This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

When you think endangered species, which come to mind? Tigers, panda's, guerrillas. I'm guessing what probably does not are Hawaiian land snails.

Yet a new analysis in the journal Conservation Biology suggests that some 95% of known Hawaiian landsnails in the Amastardi family could already be gone.

So that's a horrible level of extinction.

Robert Cowie, a biologist at the University of Hawaii.

Cowie and his colleagues came up with the 95% figure by convening the world's foremost experts on Hawaiian lands nails,

that is the dozen or so scientists and naturalists who study the creatures.

Through a series of interviews and hundreds of field surveys of the islands,

they took their best guess as to whether each of the 325 documented species in the Amastardi family still existed.

They think only 15 are still alive, leaving 310 in the probably extinct category.

Now there is an organization that officially counts in the probably extinct category.

Now there is an organization that officially counts this stuff,

the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

But the Union lists only 33 of the 325 species as extinct, a gross underestimate in Cowie's view.

And therein lies the problem, he says.

Invertebrates, including snails, make up the lion's share of the world's biodiversity, but there's hardly anyone

to catalog it.

It's a tiny, tiny number of people relative to the vast extent of invertebrate biodiversity.

And to get an organism onto official endangered lists, you need data to document its disappearance.

Data that just aren't there for many invertebrates due to the labor shortage.

You know, in my most cynical negative days, I throw up my hands and say,

why do we even bother?

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