I was born and raised in Hawai‘i and I have a masters degree in Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science, and I want to thank you so so much for this video, and sharing with your audience how unique and special the Hawaiian islands are when it comes to their biogeography, as well as how fragile their ecosystems are and how damaged they've become. I want to say also that you did fairly well with the pronunciations! Not perfect, but I've seen worse haha! And I can tell you did your research and tried to be accurate-both with the language and with the larger subject material. Mahalo palena ‘ole!
Dude missed a lot of key features on how things like animals/birds/plant life and insects being Dispersed across thousands of Miles by extreme hurricanes which I’ve been happening for millions of years across the planet 🤔 also the fact their are multiple unique Species of birds of pray specifically on the big island of Hawaii The Hawaiian hawk or ʻio is one …..
It's absolutely mindblowing to me as a Californian to think that a little plant from the Sierras made it out to Hawai'i millions of years ago and ended up becoming a whole group of incredibly diverse plants that occupied every biome on the islands! It's almost like bringing a flower to Mars and seeing it evolve into an entire new phylum.
4:40 Correct me if I’m misinterpreting this hypothesis but the crater in South Africa would not necessarily have been perfectly opposite Hawaii 2 Billion years ago. Correct? The current day alignment is probably just coincidental. The Hawaiian hotspot stays relatively stationary (relative to the pacific plate that slides over it) while that crater has been moving around with the African continent.
I logged in to post this. You can even see evidence of how the plates have moved over the hot spot, with the original seamounts being all the way near Russia. So while that impact crater is opposite Hawaii now, it surely wasn't the case a billion or so years ago.
And the same applies to Chicxulub crater. The plates are all moving in different directions so it's pure coincidence that you find impact craters NOW opposite of hot spots.
I thought the same but I think he might have accounted for it (with the Mexican impact at least). Right now they aren't each others antipodes. The only thing I cannot figure out is whether or not the impact angle of 60 degrees might have had some "impact". I also don't know enough about plate tectonics and core movement in order to critically assess his hypothesis but it seems farfetched, certainly if the shockwave has to travel through the core.
It does seems like that's probably just a conicidence, however this opens a new line of thinking, it would probably take some time for the impact of the meteorite to reach the other side of the planet, especially considering that the Earth is made of some dense stuff, which might mean that we can find other islands/volcanic hotspots by anylising big meteors impact on the planet. I am not a geologist, physicist and am not qualified to say this though.
Yea there are a lot of issues with the idea. Like look up a map of hot spots around the world and then major impact craters. Thinking in terms of stats, it's just really high probability that impacts will line up with hot spots anywhere. Bit disappointed to have that included... rest of the video is great.
As a native Hawaiian, and someone born and raised there. Thank you so much for this video! Ancient and modern Hawaiian flora and fauna is not taught enough in school, and learning about these things helps me appreciate my home so much more! Also, your genuine effort pronouncing those Hawaiian words makes up for the lack of execution. So I’ll give you a B- 🤣. Mahalo Nui Loa!
Also hawaiian local I thought so too ... for like the fist 20 he was doing quite well then it cuts to him struggling then went kinda down hill, good effort tho
I just got back from spending a two week honeymoon in Hawaii. I went to Honolulu, Maui, and Kauai. I embarrassed myself so many times trying to pronounce cities and road names. lol
Even though the video is 50 min long. The fact that it's interactive, informative and interesting makes it a worthy watch. It's like watching television all over again. Definitely my go to channel for long, documentary type videos.
What do you mean "Even though"? Some of us surfers have not yet succumbed to the social craze of subliminal attention deficate disorder...(AtlasPro has my permission to use this term, also known as "S.A.D.D." -- that's two capital "D's" for a double dose of that sad inability to hold one's attention beyond a "Deviantly Deceptive" 10 minute algorithem "Dastardly Designed to make it impossible for human beings to focus on any one thing for long enough to retain any kind of knowledge in order to properly sustain ones self without the direct accompanyment of the "Big Brother" who shall not be named, should one of those volcano-enducing comets ever decide to crack us a good one right in the tender globe sphere between our collective thighs, but I digress.) Some people do only have 10 minutes and 10 seconds to learn 4.6 billion years of geography. geology. ecology. and...oh dred, I've forgotten the 4th one. I blame these damned long videos. Quick, bring me my adderol, Uncle Sam! My digression digresses further... Anyways, where was I? Oh yes. I'm not knocking your opinion, merely comically and anhedonicly stating mine as an alternative to yours. Long videos, short ones, if its AtlasPro, it's going to be good. I think we can all agree on that much...xhopingx. Cheers. and a big salute to you, AP. -JJ
Off topic but I love the consistency of your channel. High-quality, educational and fun content and I've noticed that you ALWAYS upload at 7am EST exactly. My favorite channel :))
@@AtlasPro1 congrats on your 1M sub. You deserve it. It's a long time coming. I've commented this already on one of your shorts but I really hope you can make a video how anatomically modern humans changed as we spread out of africa.
I'm carrying out my PhD research in the Galápagos Islands with avian evolutionary history from a genomic perspective. I just want to say, what an awesome video/job you did to introduce these topics to the people! You are a great science communicator! Congrats!!! Keep this up!!!
You're initial struggle with our language was expected, editing aside. you actually progressed pretty well. The "W" doesn't have to be, but is pronounced as a "V" in traditional Hawaiian languagI. Ha-Vai`i. Kaho`o-la-Ve. The okina ( ` ) is the separation of vowel pronunciation often of the same vowel. Which you nailed successfully! That's awesome!. The kahakou stretches the pronunciation of a vowel. ( a line or dash over the specified vowel to be stretched ) all in all, I think you did a great. I appreciate that and thank you for this video.
A question about your impact crater theory: the impact crater in Africa might be directly across the globe from Hawaii 2 billion years ago but surely there has been significant continental shift since that time? Great content as always.
Yes man, Africa and its Vredeford crater was nowhere near the anti-pode of the current Hawaii. For Mars, however, with is lack of tectonic plates movement, this theory could hold water, I mean lava.
You actually might find the hypothesis in a scientific journal! "Antipodal hotspots and bipolar catastrophes: Were oceanic large-body impacts the cause?" by Jonathan T. Hagstrum
@@Capt_Saicin Not OP, but I can tell you that's the paper sited on Wikipedia in the Meteorite-induced formation section of the Large igneous province page.
Oh I will have to check this out. Because it's strange that the craters would still be in places over the antipodal hotspot while the hotspot has managed to drift. Like they're still linked, instead of the crafter's plate also moving off the spot. Or the impacts welded the crust to the mantle somehow.
I honestly would disagree with the idea of the Hawaiian hotspot being related to Vredefort Crater due to shifting plate tectonics, but something i really find odd is that if you follow the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain you will come to the Kamchatka Peninsula and further west is the Siberian Traps where one of the largest (if not the largest) volcanic event in world history happened and by the way the aproximated antipode is really close to the Wilkes land crater in Antarctica. So in a nutshell i would think that the head of the Hawaiian hotspot erupted in Eurasia and its what we know as the Siberian traps (something like the Reunion hotspot and the Deccan traps but even bigger).
I love how this channel conveniently discusses topics relating to what I’ve been learning about in my university classes, this is easily my favorite science and geography channel
Love your content. I live on Oahu, and now have friends from all over. I met this guy from the islands of Palau and he told me all about his islands. I met a Chuukese from the federated states of Micronesia. He introduced me to a higher totality of inter-island sociology in the Pacific regions. I spoke with a Tongan that told stories older than history, passed to him from his great great grandfather, stories about the Lost continent of Mu. I've spoken with people from the Marshallese Islands - they spoke about the differences between islands around the Pacific. I lived in American Samoa for a year, 2004-2005, Samoans are close to my heart.
I live in the Midwest, and I pretty much always get up at around 7 am. It’s such a great treat to wake up and see that you just posted a video about an hour ago, since they are high-quality and don’t come out very often. If I ever launch a UA-cam channel, you will have been a HUGE inspiration!
I live in Hawaii and I had no idea how many extinct species there were here and how evolutionary active this place is! Mahalo for this great video Atlas Pro.
From what my professor was telling us, there were records of the silver sword grass so plentiful on mauna kea that it would make the mountain shine silver in the sunlight. Must have been a sight to see.
You know I got to thank Atlas Pro for making this video because I actually was inspired to buy the very book Atlas Pro used as a source in this video for the birds and I gotta say it is quite nice.
Maybe. Plants always have the same resource requirements, so nothing in particular will be different about them living on a small landmass (an island) compared to a large one (a continent). But what would likely happen is that any seeds that can float on the wind or waves or hitch a ride on or inside an animal will make it to the island, no matter the size of the adult plant. In some cases you might just get grass seeds germinating on a new island, or maybe just big trees. In those cases, those plants will change to fill the new niches that are empty. More likely though, a large number of species from different sizes will end up on new islands. They may be from disparate shores, but they'll more likely than not already fill the required niches. So there won't be an island syndrome, species of plants on islands will look very similar to their close relatives on the mainlands. Just with a mash of odd species from all over the place filling out the ecosystem.
I'm not a biologist but i would assume so cause without humans cutting them down trees would grow bigger and bigger, but also plants without animals eating them wouldn't keep up the same defenses like thorns on a rose bush and would change from fruit to seeds that spread by wind
Yes, there's an island syndrome, generally with gigantism and dwarfism, while mostly small animals get large and originally large animals get small, sometimes it's just a roll the dice thing and an animal might go the opposite way with evolutionary pressures forcing small animals to get smaller and vice versa.
You should make a video about the Appalachian mountains. They always get overlooked cause they’re small and on the east coast but they have their own beauty that we here absolutely love
I totally agree! Even though I live near them and have been all over them I feel like I know very little because they are considered to be like normie mountains. tbh I would love an exploration of all the mountain ranges of the world :)
@@jeremycawley3360 especially the small ones, the Adirondacks are commonly mistaken as part of the Appalachians which is understandable considering the Adirondacks are just off the end of the Appalachians but are geologically unrelated. Similarly i would like to know what the difference is between the Rockies, Seirra Nevedas, and Cascades. (Are they geologically unique or just named poorly?)
