Author: John Woinarski, Professor of Conservation Biology, Charles Darwin University

More than 95% of Australian animals are invertebrates (animals without backbones – spiders, snails, insects, crabs, worms and others). There are at least 300,000 species of invertebrate in Australia. Of these, two-thirds are unknown to western science. This means there are huge gaps in our knowledge of Australia’s invertebrates. Our new study, published today in the journal Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, indicates there has been a catastrophic under-recording of Australia’s species extinctions. Our best estimate is that 9,111 invertebrate species have become extinct in Australia since 1788. This dwarfs the current official estimate of the total number of extinctions across all…