Hawaii may seem like a tropical paradise teeming with beautiful animals and plants, but what tourists don’t know is that many of the archipelago’s common species are non-native, and its indigenous species are facing an extinction crisis. With less than 1 percent of the land mass in the U.S., Hawaii is home to more than 30 percent of the nation’s endangered and rare species, about 360, and more than 1,000 native species are known to have gone extinct since humans arrived on the islands. Native animals and plants have been threatened by the destruction of forests, suburban sprawl, and severe ecosystem damage caused by farm animals that escaped into the wild. A few years ago, scientists working in Hawaii were hopeful that they could revive native species through restoration ecology, but now some of them are resigned to what they call “hospice ecology,” or taking care of species that are surely headed toward extinction. “Depressing — that’s an optimistic way to frame it. What we’re dealing with is whole suites of organisms disappearing,” said Rick Marshauer, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