@@TreeCutterDoug exactly, thats the most interesting thing about them. That they continue onto a completely different continent. It really just shows how old they are. He needs to make a video about it now
@@TreeCutterDoug Small as in not very tall. They are incredibly old, but as things stand now the Appalachians are baby's first mountains compared to the Rockies, Sierra Nevadas or the Cascades. Like, if you were born on the east coast of the US and consider the Appalachians to be tall, you are not prepared for mountain ranges out west. They are basically big forested hills to us Western Americans. For instance, if you look at prominence, Mount Washington is the highest of all of them but at only 6,158 ft, or 59th in the US. Mount Mitchell is 62nd. And god help you if you care about actual elevation, you can't even find any appalachian peak in the top 300 in the US. It may be interesting, but I don't even know if they have a unique bio-region, I think it is shared across the entire interior Atlantic region's forests, not just limited to the mountains themselves. I don't know if they get high enough to actually cause major flora and fauna changes compared to the forests that abut them. But I am no expert, so that may be wrong.
The amount of passion you have for geography and the range of research you do is amazing! I never thought I could see someone being as enthusiastic about geography as me. Keep it up man!
Every one of Atlas Pro's videos is an incredible piece of work, both super educational and super entertaining. This one in particular is going up as one of my favorites. Looking forward to seeing more!
I'll never forget a clip from the documentary "Racing extinction" about the call of the last male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō alive. It's one of the things that inspired me to pay more attention to the environment, hearing the last male of an entire species call out to a female, that will never get answered.
I watched a video about “Lonesome George”, the last of one of the species of Galapagos tortoises, and how they tried to get him to breed with a couple females of a closely related species, which didn’t work, but hey, at least he got to have some fun! Also, his long life (being a tortoise and all), large size, and poignant plight attracted a great deal of attention to preserving those species that COULD be saved. Godspeed, Lonesome George! 🥹🫡❤
Went to Hawai'i for the first time last year and was blown away by the unique diversity of it. Definitely more to Hawai'i than just beautiful beaches. We drove up Mount Haleakala, and it was incredible to experience several vastly different biomes just within a couple hours of driving and hiking.
I'd love a biogeography of the Phillipines, Japan or Iceland. This video was awesome. I love these longer videos. Also congratulations on 1 million! You've earned it and you fully deserve it.
Near the Philippines is also the island of Borneo, my homeland which is shared between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. With tropical rainforests and biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon, with a highest peak in Southeast Asia, evidence of early settlements, unique tribe diversity and geographical wonders. The Malaysian side has been plagued by deforestation to plant oil palms but some pristine rainforests are well kept. Chien C. Lee has some amazing wildlife photography on the island of Borneo.
@SyemurN Yes! Borneo is one of the few locations on the list of places I absolutely must visit before I die. It's such a fascinating place with an incredibly unique and beautiful landscape and mix of flora and fauna(not that I'm telling you anything you didn't already know, being from there). Learning about Borneo from a random documentary I came across on TV when I was little is a major part of what got me interested in biology and geography to begin with and is a huge part of why I'd like to go back to school to get into conservation and ecological research. The rainforest devastation caused by the growth of palm oil plantations in Island Southeast Asia is something I'd very deeply like to work to help mitigate, and ensuring places like your home remain as undamaged and in their natural state as possible is something very important to me personally. I hope more people can discover, learn about and grow to love and appreciate your home and the many other beautiful, unique places on this planet we all call home.
Crazy timing. I just got home yesterday from my honeymoon in Hawaii. I spent two weeks there and stayed at Honolulu, Maui, and Kauai. All three were downright incredible, but Kauai was my absolute favorite. It was absolutely gorgeous. Everyone there was so rediculously nice and friendly as well. I miss it already. Hawaii truly is a special place. Aloha my friends 🤙
It’s funny that u say that I visit Maui Kauai and to end my vacation i go to Oahu Every summer I love each island because there all different in there own way I wish I can move there one day and never look back 😂
Acknowledges that Eurasia is, in fact, one continent, but then turns around and apparently fails to factor in continental drift when pitching this impact idea... well you win some, you lose some I guess
Nearly every type of soil on earth can be found in Hawaiʻi. The only types that don’t occur are permafrost (for obvious reasons) and the type found in coniferous forests because Hawaiʻi has no native conifers.
@@discreetscrivener7885 Yes, but the presence of conifers for two centuries at most won’t affect the soil to nearly the same extent as millions of years of coniferous growth.
I somehow feel bad that i have such good quality educational content for free. Thank you. This has grown to become my favorite youtube channel since the first time i watched the geography of mars
Man, this is seriously one of my favourite channels. 40 minutes of video that felt like 5. A video about Socotra or the Canary Islands could be really interesting too. Keep it up man!!! ❤❤❤
I stumbled across this video only because my wife and I are planning a trip to the Hawaiian islands and I was curious to learn more about this part of the world. This was the first video I have viewed from your channel and I found it very interesting (I actually sat through the entire video) even though this is not usually my kind of subject-matter. After watching this video, I have an enhanced appreciation for both the islands and their ecological diversity. Thank you for thanking the time to produce this!
The flaw in your antipodal impact theory is that, at the time of formation (~2 Bya) , the Vredefort Crater was on the hypothesized "Vaalbara" supercontinent, which then included portions of (modern) southern Africa and western Australia. The current far removed positions of the Kaapvaal craton from the Pilbara craton serves to illustrate how much tectonic motion has occurred in the interceding aeons. Likewise, the long chain of islands illustrating the longevity of the Hawai’i hotspot also serves to illustrate the change of direction of the tectonic plates. I am not saying you are "wrong", only that you would need to do a great deal more hard science to get your antipodal impact theory accepted. One idea you may not have considered is that some of the "unknown origin" plants derive from taxa that were not preserved in the fossil record and were otherwise rendered extinct by the formation of and events following the formation of the Chicxulub crater (~66 Mya) . Another quibble, is that as recent as 3 Mya , Antarctica had vegetation, was possibly closer to the position of Australia, and the ocean currents of that era were likely to be considerably different. Only this is certain: Deep time is hard to map.
The hot spot has not moved since the impact. However, the tectonic plates have moved over this hotspot overtime. This can be observed from the Emperor Seamount chain (West-northwest of the hawaiian islands. Although, about 40 million years ago there was a shift in plate tectonics causing the plates to move a different direction thus the seamounts began moving east rather than south.
God that souces/references list is incredible. This is something I thirst for in all non-fiction youtube content, and something that all content creators should be including
Another masterpiece in this channel. Consistent quality of content and comments. I'm just happy that people like you exist. I'd had never thought of visiting Hawaii as it is so far from where I live in Spain but now I have another fascinating place to dream about.
You should definitely travel to Hawaii someday. I have been to Maui and am going to O’ahu this summer. The next Hawaiian island I really want to visit is Kauai because I have heard that it is the most beautiful of the islands and hasn’t been developed as much as other Hawaiian islands.
48:30 I sure as hell do appreciate these longer videos! I found this really interesting and I really like how in depth your channel goes when it comes to topics like this; a shorter video wouldntve done this topic justice. Keep up the good work! :D
Being a native Hawaiian, itʻs something to grip my heart around the fact that us humans was the main contributor to these birds extinction. Royal Hawaiians used to hunt these birds down for itʻs beautiful feathers to make helmets, capes, and other royal symbolic display of their status. Important and informative. Hopefully we can learn from them and save the rest from going extinct.
This video was really calming. Your interest in the subject makes the video just much more alive. I wish UA-cam algorithm gave longer, educational videos like these a better chance. Keep up the good work, because I will watch any video you make and I know I will enjoy them too.
Hawaii is so diverse! Most Islands are very diverse due to Island Biodiversity. It's basically so isolated that animals never leave and evolve there. (Also the Galapagos, Reunion and maybe easter island too! If they didnt chop down all the trees on it.)
The magnitude of just how much Hawaii has lost birdwise became a lot more apparent when you mentioned that there were only 23 endemic species left and comparing that to the many species that had been lost.
I really love this channel. This video is really one of my favs! Probably worth mentioning is one of the more popular theories of Hawaiian and other Pacific islands plants is that many, if not most of the Indo-Malayan plants were brought by the Pacific islanders (Polynesians/Micronesians/Melanesians). The ancestors of these people were in turn brought them from their ancestral lands where they originated from, southeast Asia and these people brought along their local plants/seeds along their voyage to Pacific islands.
Everytime you post one of these long 30+ min videos, I feel like I really cannot watch a video that long and that my attention span will give in too soon. But every single time, you have me hooked for the entirety of the length of the video no matter how long! I cannot look away once I start! I truly love these...
While it's a bummer to not have a lot of unique animal species around anymore, it's at least some consolation that there have been people who cared enough to catalog what they found, and people who have come back later and tried to conserve the past, and try to keep parts of the present from also becoming the past.
Would love to see a similar video on New Zealand. Pretty much everything you said about birds and island tameness/giantism syndrome applies to NZ as well except id argue its even more interesting because NZ has much more landmass than Hawaii while still have no land predators - so NZ birds evolved even more into very weird niches and you got things like the Moa, kiwi, and Haasts Eagle.
Also the graph he showed was a little off. I think the graph in the book didn't take into account that the Moa came in 7-9 species. Which gives us a total of over 60 birds gone. Still behind Hawaii but higher then shown.
watching this here in NZ I was thinking the same thing! so many simularities! but I think a big difference is that NZ already had a lot of biology when it split from gwandona, so it would have a lot of palotropic stuff, for example the tuatara, where as hawaii popped out of the ocean completely barren so literally everything had to take a journey to get there!
Man I just want to say you have one of the most interesting science-based channels on youtube. Everything you talk about just draws me in. Keep up the great content!
For those wondering about the Hawaiian volcanism, another explanation of the Hawaiian hotspot is magma plumes. Hot rock near the core gets superheated due to the extreme heat and pressure there, and it begins to rise through the mantle. While most plumes don't reach the surface, those that do will hit the plate, and begin feeding an absolutely massive magma chamber beneath the surface. Because mantle processes are *slow*, and because of hot rock contiually being fed into the plume, these plumes last for millions, possibly billions, of years and will continue to erupt the whole time.
I remember watching your videos and subbing when you had like 50k subs, now you're over a million and it's so so deserved. your content is always incredibly interesting and high quality, your animations, maps, scripts and your presenting of everything together is done exceptionally well I can't wait to see your channel grow even more, I love seeing educational content become more and more popular, it's a great thing
Hey Atlas love your videos. Just a thought, Hawaii and Africa are antipodes today but making this comparison only makes sense on relatively recent timescales. Isn’t that crater so old that now it’s been dragged by tectonic movement to a completely different spot? I know the earth today vs 66 million years ago looked (kinda) similar to today but 2 billion years seems like a stretch to me to be more than coincidental. Am I missing something?
