6 chapter one

complicated by our considerable ignorance about many threatened

ecosystems and the biodiversity they protect. Most extant species are
yet to be described by taxonomists (Holloway and Stork 1991), and we
know very little about the distribution and abundance of most of those
that have been described. Close to a million species of arthropods have
been described, but we can assess the conservation status of only about
3,500 of them (Brooks et al. 2006). Thus there are many species threat-
ened with extinction about which we know little, except perhaps that
they have relatively small ranges and that they are unlikely to perform
unique ecological functions. In this respect, the snail darter is typical.
It is vulnerable to relatively local habitat change, and the extinctions of
species vulnerable for those reasons are unlikely to have dramatic flow-
on effects (with the possible exception of island species, all of whom
have restricted ranges). That in turn makes it unlikely that there are
powerful economic-instrumental reasons for preserving such species.
Perhaps we should think of these unremarkable species as expend-
able (see Sober 1986). However, there is a precautionary principle to
be urged against this thought: if we let a species go extinct, we have
foreclosed on the possibility that we might discover the species to be
important. We ought to preserve biodiversity to hedge our bets. We
maximize what conservation ethicists call “option value.” These ideas
will be explored in detail in 8.3 and 8.4.
Since the concept of biodiversity has been forged from such differ-
ent sources and with such different motives, it is no surprise, then, that
it has been used and measured in widely varying ways. We will mostly
focus on the idea that biodiversity is a natural magnitude (or magni-
tudes) of biological systems, for this is often how biologists employ the
concept (Gaston 1996a, 1996b; Kinzig et al. 2001). Indeed, biodiversity
is often spoken of as if it were a single property, something that we
might measure and compare across two habitats (Rolston 2001), and
this idea continues to be influential in conservation biology, though
conservation biologists no longer expect to be able to measure biodiver-
sity directly. As we shall see in chapter 7, there is considerable discus-
sion in conservation biology about surrogates, readily identifiable and
measurable features of biological systems. According to those searching
for a surrogate, biodiversity itself is a complex property, but if we are
lucky it covaries in a reasonably reliable way with a simple and measur-
able property. We need a measure of relative importance, change over
time, and of the effectiveness of intervention. So surrogates are chosen
as biodiversity indexes: we can use them to measure the biodiversity dif-
ference between habitat patches at a time, thus setting relative conser-
vation priorities. And we can use them to measure biodiversity changes