Islands of the Pacific.

ISLANDS -- United States; IDECHONG, Noah; ENVIRONMENTAL protection; BIODIVERSITY; BIOTIC communities; SEAFARING life; MARINE biology; BIRDS; ENDANGERED ecosystems; ENDANGERED species

Birds like sooty terns have found their way to the empire of land fragments known as Micronesia, Fiji, and Polynesia, many evolving into species unique to these islands. Such biodiversity may fade, unless the winds of change start to blow. The island nation of Palau is one of nine independent countries, eighteen territories, and one American state (Hawaii) that make up the Micronesia-Fiji-Polynesia biodiversity hotspot. It is one of 25 areas that Conservation International, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C., has identified as rich in endemic species in danger of extinction. The biib is a bird. It's the name that the people Of Palau have for a species of fruit dove that lives only in their archipelago. Fully half of the plants here--3,334 species to be exact--exist no place on Earth but these islands. Strikingly, this high percentage is found on a relatively tiny amount of land. The land surface of this hotspot is only about 18,000 square miles--less than the area of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Islands form unique ecosystems mostly because the species that end up living on each island arrived there by chance. So a species that reaches an island will probably find a different kind of neighborhood from the one it left.To survive, the life that's arrived will change to fit the new shape of its niche. In a way, then, each of the 1,400-plus islands of this hotspot is its own factory of evolution. In Palau this quality of islands reaches a wonderful complexity. Exactly why fruit doves found their way to the Marquesas Islands, a remote piece of French Polynesia almost 3,000 miles northeast of Fiji, is another mystery unlikely ever to be solved. more than three-quarters of the original vegetation in this hotspot has been lost or changed since humans first began arriving here 3,500 years ago. Dozens of birds are now extinct; the list grows longer as archaeologists uncover the bones of hitherto unknown species in ancient villages.