@@imulippo5245 yes but my point being the crater may not reflect where the impact (or antipodal hotspot) would have happened relative to the earths mantle some 2 billion years ago
Yes on Mars antipodal places stay the same because crust don`t move there, on Earth they change with time because of tectonic plate movement. Vredefort crater was not antipodal point to Hawaii in the past.
the first hawaiian islands would have been up by Russia, so thats where you would have to look from. There's just been too much time since then to give this theory any basis
Your video took me back to my days as an Biology undergraduate. I especially enjoyed your use of countless photos and diagrams to make your point. Keep this up and I will gladly watch future videos from you.
You did a pretty good job on pronouncing the bird names for not practicing before hand. I always loved your channel. Glad that you did a vid on my home.
The Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is an amazing story. All those islands, all the way from Taiwan where they started to Rapa Nui/ Easter Island, which is the most remote separately colonized place in pre-European history. All settled by small teams in outrigger canoes with simple sales. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There is even a good chance that they may have reached South America (which isn't much further than Rapa Nui.) Of course the part that doesn't get mentioned because they left no traces, is all those outrigger expeditions that were lost at sea over the centuries. Hawaii itself is a long long way away from any other islands, so it's probably an amazing story how the first Polynesian boaters came across it. It is also almost certain for example that some Hawaiian settlers must have loaded up the canoes to try and head East again, without knowing that the next landform was either Mexico or California. And were never heard from again.
Don't forget they also went to Madagascar. Interestingly, these Austronesian seafarers settled Madagascar a thousand years before the Maori settled New Zealand.
This really does feel like a culmination of so many of the videos you’ve put out the past couple of years. Looking forward to many more! Happy 1 million!!
Very cool video. I'm a huge fan of these in depth videos. I would vote for a closer look at the Indian Ocean islands. The geology of the Seychelles is fascinating, as is the case study of Réunion/Mauritius/Rodrigues. Huge kudos on this video, it was really excellent
Loved it! I live on Maui and I see what you’re saying every day everywhere. Thanks for highlighting the importance of making a difference by learning from the past.
I was actually arguing about native impacts on environment vs European impact a while ago but specifically about New Zealand instead of Hawaii. It's crazy that people don't realize the reality of history or how extinction actually happens. The mosquito is a great example, most people wouldn't think that they'd be that big of a deal for animals. It's important too because if people don't understand this sort of thing how are we going to prevent it happening in the future?
I can believe it with the mosquito. It actually makes less of an impact on my state (lots of lakes, ditches, bottoms, shallow rivers, deep creeks, plentiful rain, etc) to do careful parasite spraying. Mosquitos nearly made our birds threatened to almost locally extinct. And brain worms flatout killed off basically our entire deer population (save white tailed deer. Those are overpopulated, but are also listed as the major carriers that made the rest of the deer locally extinct. For whatever reason white tail deer were more resilient than the other deer species. So No Wolves and Few Other Large Predators + No Other Competing Deer Species…a la too many white tailed deer.)
There are two species of Hawaiian birds that naturally evolved immunity to avian malaria (somehow). Surprise surprise, they’re the only two that aren’t endangered. Relatively rare, yes, but you can find them without scaling a couple thousand feet up a mountain if you know where to look.
I live on big island and I just can’t understand how lax our standards are for imports especially after we’ve gotten Little fire ants (make your pets blind btw), Coqui frogs, Africanized Bees, and countless snakes that have snuck in and luckily haven’t mated or haven’t mated yet in populations large enough to recognize.
I love long-form videos like this where you take a deep dive into unique places and areas on earth. Youre one of my favorite channels and Cant wait to see whats up next
2 роки тому
This is by far one of your best episodes, easily in top 5. Thank you very much.
One interesting part of that study showing where the Hawaiian species originated says that Indo-Malayan and East Asian wildlife predominantly jumped to Hawaii using pacific islands as a bridge, whereas the US’s wildlife came directly in all but one case, that’s really fascinating to me.
I always watch to the very last second of your videos. Especially love the longer ones- by far my favorite channel on this platform. The way you present the details and transition between them is so fluid and easy to comprehend. Currently I'm sick with the flu, but watching this has made me feel a bit better. Here is hoping that we can preserve Hawaii's natural fauna and flora for thousands of years to come, the next few years being the most important for solidifying that preservation.
Kudos to your hard work and deep research. The amount of time and efforts you've put in must be incredible and just wanted to let you know, we all appreciate it!
Reading about Hawaii's geography, this reminds me of Michael Crichton's novel called Micro. This author is a mastermind of biological sci-fi. He thoroughly described the flora and fauna of Hawaii from a "micro" perspective. Real and brutal. I recommend this book to everyone
Really appreciate you for spending the time making such long and in-depth video despite the pressure to transition to shorts. This was very educational and I learnt so much about Hawaii that i never wouldve
Great video! Interestingly enough, I’ve never known that Hawaii was only (natively) populated with birds until now. I do have a question though, could you do a video on the Mediterranean? It’s not the tropics but it is a biodiversity hotspot.
And (for once) dogs, rats, and cats aren’t Extinction Causers as invasive species since they’re actually native to north africa, the mediteranean, and west asia. There were SO MANY CATS in Lebanon and Jordan and I have friends saying the same about Turkey as well. (Although, human conflicts have caused animals to be locally extinct. In Lebanon we never saw any birds, only bats; war-caused famines made people desperate enough to eat them all. They would’ve ate the bats, too, except it made them sick, so with the birds gone the bat population exploded. Saw several feral and stray cats just casually catching bats midair and eating them. If I had to guess that’s also why the cats weren’t eaten-if a cat ate a bat it probably carried whatever diseases the bat had.)
@@anonymousfellow8879 that’s a very intersection anecdote. My father is Lebanese and we are visiting Lebanon this year. When we visit together I will look out for those signs.
I also never knew about Hawaii being originally bird-only. Just like New Zealand, and just as fragile. Curious that Atlas never mentioned New Zealand that I recall, nor reptiles.
Wow this is all really fascinating. I liked that you also included plants as I like them more than animals. Thinking about evolution on islands where they can start from zero is incredible. Thank you for this lecture long video
I’ve always had an interest with Madagascar and Australia, which are more thought about than Hawaii in terms of biogeography, and have a huge history that many people may not be familiar with.
Haven't traveled to Hawai'i yet, but would like to as I'm increasingly becoming interesting in the unique biology and the efforts to preserve some of earth's most precious gems. Well, I technically DID go to Hawai'i, but I was still growing inside my mother while my parents were vacationing there at the beginning of the 90s. I like to think that even in my fetal state, I could still pick up the unique calls and sounds the local wildlife was making, creating a loving connection with the islands that I still feel today.
i really love your style of videos and all the animations and stuff - it is a mystery to me how to even do this but it helps so much in understanding everything you explain. such interesting videos every time!
Do Philippine biogeography next! With its unique position being sandwiched by the Indo-Malayan ecoregion and the Australasian ecoregion it has both elements and add that some Palearctic animals have contributed to its modern form (a supporting claim for the Chinese flora and fauna to insular Philippines via Taiwan). It is very interesting since, these distributions also correspond on human migration via Austronesian expansion.
I find it hard to find anything interesting on the geology/geography/biology of the Kerguelen Islands and they seem pretty interesting, maybe at least for a shorter video? ❤️
Kerguelen and surrounding island groups like the McDonald Islands collectively are assigned to the 'Antarctic Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean' ecoregion by the WWF. Like other isolated island groups, there are several animal and plant species found only on the islands and nowhere else, with most having diverged from their closest relatives on other continents several million years ago. However, because of the extremely harsh climate, the ecosystem is nowhere near as diverse as other island chains of comparably large size. Of the current living species on the island, most are only distantly related to any other life, and most of their closest relatives live in New Zealand and to a lesser extent Australia and South America. It's worth noting that the Kerguelen Islands are the mountaintops of an ancient submerged continent similar to New Zealand, called 'Kerguelea', which is thought to have existed as a small continent about half the size of Greenland from 100-20 million years ago. However, as far as I'm aware there are no genetic studies indicating if any of its current species are descended from ancestors on old Kerguelea-nearly all plant and animal life would have been wiped out by the continent slowly being submerged, the earth's climate becoming much colder, and recent glaciation events like the Last Ice Age. The most common plant is Azorella, which forms large sheets of foliage much like grasslands in most of the rest of the world. These are extremely small flowering plants, which look more like moss from a distance, and grow atop the decaying mass of their parents, dying every winter and leaving seeds for the next generation. Also somewhat common is Acaena, a member of the Rose family somewhat common in New Zealand which is thought to have originated in Antarctica prior to the formation of the Ice Cap. This isn't to imply that Kerguelen islands are grass-free, however, a single grass species Poa cookii is quite common, which use their exceptionally long roots to collect nutrients buried deep in the soil. The largest and best known plant is Pringea, the "Kerguelen Cabbage", which descended from much smaller ancestors which lived in the cold southern extreme end of South America 5 million years ago. Wherever the ground is too rocky for other plants to grow (like many other members of the Cabbage Family, they can grow on rocks with little to no actual soil), particularly high-altitude areas, these small plants are dominant, sometimes forming their own grassland-like fields. In the absence of competition for sunlight from larger plants, they have become wider and flatter than their relatives, maximizing the surface area for photosynthesis. In the brackish wetlands by the coasts, various moss species are quite successful. As far as scientists know Kerguelen is home to just 3 types of insects: Beetles, flies, and moths. Of the 23 known species, 19 are flightless--there's little use in something which uses lots of energy and invites heat loss on an island with no predatory flying insects. Even the ones that can fly are very bad at it and only ever use it to search for mates. By far the most common animals on the island are weevils, herbivorous beetles with distinctive funnel-shaped mouthparts used to suck liquids out of plants. Other beetles dive in the coastal waters to collect aquatic plants or debris that washes up on the shore. Flies (almost all of which are flightless, ironically enough) serve an equally important role, consuming dead plant and fungal material. Exactly one species of moth is known--fittingly a 'cabbage moth' which feeds exclusively on the Kerguelen Cabbage. To my knowledge, no predatory insects are native to Kerguelen. Instead, the predatory arthropod niche is exclusively occupied by Myro spiders, which is dominant in Kerguelea despite being fairly uncommon in Australia and New Zealand, the only other places they are known from. Rather than building webs, they hunt in the intertidal region, mainly feeding on the beetles searching the zone for ocean debris during high tide. Other arthropods include mites and springtails. The only vertebrates on Kerguelean are penguins, seabirds, and seals. 3 species of seal raise young on the islands, where they are safe from the orcas that patrol the surrounding waters. 4 species of penguin do the same, mainly living on fish and crustaceans but coming to shore to breed and escape from leopard seals. Interestingly, Commerson's dolphin, which is otherwise only found off the southeastern coast of South America, is also found around Kerguelen, feeding on various crustaceans in the shallow surrounding sea. The seabirds on the island mostly use the islands as nesting grounds, while getting all their food from the water, but Terns feed on the insects on the land itself, and sheathbills feed on dead seals and the eggs of other birds. The Kerguelen ecosystem has proven very fragile in the face of human colonization, which has brought dozens of new species previously unable to reach the isolated islands. As the Kerguelen islands have a climate remarkably similar to the Scottish Highlands, countless species from Europe are capable of thriving there, and often out-competing the locals-indeed, the total number of non-native insect species now outnumber the 23 native ones. Now, sheep graze on its grass while Reindeer destroy moss and lichen. Predatory beetles target vulnerable weevils which lack any natural predators. Feral cats and rats attack the nests of seabirds, driving several to near extinction. But by far the most destructive are rabbits, which chew through Kerguelen cabbage and almost every other plant on the islands, striking at the very heart of the whole food web. As such, the World Wildlife Fund has assessed the 'Antarctic Islands of the Southern Indian Ocean' ecoregion as critically endangered, making them even more vulnerable than the Amazon Rainforest. As humans remain unable or unwilling to exterminate all of the invasive mammals, to say nothing of the countless invasive insects which are essentially impossible to eradicate, these habitats are likely to become even more unrecognizable in the coming decades.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video and I hope that you make more so that I can learn about the geology and biology of islands. Basically any islands around the world. Thank you for taking the time to make this video.
