marine reserves and national measures: the Marshall Islands created its first federal marine sanctuary around remote northern atolls; Samoa enacted a marine spatial plan to sustainably manage all of its ocean by 2030 while protecting 30% through new MPAs; the Philippines protected a coral hotspot off Panaon Island; and French Polynesia announced an immense MPA across its entire EEZ, with substantial highly protected and fully protected zones.

Progress was not limited to maps and treaties. Some of the most persuasive evidence that conservation can work is biological. The green turtle was reclassified from endangered to least concern globally, reflecting decades of protection, better fisheries practices, and the unglamorous labor of guarding nesting beaches. Brazil’s red-tailed amazon parrot improved from endangered to near threatened after conservationists and local residents built artificial nests and shifted local incentives. On the Galápagos island of Floreana, a rail last seen by Darwin’s generation reappeared after invasive species control, suggesting that absence is not always final.

None of this cancels out the losses. It does something more modest, and more useful: it shows that outcomes are contingent. They are shaped by policy choices, financing, enforcement, and the willingness to keep doing work that rarely feels triumphant in real time.

What the ledger cannot show

A year like 2025 leaves a mixed record: species declared extinct long after the fact, species described just in time to learn they are already under threat, defenders lost whose expertise cannot be replaced quickly, and tangible decisions that should keep some ecosystems intact. And millions of hectares of critical habitat were felled, burned, or trawled.

The temptation at the end of such a year is to choose a mood. Despair can feel honest. Optimism can feel necessary. The more accurate conclusion is that conservation is a discipline of unfinished business.

The Red List updates remind us that delay is costly. The discovery lists remind us that ignorance does not protect what we have not named. The obituaries remind us that environmental progress depends on people who are not treated as renewable resources. And beyond the species named and the treaties signed, millions of hectares of forest, reef, and seafloor were still felled, bleached, or trawled in 2025.

What we lost in 2025 was not only species. It was time. What we found was not only new life. It was proof, again, that the future is still shaped by the choices we make today.

This piece was first published here

Header image: Rainforest in Brunei, on the island of Borneo, in Nov 2025. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.

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Rhett Butler Editor

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