In Search of Lost Snails

The Hawaiian Islands were once home to one of the most diverse assemblages of terrestrial snails found anywhere on earth, with more than 750 recognized species. Today, however, the majority of these species are extinct, and most of those that remain are headed swiftly in the same direction. But this is just the crisis that we know about, that we can in some way quantify. In Hawai‘i, and all over the world, a diversity of species—many of them invertebrates—are being lost while they still remain unknown to science. In fact, for every described species that blinks out, the best estimates indicate that roughly another four extinctions take place entirely unknown to us. This article focuses on the particular case of Hawai‘i’s snails and the efforts of taxonomists to catalog them as a way into this broader unknown extinction crisis. Snails have particular lessons to offer in understanding and responding to this situation. This article seeks to draw out those lessons, thinking through some of the challenges for storytelling in summoning up these unseen others and in opening up a space for ethical encounter with living and dead beings that must, in important ways, remain beyond the edges of our knowledge.