I just got back from a trip to Hawaii and this video was very relevant to my interests. I was actually fortunate enough to see a Mauna Kea Silversword while I was there - it was behind a huge fenced off area with a gate to prevent any roaming goats. The way that the Big Island has so many different biomes is so fascinating to me - going from desert to rainforest to alpine in such a short range as you mentioned. Anyway, really awesome video! Thanks for making this.
The 'Okina' is the apostrophe you see in a lot of Pacific languages. It represents a glottal stop. Thank you for bringing laughter to my day while massacring my native home's language and also teaching me something new about it.
New Zealand is another landmass that developed due to isolation, no landbased mammals and a variety of flightless birds have unfortunately lead to severe impact of people on the fauna in NZ.
It’s interesting to see how invasive species have supplanted the native ones in their ecological niches. For example, I’ve seen barn owls fairly often. There is an area on Kauai where they are doing a controlled experiment to see what the impact of introducing Galapagos tortoises to the environment would be. They are hoping they can fill the ecological niche left by the Turtle Billed goose mentioned in the video, as a means of managing the island’s flora.
I really love your channel, a lot of the people I watch just talk about facts and have very little to contribute to the conversation. You give us hypothesis and ideas that are original and awesome!
Im from Hawaii born and raised. Thanks for doing such an awesome job with this video. You also actually did a great job with pronunciation too, considering you are literally speaking a different language than you are used to.
Really interesting seeing the images of the extinct birds, and how similar some of them look to similarly-extinct avian species here in Aotearoa/NZ! Edit: 27:48 nice underplayed pun!! 😁 45:37... and another one!
Dear AtlasPro (I know you said not to call you that, but the only thing I remember about your name is that I don't know how to spell it), first I really enjoy your videos; great work. Second, you've talked a lot about biogeography but there's one thing you almost never mention (as far as I can tell) and that I actually asked myself about three times during this video: bugs! I know so little about insects, to the point that I couldn't even guess as to the amount of insects living in Hawaii before birds arrived, and I think that a lot of people are in the same situation. Would you considered doing a video about the evolution or biogeography of insects? Please and thank you and have a lovely day.
Hey Atlas, you were pretty decent with the Hawai'ian pronunciations. The only glaring thing is that in Hawai'ian "W" is pronounced more like a "V". Keep up the great videos and thank you for doing a video on my home.
Just FYI...When pronouncing Hawaiian words, if W is at beginning of a word, pronounce as W..e.g...Waimanalo, Waimea, Waikiki, Wai'ahole(Why-ah-ho-lay) Wai'kane(Why-kah-nay) wiki-wiki. When W is mid-word, pronounce as Vee..e.g...Alewa(Ah-leh-vah), Hawaii(Hah-vye-ee), Kaho'olawe(Kah-ho-oh-lah-vay), Ewa(Eh-vah), Haleiwa(Hah-lay-ee-vah), Ka'a'awa(Kah-ah-ah-vah). Apostrophe/glottal stops(') cut short previous letters pronounciation....
W- v Sound is not specific where one needs to be native speaker or language student for there are no hard rules. Usually if the w occurs within a word and not in the first position it’s pronounced as v and in the first position it’s w. Example: Waikiki and Hawa’i but again no hard and fast rules. Mahalo for trying.
As much as I appreciate this video, the research you performed, and the earnest attempt at pronouncing the Hawaiian names, there was one part that piqued my ire: the part where you discussed Hawaiians shooting the ‘o’o to collect their feathers does not seem based in fact, but rather in speculation. Even into the early 1900s, Hawaiians saw themselves as caretakers of the land, to include flora and fauna. We’re mistakes made? Sure. However, as a Hawaiian, I find it hard to believe that my ancestors would discard a known ethical practice with reckless abandon when they were at the forefront of conservation well before western society (as seen in documented kapu periods of fishing and relative size harvesting in loko ia). That being said, thank you for taking the time to discuss, in depth, my home.
@@chaosXP3RT Not sure if this was your intention, but this comment comes across as a bit tone deaf--the islands of Hawai'i and the Hawai'ians living there were forcibly colonized. They have their own culture and practices that were outlawed as an attempt to stamp them out by Western colonizers. How would you feel if you were being forced to give up the traditions, values, and practices most important to you because a group of strangers who turned up on your land suddenly decreed it? Additionally, it's a good question--unlike industrialized Western societies that, for example, were happy to hunt beavers into near extinction in Europe by the 17th century just to sell top hats, Hawai'ians had a tradition of subsistence living. Was hunting the 'o'o just for its feathers a special case, or is this a Western bias?
@@maevemaguire7278 It sounds like to me, your question is more like "Were the Hawaiians special? Or perhaps it was the industrialized West that was the savages". Your comment doesn't strike me as trying to provoke a conversation of substance and nuance. I suspect you want to find any way possible to dehumanize Western society. I'm not here for any kind of "insert ____ supremacy". Hawaiian and "Westerners" are both human beings, flawed and all. The extinction of the O'o is the result of human nature and more specifically, economics. Anytime people collectively agree on the value of certain items, people will naturally try to acquire more of that valuable item. The Hawaiians were not better or worse than anyone else when they caused O'o extinction. They simply failed to adequately preserve the species and fairly regulate the acquisition of it's feathers.
To me, the most likely scenario where Antarctic flora would make it to the Hawaiian archipelago would be via its closest, and last, connected continent: Australia. Either through their shared biological pool, or shortly after their separation when the continents were separate, yet close enough, for the surrounding southern current to not fully disconnect the two landmasses.
I love your videos, they are very informative as well as interesting. Plus, I can save them in my 'Earth History' file. Thank you so much for uploading these and please keep them coming.
Good job sir. I love what you've done here. This is a video that every real-estate developer needs to see before ever considering to build on the Hawaiian Islands.
I was born and raised in Hawai‘i and I have a masters degree in Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science, and I want to thank you so so much for this video, and sharing with your audience how unique and special the Hawaiian islands are when it comes to their biogeography, as well as how fragile their ecosystems are and how damaged they've become. I want to say also that you did fairly well with the pronunciations! Not perfect, but I've seen worse haha! And I can tell you did your research and tried to be accurate-both with the language and with the larger subject material. Mahalo palena ‘ole!
howzit 🤙
@@dc5hnl110 Eh, cuz! 😁🤙
that’s so sweet of you
Wutdup bruh!
@@buttonz8646 Howzit cuz!
The way you present images is insane. You're actually an after effects pro!
The secret ingredient is love
I love when my favorite creators compliment my favorite creators. Both of you are among the best educational content creators on UA-cam, hands down.
@@AtlasPro1 i love the pacific, so cool to see you make this. Ty!!!
When he started animating that still image of a book he owns, I realized how little I know about what goes on behind the scenes haha
Dude missed a lot of key features on how things like animals/birds/plant life and insects being Dispersed across thousands of Miles by extreme hurricanes which I’ve been happening for millions of years across the planet 🤔 also the fact their are multiple unique Species of birds of pray specifically on the big island of Hawaii The Hawaiian hawk or ʻio is one …..
It's absolutely mindblowing to me as a Californian to think that a little plant from the Sierras made it out to Hawai'i millions of years ago and ended up becoming a whole group of incredibly diverse plants that occupied every biome on the islands! It's almost like bringing a flower to Mars and seeing it evolve into an entire new phylum.
4:40 Correct me if I’m misinterpreting this hypothesis but the crater in South Africa would not necessarily have been perfectly opposite Hawaii 2 Billion years ago. Correct? The current day alignment is probably just coincidental. The Hawaiian hotspot stays relatively stationary (relative to the pacific plate that slides over it) while that crater has been moving around with the African continent.
I logged in to post this. You can even see evidence of how the plates have moved over the hot spot, with the original seamounts being all the way near Russia. So while that impact crater is opposite Hawaii now, it surely wasn't the case a billion or so years ago.
And the same applies to Chicxulub crater. The plates are all moving in different directions so it's pure coincidence that you find impact craters NOW opposite of hot spots.
I thought the same but I think he might have accounted for it (with the Mexican impact at least). Right now they aren't each others antipodes. The only thing I cannot figure out is whether or not the impact angle of 60 degrees might have had some "impact". I also don't know enough about plate tectonics and core movement in order to critically assess his hypothesis but it seems farfetched, certainly if the shockwave has to travel through the core.
It does seems like that's probably just a conicidence, however this opens a new line of thinking, it would probably take some time for the impact of the meteorite to reach the other side of the planet, especially considering that the Earth is made of some dense stuff, which might mean that we can find other islands/volcanic hotspots by anylising big meteors impact on the planet.
I am not a geologist, physicist and am not qualified to say this though.
Yea there are a lot of issues with the idea. Like look up a map of hot spots around the world and then major impact craters. Thinking in terms of stats, it's just really high probability that impacts will line up with hot spots anywhere. Bit disappointed to have that included... rest of the video is great.
