Siberian tigers, giant pandas and polar bears are the poster animals for the worldwide conservation movement, but it was a considerably less glamorous creature that went into the record books as photographer Joel Sartore’s 11,000th species in his global Photo Ark project.
The Photo Ark is a National Geographic project to assemble a gallery of portrait photographs of every remaining animal species on planet Earth.
The hope is that the project will galvanize people to action, but it also has a more sobering aim — to record, possibly for posterity, all the animals that are disappearing forever in the looming Sixth Mass Extinction. We’re living in the Anthropocene era, the first epoch in geological time defined by human existence.
In the short time — a blink of an eye, in geological terms — since Sartore first started crisscrossing the globe for his Photo Ark project, 12 years ago now, a dozen of his portrait subjects have gone extinct.
That fate may yet await his milestone 11,000th portrait subject, but the odds may yet turn in its favour. The long-toothed dart moth, aka Dichagyris longidens, is so rare and mysterious it’s believed it had never been photographed alive until a Photo Ark expedition last September.
Sartore found his subject along the banks of the Pecos River, just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. He captured his image using lights, at night. The moth was captured, photographed and then released back into the wild, in keeping with Sartore’s mandate to leave as light a footprint on nature as possible — one reason why he chooses to take many of his portrait photographs in zoos. His first image for the Photo Ark was of a naked mole-rat at the Lincoln, Nebraska children’s zoo. Sartore is from Nebraska originally, and has lived much of his life there.
Sartore says he will stay with the Photo Ark project for the rest of his working life. He estimates he could have as many as has 15,000 species yet to go. They’re not all glamourous.
“There was a little frog, one of the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frogs, from Panama,” Sartore recalled in a recent National Geographic conference call with TV reviewers. “We all knew he was the last one. They’ve been wiped out by a fungus and habitat loss. Climate change may be helping that fungus along.”
The Rabbs’ tree frog officially went extinct in 2016.
“Things stick with you all the time. “The Bornean rhino, again, maybe the last one in the world. We’ll see. These are animals that are near and dear tome, obviously. They’re special because they’re quite rare, but aren’t they all special? Don’t we need to pay attention to all of them? The very last Bornean rhino I think I’ll ever see in my lifetime . . . and maybe everybody’s lifetime.”
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