As a native Hawaiian, and someone born and raised there. Thank you so much for this video! Ancient and modern Hawaiian flora and fauna is not taught enough in school, and learning about these things helps me appreciate my home so much more!
Also, your genuine effort pronouncing those Hawaiian words makes up for the lack of execution. So I’ll give you a B- 🤣.
Mahalo Nui Loa!
Make hawaii mosquito free again 😂
As someone who is a Hawaii local, I appreciate the attempt at pronouncing the names of the extinct birds of the islands!
Also hawaiian local I thought so too ... for like the fist 20 he was doing quite well then it cuts to him struggling then went kinda down hill, good effort tho
Eh, even the kama'aina have a history of massacring hawaiian words (At least the older ones, this may have changed)
@@Tinil0, as a kama’āina, many of us still butcher Hawai'ian pronunciation, unfortunately.
I think it was the most fun part of the video, lol ^^
I just got back from spending a two week honeymoon in Hawaii. I went to Honolulu, Maui, and Kauai. I embarrassed myself so many times trying to pronounce cities and road names. lol
Even though the video is 50 min long. The fact that it's interactive, informative and interesting makes it a worthy watch. It's like watching television all over again. Definitely my go to channel for long, documentary type videos.
I didn't even notice the length until you mentioned it. That's how good his videos are.
Yeah, but 45 minutes is him screwing up the Hawaiian pronunciations of bird names.
@@Ishkur23 Good content indeed
What do you mean "Even though"? Some of us surfers have not yet succumbed to the social craze of subliminal attention deficate disorder...(AtlasPro has my permission to use this term, also known as "S.A.D.D." -- that's two capital "D's" for a double dose of that sad inability to hold one's attention beyond a "Deviantly Deceptive" 10 minute algorithem "Dastardly Designed to make it impossible for human beings to focus on any one thing for long enough to retain any kind of knowledge in order to properly sustain ones self without the direct accompanyment of the "Big Brother" who shall not be named, should one of those volcano-enducing comets ever decide to crack us a good one right in the tender globe sphere between our collective thighs, but I digress.) Some people do only have 10 minutes and 10 seconds to learn 4.6 billion years of geography. geology. ecology. and...oh dred, I've forgotten the 4th one. I blame these damned long videos. Quick, bring me my adderol, Uncle Sam! My digression digresses further... Anyways, where was I? Oh yes. I'm not knocking your opinion, merely comically and anhedonicly stating mine as an alternative to yours. Long videos, short ones, if its AtlasPro, it's going to be good. I think we can all agree on that much...xhopingx. Cheers. and a big salute to you, AP.
-JJ
Off topic but I love the consistency of your channel. High-quality, educational and fun content and I've noticed that you ALWAYS upload at 7am EST exactly. My favorite channel :))
7am is when I wake up, it's a good way to start the day
@@AtlasPro1 Haha, it's 4 AM for me, so a good way to end the night as an insomniac!
@@AtlasPro1 It's 4:30 pm for me here in India! nice way to spend the evening when i am free
it's 12pm here, the most boring time of the day, really cheers me up
@@AtlasPro1 congrats on your 1M sub. You deserve it. It's a long time coming. I've commented this already on one of your shorts but I really hope you can make a video how anatomically modern humans changed as we spread out of africa.
I'm carrying out my PhD research in the Galápagos Islands with avian evolutionary history from a genomic perspective. I just want to say, what an awesome video/job you did to introduce these topics to the people! You are a great science communicator! Congrats!!! Keep this up!!!
i wish i could study something like this :((
You're initial struggle with our language was expected, editing aside. you actually progressed pretty well. The "W" doesn't have to be, but is pronounced as a "V" in traditional Hawaiian languagI.
Ha-Vai`i. Kaho`o-la-Ve. The okina ( ` ) is the separation of vowel pronunciation often of the same vowel. Which you nailed successfully! That's awesome!. The kahakou stretches the pronunciation of a vowel. ( a line or dash over the specified vowel to be stretched ) all in all, I think you did a great. I appreciate that and thank you for this video.
These videos keep getting longer and longer and that's a good thing (for me atleast).
You're the type of viewer I make videos for :)
Long videos from a channel that rarely posts are my favorite. It's like an event 🎉 when they're uploaded.
@@WanderTheNomad
it's like
uuu, a new short film documentary!
A question about your impact crater theory: the impact crater in Africa might be directly across the globe from Hawaii 2 billion years ago but surely there has been significant continental shift since that time? Great content as always.
Yes man, Africa and its Vredeford crater was nowhere near the anti-pode of the current Hawaii.
For Mars, however, with is lack of tectonic plates movement, this theory could hold water, I mean lava.
Exactly my first thought.
I was thinking the same thing 66 million years the movement would be small but 2 billion lol
Still tho this has been brought up before about the besalts fields in Russia and India
Not to mention how the Hawaii chain was closer to Asia, so current Hawaii's antipode would be significantly different
You actually might find the hypothesis in a scientific journal! "Antipodal hotspots and bipolar catastrophes: Were oceanic large-body impacts the cause?" by Jonathan T. Hagstrum
Out of curiosity, did you find the source after watching the video or did you just have it tucked away, ready and waiting for this exact moment?
@@Capt_Saicin Not OP, but I can tell you that's the paper sited on Wikipedia in the Meteorite-induced formation section of the Large igneous province page.
Oh I will have to check this out. Because it's strange that the craters would still be in places over the antipodal hotspot while the hotspot has managed to drift. Like they're still linked, instead of the crafter's plate also moving off the spot. Or the impacts welded the crust to the mantle somehow.
I honestly would disagree with the idea of the Hawaiian hotspot being related to Vredefort Crater due to shifting plate tectonics, but something i really find odd is that if you follow the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain you will come to the Kamchatka Peninsula and further west is the Siberian Traps where one of the largest (if not the largest) volcanic event in world history happened and by the way the aproximated antipode is really close to the Wilkes land crater in Antarctica.
So in a nutshell i would think that the head of the Hawaiian hotspot erupted in Eurasia and its what we know as the Siberian traps (something like the Reunion hotspot and the Deccan traps but even bigger).
No. The plates would have moved too much for his theory to work.
I love how this channel conveniently discusses topics relating to what I’ve been learning about in my university classes, this is easily my favorite science and geography channel
Love your content.
I live on Oahu, and now have friends from all over. I met this guy from the islands of Palau and he told me all about his islands.
I met a Chuukese from the federated states of Micronesia. He introduced me to a higher totality of inter-island sociology in the Pacific regions.
I spoke with a Tongan that told stories older than history, passed to him from his great great grandfather, stories about the Lost continent of Mu.
I've spoken with people from the Marshallese Islands - they spoke about the differences between islands around the Pacific.
I lived in American Samoa for a year, 2004-2005, Samoans are close to my heart.
Where are you originally from brother ?
I live in the Midwest, and I pretty much always get up at around 7 am. It’s such a great treat to wake up and see that you just posted a video about an hour ago, since they are high-quality and don’t come out very often. If I ever launch a UA-cam channel, you will have been a HUGE inspiration!
I live in Hawaii and I had no idea how many extinct species there were here and how evolutionary active this place is! Mahalo for this great video Atlas Pro.
From what my professor was telling us, there were records of the silver sword grass so plentiful on mauna kea that it would make the mountain shine silver in the sunlight. Must have been a sight to see.
We were up at the Maunakea Visitor Center last summer and there is a Silver Sword garden. Sadly I only saw two less than healthy-looking plants.
@@onebigkahuna have not been up there in years. If I end up going up there ill check it out and see if there were any changes and post it here.
@@onebigkahunayup now its just a lil roped off area
Hawaiian born and raised, thank you for the great work! It’s truly an amazing place and needs all the help it can get
You know I got to thank Atlas Pro for making this video because I actually was inspired to buy the very book Atlas Pro used as a source in this video for the birds and I gotta say it is quite nice.
This has made me think, is there an "island syndrome" for plants? Are there any big trends in how plants evolve on islands?
Maybe. Plants always have the same resource requirements, so nothing in particular will be different about them living on a small landmass (an island) compared to a large one (a continent). But what would likely happen is that any seeds that can float on the wind or waves or hitch a ride on or inside an animal will make it to the island, no matter the size of the adult plant. In some cases you might just get grass seeds germinating on a new island, or maybe just big trees. In those cases, those plants will change to fill the new niches that are empty.
More likely though, a large number of species from different sizes will end up on new islands. They may be from disparate shores, but they'll more likely than not already fill the required niches. So there won't be an island syndrome, species of plants on islands will look very similar to their close relatives on the mainlands. Just with a mash of odd species from all over the place filling out the ecosystem.
I'm not a biologist but i would assume so cause without humans cutting them down trees would grow bigger and bigger, but also plants without animals eating them wouldn't keep up the same defenses like thorns on a rose bush and would change from fruit to seeds that spread by wind
Yes, there's an island syndrome, generally with gigantism and dwarfism, while mostly small animals get large and originally large animals get small, sometimes it's just a roll the dice thing and an animal might go the opposite way with evolutionary pressures forcing small animals to get smaller and vice versa.
@@rivitraven the topic was about plants and not animals
they get thornier? xD
You should make a video about the Appalachian mountains. They always get overlooked cause they’re small and on the east coast but they have their own beauty that we here absolutely love
I totally agree! Even though I live near them and have been all over them I feel like I know very little because they are considered to be like normie mountains. tbh I would love an exploration of all the mountain ranges of the world :)
@@jeremycawley3360 especially the small ones, the Adirondacks are commonly mistaken as part of the Appalachians which is understandable considering the Adirondacks are just off the end of the Appalachians but are geologically unrelated.
Similarly i would like to know what the difference is between the Rockies, Seirra Nevedas, and Cascades. (Are they geologically unique or just named poorly?)
Small? They stretch from Georgia to Scotland! The Adirondacks are a sub-range of the Appalachians, as are the Smokeys, Shenandoah and Blue Ridge.
@@TreeCutterDoug exactly, thats the most interesting thing about them. That they continue onto a completely different continent. It really just shows how old they are. He needs to make a video about it now
@@TreeCutterDoug Small as in not very tall. They are incredibly old, but as things stand now the Appalachians are baby's first mountains compared to the Rockies, Sierra Nevadas or the Cascades. Like, if you were born on the east coast of the US and consider the Appalachians to be tall, you are not prepared for mountain ranges out west. They are basically big forested hills to us Western Americans. For instance, if you look at prominence, Mount Washington is the highest of all of them but at only 6,158 ft, or 59th in the US. Mount Mitchell is 62nd. And god help you if you care about actual elevation, you can't even find any appalachian peak in the top 300 in the US.
It may be interesting, but I don't even know if they have a unique bio-region, I think it is shared across the entire interior Atlantic region's forests, not just limited to the mountains themselves. I don't know if they get high enough to actually cause major flora and fauna changes compared to the forests that abut them. But I am no expert, so that may be wrong.
Congrats on 1 million!!! You definitely deserve, having had put in some much time and effort into this channel for all of us to enjoy
Oh yes, didn't notice it actually!
Yeah congrats to him/his channel - definitely deserved: high quality content it is!
The amount of passion you have for geography and the range of research you do is amazing! I never thought I could see someone being as enthusiastic about geography as me. Keep it up man!
Every one of Atlas Pro's videos is an incredible piece of work, both super educational and super entertaining. This one in particular is going up as one of my favorites. Looking forward to seeing more!
I'll never forget a clip from the documentary "Racing extinction" about the call of the last male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō alive. It's one of the things that inspired me to pay more attention to the environment, hearing the last male of an entire species call out to a female, that will never get answered.
I watched a video about “Lonesome George”, the last of one of the species of Galapagos tortoises, and how they tried to get him to breed with a couple females of a closely related species, which didn’t work, but hey, at least he got to have some fun! Also, his long life (being a tortoise and all), large size, and poignant plight attracted a great deal of attention to preserving those species that COULD be saved. Godspeed, Lonesome George! 🥹🫡❤
Went to Hawai'i for the first time last year and was blown away by the unique diversity of it. Definitely more to Hawai'i than just beautiful beaches. We drove up Mount Haleakala, and it was incredible to experience several vastly different biomes just within a couple hours of driving and hiking.
I'd love a biogeography of the Phillipines, Japan or Iceland. This video was awesome. I love these longer videos. Also congratulations on 1 million! You've earned it and you fully deserve it.
Near the Philippines is also the island of Borneo, my homeland which is shared between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. With tropical rainforests and biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon, with a highest peak in Southeast Asia, evidence of early settlements, unique tribe diversity and geographical wonders. The Malaysian side has been plagued by deforestation to plant oil palms but some pristine rainforests are well kept. Chien C. Lee has some amazing wildlife photography on the island of Borneo.
@SyemurN Yes! Borneo is one of the few locations on the list of places I absolutely must visit before I die. It's such a fascinating place with an incredibly unique and beautiful landscape and mix of flora and fauna(not that I'm telling you anything you didn't already know, being from there).
Learning about Borneo from a random documentary I came across on TV when I was little is a major part of what got me interested in biology and geography to begin with and is a huge part of why I'd like to go back to school to get into conservation and ecological research. The rainforest devastation caused by the growth of palm oil plantations in Island Southeast Asia is something I'd very deeply like to work to help mitigate, and ensuring places like your home remain as undamaged and in their natural state as possible is something very important to me personally. I hope more people can discover, learn about and grow to love and appreciate your home and the many other beautiful, unique places on this planet we all call home.
@@SyemurNPhilippines Owns sabah
Crazy timing. I just got home yesterday from my honeymoon in Hawaii. I spent two weeks there and stayed at Honolulu, Maui, and Kauai. All three were downright incredible, but Kauai was my absolute favorite. It was absolutely gorgeous. Everyone there was so rediculously nice and friendly as well. I miss it already. Hawaii truly is a special place. Aloha my friends 🤙
It’s funny that u say that I visit Maui Kauai and to end my vacation i go to Oahu Every summer I love each island because there all different in there own way I wish I can move there one day and never look back 😂
"The only one left out being Africa"
I see Atlas Pro is a connoisseur of the Eurasian Continent philosophy. Although imperial Europe squints at this.
Acknowledges that Eurasia is, in fact, one continent, but then turns around and apparently fails to factor in continental drift when pitching this impact idea... well you win some, you lose some I guess
Nearly every type of soil on earth can be found in Hawaiʻi. The only types that don’t occur are permafrost (for obvious reasons) and the type found in coniferous forests because Hawaiʻi has no native conifers.
Permafrost occurs on the summit of mauna kea
There are invasive conifers on island though, so would that affect the soil type?
@@discreetscrivener7885 Yes, but the presence of conifers for two centuries at most won’t affect the soil to nearly the same extent as millions of years of coniferous growth.
Kalihi yessa
Even red clay?
I somehow feel bad that i have such good quality educational content for free. Thank you.
This has grown to become my favorite youtube channel since the first time i watched the geography of mars
as a native of hawaii i loved hearing about hawaii even more, and your attempt of reading hawaiian.
Man, this is seriously one of my favourite channels. 40 minutes of video that felt like 5.
A video about Socotra or the Canary Islands could be really interesting too.
Keep it up man!!! ❤❤❤
I stumbled across this video only because my wife and I are planning a trip to the Hawaiian islands and I was curious to learn more about this part of the world. This was the first video I have viewed from your channel and I found it very interesting (I actually sat through the entire video) even though this is not usually my kind of subject-matter.
After watching this video, I have an enhanced appreciation for both the islands and their ecological diversity. Thank you for thanking the time to produce this!
The flaw in your antipodal impact theory is that, at the time of formation (~2 Bya) , the Vredefort Crater was on the hypothesized "Vaalbara" supercontinent, which then included portions of (modern) southern Africa and western Australia. The current far removed positions of the Kaapvaal craton from the Pilbara craton serves to illustrate how much tectonic motion has occurred in the interceding aeons. Likewise, the long chain of islands illustrating the longevity of the Hawai’i hotspot also serves to illustrate the change of direction of the tectonic plates. I am not saying you are "wrong", only that you would need to do a great deal more hard science to get your antipodal impact theory accepted.
One idea you may not have considered is that some of the "unknown origin" plants derive from taxa that were not preserved in the fossil record and were otherwise rendered extinct by the formation of and events following the formation of the Chicxulub crater (~66 Mya) . Another quibble, is that as recent as 3 Mya , Antarctica had vegetation, was possibly closer to the position of Australia, and the ocean currents of that era were likely to be considerably different. Only this is certain: Deep time is hard to map.
That was my first thought as well. I'd be curious to see if the plates moved relative to each other in that time frame.
Ah, yeah this is a bit more thought out than my: "But hasn't stuff moved around a lot in the past 2 billion years?"
LOL 😂 stop it! Your response to this video is a bit EXTRA.
The hot spot has not moved since the impact. However, the tectonic plates have moved over this hotspot overtime. This can be observed from the Emperor Seamount chain (West-northwest of the hawaiian islands. Although, about 40 million years ago there was a shift in plate tectonics causing the plates to move a different direction thus the seamounts began moving east rather than south.
Hot spots shouldn't move but the plates still do. I do enjoy this theory of hot spot origins. It's an exciting thing to speculate! :) I love this one
God that souces/references list is incredible. This is something I thirst for in all non-fiction youtube content, and something that all content creators should be including
Another masterpiece in this channel. Consistent quality of content and comments. I'm just happy that people like you exist. I'd had never thought of visiting Hawaii as it is so far from where I live in Spain but now I have another fascinating place to dream about.
You should definitely travel to Hawaii someday. I have been to Maui and am going to O’ahu this summer. The next Hawaiian island I really want to visit is Kauai because I have heard that it is the most beautiful of the islands and hasn’t been developed as much as other Hawaiian islands.
48:30 I sure as hell do appreciate these longer videos! I found this really interesting and I really like how in depth your channel goes when it comes to topics like this; a shorter video wouldntve done this topic justice. Keep up the good work! :D
Being a native Hawaiian, itʻs something to grip my heart around the fact that us humans was the main contributor to these birds extinction. Royal Hawaiians used to hunt these birds down for itʻs beautiful feathers to make helmets, capes, and other royal symbolic display of their status. Important and informative. Hopefully we can learn from them and save the rest from going extinct.
This video was really calming. Your interest in the subject makes the video just much more alive. I wish UA-cam algorithm gave longer, educational videos like these a better chance. Keep up the good work, because I will watch any video you make and I know I will enjoy them too.
Hawaii is so diverse! Most Islands are very diverse due to Island Biodiversity. It's basically so isolated that animals never leave and evolve there. (Also the Galapagos, Reunion and maybe easter island too! If they didnt chop down all the trees on it.)
The magnitude of just how much Hawaii has lost birdwise became a lot more apparent when you mentioned that there were only 23 endemic species left and comparing that to the many species that had been lost.
I really love this channel. This video is really one of my favs!
Probably worth mentioning is one of the more popular theories of Hawaiian and other Pacific islands plants is that many, if not most of the Indo-Malayan plants were brought by the Pacific islanders (Polynesians/Micronesians/Melanesians). The ancestors of these people were in turn brought them from their ancestral lands where they originated from, southeast Asia and these people brought along their local plants/seeds along their voyage to Pacific islands.
Everytime you post one of these long 30+ min videos, I feel like I really cannot watch a video that long and that my attention span will give in too soon. But every single time, you have me hooked for the entirety of the length of the video no matter how long! I cannot look away once I start! I truly love these...
While it's a bummer to not have a lot of unique animal species around anymore, it's at least some consolation that there have been people who cared enough to catalog what they found, and people who have come back later and tried to conserve the past, and try to keep parts of the present from also becoming the past.
Would love to see a similar video on New Zealand. Pretty much everything you said about birds and island tameness/giantism syndrome applies to NZ as well except id argue its even more interesting because NZ has much more landmass than Hawaii while still have no land predators - so NZ birds evolved even more into very weird niches and you got things like the Moa, kiwi, and Haasts Eagle.
Also the graph he showed was a little off. I think the graph in the book didn't take into account that the Moa came in 7-9 species. Which gives us a total of over 60 birds gone. Still behind Hawaii but higher then shown.
watching this here in NZ I was thinking the same thing! so many simularities! but I think a big difference is that NZ already had a lot of biology when it split from gwandona, so it would have a lot of palotropic stuff, for example the tuatara, where as hawaii popped out of the ocean completely barren so literally everything had to take a journey to get there!
Man I just want to say you have one of the most interesting science-based channels on youtube. Everything you talk about just draws me in. Keep up the great content!
You rock so much for bringing the content to all of us. Please keep it coming. Long time follower and can't wait to see what ya have next.
The effort put in this is outstanding. Grat video
For those wondering about the Hawaiian volcanism, another explanation of the Hawaiian hotspot is magma plumes. Hot rock near the core gets superheated due to the extreme heat and pressure there, and it begins to rise through the mantle. While most plumes don't reach the surface, those that do will hit the plate, and begin feeding an absolutely massive magma chamber beneath the surface. Because mantle processes are *slow*, and because of hot rock contiually being fed into the plume, these plumes last for millions, possibly billions, of years and will continue to erupt the whole time.
no, the magma plume is the thing that we're trying to explain, it can't be the explanation.
I remember watching your videos and subbing when you had like 50k subs, now you're over a million and it's so so deserved. your content is always incredibly interesting and high quality, your animations, maps, scripts and your presenting of everything together is done exceptionally well
I can't wait to see your channel grow even more, I love seeing educational content become more and more popular, it's a great thing
Hey Atlas love your videos. Just a thought, Hawaii and Africa are antipodes today but making this comparison only makes sense on relatively recent timescales. Isn’t that crater so old that now it’s been dragged by tectonic movement to a completely different spot?
I know the earth today vs 66 million years ago looked (kinda) similar to today but 2 billion years seems like a stretch to me to be more than coincidental. Am I missing something?
No I feel like your right i also had the same thought. I think he made a mistaken assumption or i did
I think hotspots are underneath tectonic plates, that's why they create islands when tectonic plate moves over them.
@@imulippo5245 yes but my point being the crater may not reflect where the impact (or antipodal hotspot) would have happened relative to the earths mantle some 2 billion years ago
Yes on Mars antipodal places stay the same because crust don`t move there, on Earth they change with time because of tectonic plate movement. Vredefort crater was not antipodal point to Hawaii in the past.
the first hawaiian islands would have been up by Russia, so thats where you would have to look from. There's just been too much time since then to give this theory any basis
Your video took me back to my days as an Biology undergraduate. I especially enjoyed your use of countless photos and diagrams to make your point. Keep this up and I will gladly watch future videos from you.
You did a pretty good job on pronouncing the bird names for not practicing before hand. I always loved your channel. Glad that you did a vid on my home.
The Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is an amazing story. All those islands, all the way from Taiwan where they started to Rapa Nui/ Easter Island, which is the most remote separately colonized place in pre-European history. All settled by small teams in outrigger canoes with simple sales. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There is even a good chance that they may have reached South America (which isn't much further than Rapa Nui.) Of course the part that doesn't get mentioned because they left no traces, is all those outrigger expeditions that were lost at sea over the centuries. Hawaii itself is a long long way away from any other islands, so it's probably an amazing story how the first Polynesian boaters came across it.
It is also almost certain for example that some Hawaiian settlers must have loaded up the canoes to try and head East again, without knowing that the next landform was either Mexico or California. And were never heard from again.
Native Taiwanese aren't Polynesians
Don't forget they also went to Madagascar. Interestingly, these Austronesian seafarers settled Madagascar a thousand years before the Maori settled New Zealand.
@@khust2993 they’re austronesians
@@khust2993 Perhaps not, but anthropologists are pretty convinced that the original home of the Polynesians was in Taiwan.
Actually proof of reaching South America AND North America
Thank you so much for making these videos. I have been watching you for years and you are always able to make these amazing videos!
This really does feel like a culmination of so many of the videos you’ve put out the past couple of years. Looking forward to many more! Happy 1 million!!
This is literally the greatest video I've seen about Biogeography in my entire life... I'm gonna share this to my friends for sure ❤️
Very cool video. I'm a huge fan of these in depth videos. I would vote for a closer look at the Indian Ocean islands. The geology of the Seychelles is fascinating, as is the case study of Réunion/Mauritius/Rodrigues. Huge kudos on this video, it was really excellent
Loved it! I live on Maui and I see what you’re saying every day everywhere. Thanks for highlighting the importance of making a difference by learning from the past.
I was actually arguing about native impacts on environment vs European impact a while ago but specifically about New Zealand instead of Hawaii. It's crazy that people don't realize the reality of history or how extinction actually happens. The mosquito is a great example, most people wouldn't think that they'd be that big of a deal for animals. It's important too because if people don't understand this sort of thing how are we going to prevent it happening in the future?
I can believe it with the mosquito. It actually makes less of an impact on my state (lots of lakes, ditches, bottoms, shallow rivers, deep creeks, plentiful rain, etc) to do careful parasite spraying. Mosquitos nearly made our birds threatened to almost locally extinct. And brain worms flatout killed off basically our entire deer population (save white tailed deer. Those are overpopulated, but are also listed as the major carriers that made the rest of the deer locally extinct. For whatever reason white tail deer were more resilient than the other deer species. So No Wolves and Few Other Large Predators + No Other Competing Deer Species…a la too many white tailed deer.)
There are two species of Hawaiian birds that naturally evolved immunity to avian malaria (somehow).
Surprise surprise, they’re the only two that aren’t endangered. Relatively rare, yes, but you can find them without scaling a couple thousand feet up a mountain if you know where to look.
And the Aborigines brought dingos to Australia...
Mosquitos arrived in Hawai'i in the 1800s on whaling ships.
I live on big island and I just can’t understand how lax our standards are for imports especially after we’ve gotten Little fire ants (make your pets blind btw), Coqui frogs, Africanized Bees, and countless snakes that have snuck in and luckily haven’t mated or haven’t mated yet in populations large enough to recognize.
I love long-form videos like this where you take a deep dive into unique places and areas on earth. Youre one of my favorite channels and Cant wait to see whats up next
This is by far one of your best episodes, easily in top 5. Thank you very much.
One interesting part of that study showing where the Hawaiian species originated says that Indo-Malayan and East Asian wildlife predominantly jumped to Hawaii using pacific islands as a bridge, whereas the US’s wildlife came directly in all but one case, that’s really fascinating to me.
I always watch to the very last second of your videos. Especially love the longer ones- by far my favorite channel on this platform. The way you present the details and transition between them is so fluid and easy to comprehend. Currently I'm sick with the flu, but watching this has made me feel a bit better. Here is hoping that we can preserve Hawaii's natural fauna and flora for thousands of years to come, the next few years being the most important for solidifying that preservation.
Kudos to your hard work and deep research. The amount of time and efforts you've put in must be incredible and just wanted to let you know, we all appreciate it!
Reading about Hawaii's geography, this reminds me of Michael Crichton's novel called Micro. This author is a mastermind of biological sci-fi. He thoroughly described the flora and fauna of Hawaii from a "micro" perspective. Real and brutal. I recommend this book to everyone
Wow!! Your production quality has increased so much, from narration to graphics :)
Really appreciate you for spending the time making such long and in-depth video despite the pressure to transition to shorts. This was very educational and I learnt so much about Hawaii that i never wouldve
Great video! Interestingly enough, I’ve never known that Hawaii was only (natively) populated with birds until now. I do have a question though, could you do a video on the Mediterranean? It’s not the tropics but it is a biodiversity hotspot.
And (for once) dogs, rats, and cats aren’t Extinction Causers as invasive species since they’re actually native to north africa, the mediteranean, and west asia. There were SO MANY CATS in Lebanon and Jordan and I have friends saying the same about Turkey as well.
(Although, human conflicts have caused animals to be locally extinct. In Lebanon we never saw any birds, only bats; war-caused famines made people desperate enough to eat them all. They would’ve ate the bats, too, except it made them sick, so with the birds gone the bat population exploded. Saw several feral and stray cats just casually catching bats midair and eating them. If I had to guess that’s also why the cats weren’t eaten-if a cat ate a bat it probably carried whatever diseases the bat had.)
@@anonymousfellow8879 that’s a very intersection anecdote. My father is Lebanese and we are visiting Lebanon this year. When we visit together I will look out for those signs.
I also never knew about Hawaii being originally bird-only. Just like New Zealand, and just as fragile. Curious that Atlas never mentioned New Zealand that I recall, nor reptiles.
Wow this is all really fascinating. I liked that you also included plants as I like them more than animals. Thinking about evolution on islands where they can start from zero is incredible. Thank you for this lecture long video
I’ve always had an interest with Madagascar and Australia, which are more thought about than Hawaii in terms of biogeography, and have a huge history that many people may not be familiar with.
Haven't traveled to Hawai'i yet, but would like to as I'm increasingly becoming interesting in the unique biology and the efforts to preserve some of earth's most precious gems.
Well, I technically DID go to Hawai'i, but I was still growing inside my mother while my parents were vacationing there at the beginning of the 90s. I like to think that even in my fetal state, I could still pick up the unique calls and sounds the local wildlife was making, creating a loving connection with the islands that I still feel today.
i really love your style of videos and all the animations and stuff - it is a mystery to me how to even do this but it helps so much in understanding everything you explain. such interesting videos every time!
I’ve lived in Hawai’i my entire life and I still learned so much..great video!
Lucky I wish I can move there one day and never look back 🥺
Do Philippine biogeography next! With its unique position being sandwiched by the Indo-Malayan ecoregion and the Australasian ecoregion it has both elements and add that some Palearctic animals have contributed to its modern form (a supporting claim for the Chinese flora and fauna to insular Philippines via Taiwan). It is very interesting since, these distributions also correspond on human migration via Austronesian expansion.
I find it hard to find anything interesting on the geology/geography/biology of the Kerguelen Islands and they seem pretty interesting, maybe at least for a shorter video? ❤️
Kerguelen and surrounding island groups like the McDonald Islands collectively are assigned to the 'Antarctic Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean' ecoregion by the WWF. Like other isolated island groups, there are several animal and plant species found only on the islands and nowhere else, with most having diverged from their closest relatives on other continents several million years ago. However, because of the extremely harsh climate, the ecosystem is nowhere near as diverse as other island chains of comparably large size. Of the current living species on the island, most are only distantly related to any other life, and most of their closest relatives live in New Zealand and to a lesser extent Australia and South America.
It's worth noting that the Kerguelen Islands are the mountaintops of an ancient submerged continent similar to New Zealand, called 'Kerguelea', which is thought to have existed as a small continent about half the size of Greenland from 100-20 million years ago. However, as far as I'm aware there are no genetic studies indicating if any of its current species are descended from ancestors on old Kerguelea-nearly all plant and animal life would have been wiped out by the continent slowly being submerged, the earth's climate becoming much colder, and recent glaciation events like the Last Ice Age.
The most common plant is Azorella, which forms large sheets of foliage much like grasslands in most of the rest of the world. These are extremely small flowering plants, which look more like moss from a distance, and grow atop the decaying mass of their parents, dying every winter and leaving seeds for the next generation. Also somewhat common is Acaena, a member of the Rose family somewhat common in New Zealand which is thought to have originated in Antarctica prior to the formation of the Ice Cap. This isn't to imply that Kerguelen islands are grass-free, however, a single grass species Poa cookii is quite common, which use their exceptionally long roots to collect nutrients buried deep in the soil.
The largest and best known plant is Pringea, the "Kerguelen Cabbage", which descended from much smaller ancestors which lived in the cold southern extreme end of South America 5 million years ago. Wherever the ground is too rocky for other plants to grow (like many other members of the Cabbage Family, they can grow on rocks with little to no actual soil), particularly high-altitude areas, these small plants are dominant, sometimes forming their own grassland-like fields. In the absence of competition for sunlight from larger plants, they have become wider and flatter than their relatives, maximizing the surface area for photosynthesis. In the brackish wetlands by the coasts, various moss species are quite successful.
As far as scientists know Kerguelen is home to just 3 types of insects: Beetles, flies, and moths. Of the 23 known species, 19 are flightless--there's little use in something which uses lots of energy and invites heat loss on an island with no predatory flying insects. Even the ones that can fly are very bad at it and only ever use it to search for mates. By far the most common animals on the island are weevils, herbivorous beetles with distinctive funnel-shaped mouthparts used to suck liquids out of plants. Other beetles dive in the coastal waters to collect aquatic plants or debris that washes up on the shore. Flies (almost all of which are flightless, ironically enough) serve an equally important role, consuming dead plant and fungal material. Exactly one species of moth is known--fittingly a 'cabbage moth' which feeds exclusively on the Kerguelen Cabbage.
To my knowledge, no predatory insects are native to Kerguelen. Instead, the predatory arthropod niche is exclusively occupied by Myro spiders, which is dominant in Kerguelea despite being fairly uncommon in Australia and New Zealand, the only other places they are known from. Rather than building webs, they hunt in the intertidal region, mainly feeding on the beetles searching the zone for ocean debris during high tide. Other arthropods include mites and springtails.
The only vertebrates on Kerguelean are penguins, seabirds, and seals. 3 species of seal raise young on the islands, where they are safe from the orcas that patrol the surrounding waters. 4 species of penguin do the same, mainly living on fish and crustaceans but coming to shore to breed and escape from leopard seals. Interestingly, Commerson's dolphin, which is otherwise only found off the southeastern coast of South America, is also found around Kerguelen, feeding on various crustaceans in the shallow surrounding sea. The seabirds on the island mostly use the islands as nesting grounds, while getting all their food from the water, but Terns feed on the insects on the land itself, and sheathbills feed on dead seals and the eggs of other birds.
The Kerguelen ecosystem has proven very fragile in the face of human colonization, which has brought dozens of new species previously unable to reach the isolated islands. As the Kerguelen islands have a climate remarkably similar to the Scottish Highlands, countless species from Europe are capable of thriving there, and often out-competing the locals-indeed, the total number of non-native insect species now outnumber the 23 native ones. Now, sheep graze on its grass while Reindeer destroy moss and lichen. Predatory beetles target vulnerable weevils which lack any natural predators. Feral cats and rats attack the nests of seabirds, driving several to near extinction. But by far the most destructive are rabbits, which chew through Kerguelen cabbage and almost every other plant on the islands, striking at the very heart of the whole food web. As such, the World Wildlife Fund has assessed the 'Antarctic Islands of the Southern Indian Ocean' ecoregion as critically endangered, making them even more vulnerable than the Amazon Rainforest. As humans remain unable or unwilling to exterminate all of the invasive mammals, to say nothing of the countless invasive insects which are essentially impossible to eradicate, these habitats are likely to become even more unrecognizable in the coming decades.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video and I hope that you make more so that I can learn about the geology and biology of islands. Basically any islands around the world. Thank you for taking the time to make this video.
I just got back from a trip to Hawaii and this video was very relevant to my interests. I was actually fortunate enough to see a Mauna Kea Silversword while I was there - it was behind a huge fenced off area with a gate to prevent any roaming goats. The way that the Big Island has so many different biomes is so fascinating to me - going from desert to rainforest to alpine in such a short range as you mentioned. Anyway, really awesome video! Thanks for making this.
You can spell Hawaii Hawai’i :)
The 'Okina' is the apostrophe you see in a lot of Pacific languages. It represents a glottal stop. Thank you for bringing laughter to my day while massacring my native home's language and also teaching me something new about it.
New Zealand is another landmass that developed due to isolation, no landbased mammals and a variety of flightless birds have unfortunately lead to severe impact of people on the fauna in NZ.
The extinction of the moa will never not be sad
yup. The polynesians had a large impact on the islands.
It’s interesting to see how invasive species have supplanted the native ones in their ecological niches. For example, I’ve seen barn owls fairly often. There is an area on Kauai where they are doing a controlled experiment to see what the impact of introducing Galapagos tortoises to the environment would be. They are hoping they can fill the ecological niche left by the Turtle Billed goose mentioned in the video, as a means of managing the island’s flora.
I really love your channel, a lot of the people I watch just talk about facts and have very little to contribute to the conversation. You give us hypothesis and ideas that are original and awesome!
Im from Hawaii born and raised. Thanks for doing such an awesome job with this video. You also actually did a great job with pronunciation too, considering you are literally speaking a different language than you are used to.
I would like to hear about the Congo River.
For example the geology and how it evolved. The various species etc.
Really interesting seeing the images of the extinct birds, and how similar some of them look to similarly-extinct avian species here in Aotearoa/NZ!
Edit: 27:48 nice underplayed pun!! 😁
45:37... and another one!
"The Hawaiian islands did not have any mosquitos before 1800"
*We have destroyed the last paradise on earth*
florida is a paradise.😂
Ca is a paradise 😂 wish I can move to the islands and never look back
Dear AtlasPro (I know you said not to call you that, but the only thing I remember about your name is that I don't know how to spell it), first I really enjoy your videos; great work. Second, you've talked a lot about biogeography but there's one thing you almost never mention (as far as I can tell) and that I actually asked myself about three times during this video: bugs! I know so little about insects, to the point that I couldn't even guess as to the amount of insects living in Hawaii before birds arrived, and I think that a lot of people are in the same situation. Would you considered doing a video about the evolution or biogeography of insects? Please and thank you and have a lovely day.
Thanks!
Hey Atlas, you were pretty decent with the Hawai'ian pronunciations. The only glaring thing is that in Hawai'ian "W" is pronounced more like a "V". Keep up the great videos and thank you for doing a video on my home.
Don’t forget the glottal stops!
@@luckyblockyoshi everyone forgets the 'okina
Just FYI...When pronouncing Hawaiian words, if W is at beginning of a word, pronounce as W..e.g...Waimanalo, Waimea, Waikiki, Wai'ahole(Why-ah-ho-lay) Wai'kane(Why-kah-nay) wiki-wiki. When W is mid-word, pronounce as Vee..e.g...Alewa(Ah-leh-vah), Hawaii(Hah-vye-ee), Kaho'olawe(Kah-ho-oh-lah-vay), Ewa(Eh-vah), Haleiwa(Hah-lay-ee-vah), Ka'a'awa(Kah-ah-ah-vah). Apostrophe/glottal stops(') cut short previous letters pronounciation....
W- v Sound is not specific where one needs to be native speaker or language student for there are no hard rules. Usually if the w occurs within a word and not in the first position it’s pronounced as v and in the first position it’s w.
Example: Waikiki and Hawa’i but again no hard and fast rules. Mahalo for trying.
As much as I appreciate this video, the research you performed, and the earnest attempt at pronouncing the Hawaiian names, there was one part that piqued my ire: the part where you discussed Hawaiians shooting the ‘o’o to collect their feathers does not seem based in fact, but rather in speculation. Even into the early 1900s, Hawaiians saw themselves as caretakers of the land, to include flora and fauna. We’re mistakes made? Sure. However, as a Hawaiian, I find it hard to believe that my ancestors would discard a known ethical practice with reckless abandon when they were at the forefront of conservation well before western society (as seen in documented kapu periods of fishing and relative size harvesting in loko ia).
That being said, thank you for taking the time to discuss, in depth, my home.
It sounds like you resent being associated in any way with Western society
Impossible of you to speak on behalf of people who lived thousands of years ago.
@@chaosXP3RT Not sure if this was your intention, but this comment comes across as a bit tone deaf--the islands of Hawai'i and the Hawai'ians living there were forcibly colonized. They have their own culture and practices that were outlawed as an attempt to stamp them out by Western colonizers. How would you feel if you were being forced to give up the traditions, values, and practices most important to you because a group of strangers who turned up on your land suddenly decreed it? Additionally, it's a good question--unlike industrialized Western societies that, for example, were happy to hunt beavers into near extinction in Europe by the 17th century just to sell top hats, Hawai'ians had a tradition of subsistence living. Was hunting the 'o'o just for its feathers a special case, or is this a Western bias?
@@maevemaguire7278 It sounds like to me, your question is more like "Were the Hawaiians special? Or perhaps it was the industrialized West that was the savages". Your comment doesn't strike me as trying to provoke a conversation of substance and nuance. I suspect you want to find any way possible to dehumanize Western society. I'm not here for any kind of "insert ____ supremacy". Hawaiian and "Westerners" are both human beings, flawed and all. The extinction of the O'o is the result of human nature and more specifically, economics. Anytime people collectively agree on the value of certain items, people will naturally try to acquire more of that valuable item. The Hawaiians were not better or worse than anyone else when they caused O'o extinction. They simply failed to adequately preserve the species and fairly regulate the acquisition of it's feathers.
To me, the most likely scenario where Antarctic flora would make it to the Hawaiian archipelago would be via its closest, and last, connected continent: Australia. Either through their shared biological pool, or shortly after their separation when the continents were separate, yet close enough, for the surrounding southern current to not fully disconnect the two landmasses.
then it would be classified as part of the Australasian realm.
Use commas better.
@@zoerose3478 The only one misplaced would be after pool
I shit you not I get behind excited for your videos. Without question some of the most enjoyable and well made videos on here💯. Loving it fam
I love your videos, they are very informative as well as interesting. Plus, I can save them in my 'Earth History' file. Thank you so much for uploading these and please keep them coming.
Good job sir.
I love what you've done here.
This is a video that every real-estate developer needs to see before ever considering to build on the Hawaiian Islands.
0:14 and Europe?
Congrats on 1M
I couldn't have done it without you!
What a phenomenal video! This is such a gem of an educational channel and I am so grateful for your content.
I love how your tropical shirt matches the tropical theme of the video. Very good coordination skills and attention to detail.