The Fading Lights * We are Single Digits and Our Time is Nearly Out
- dreamwriterariaros
- 7 hours ago
- 11 min read
Every time a flame burns out in the world we are diminished. These voices, once gone, might not ever be heard again. They do attempt to clone creatures but it has limited results. And as they often need to combine genetics due to lacking pieces — in the case of the northern white rhinoceros, scientists are using frozen sperm collected from already-deceased males combined with eggs from the last two living females, gathering the pieces of a species literally from the dead — are they even getting the SAME creature?
Extinction — people think sometimes that it is just an idea, a statistic, meaningless.
We walk in school through the museum, the creature is behind the glass. The bones of the dinosaur go up. But what if it was you behind the glass being looked at? Ever go to a wax museum with human likenesses? Now feel like you are a dog walking through the last humans around. Do you want them to stop for a second as they shrug it off?
No. You want to be heard. You want them to preserve the last flames wherever they are. There are animals that do not have the luxury of waiting for us to pay attention. Their numbers are down to single digits.
One, two, seven, ten — these are not metaphors. These are the actual number of living individuals left on the entire planet. I am not sure this work for these single digits will do more than be a container in a museum, but I must try. I must do what I can to help them. And even if by shedding a light on the most serious, giving them a voice where they had none we could remotely understand, maybe the others falling into single digits will get help before it gets there.
There are over 40,000 animals on this Earth currently facing total extinction. Total. Every single voice. Every single light. Every single chance to continue. I am launching this project because I had a dream to get more volunteers on the page. Some of my family joined the page to tell you kids out there that there are more of us rooting for you. They help me in tiny ways, but they became an inspiration.
Sir Chewy, my Yorkie, when doing his post — as I know dogs love kids in general. They don't love you pulling their tails or being mean, but they do love to play with you. Anyway, we were doing his page and learning about various animals. Sir Chewy barks at all sorts of animals on television and not a cat or a rat oddly, so we decided that he was saying hello to a fellow "dog." And I was like, you know, that is hilarious and also a good object lesson in thoughts. How do you get people to change?
I am like an accordion when I write. The smallest things can set off mass change. All lives matter, and we hit a species facing extinction and my soul ignited. We had to speak for these voices going off into silence.
We start with the first three who are single digits and start our call to arms. We need photographs, details, as much information as can be gleaned to give them a voice. Even if they become figures in a box, at least then they will have a place to be remembered.
ANIMAL ONE The Vaquita Porpoise
Phocoena sinus — "Little Cow of the Sea"
Status: 7 to 10 individuals remaining as of 2025
Population in 1997: 567
Population today: 7 to 10
Population lost: 99 percent
Places on Earth it can live: 1
The vaquita is the world's smallest cetacean — a tiny porpoise.
It is not much larger than a grown person, wearing dark rings around its eyes like painted spectacles and a small, permanent smile along its lips. Scientists sometimes call it the panda of the sea.
Imagine, kids — a panda bear floating around. Isn't it something hopeful?
The only place it lives: the northern Gulf of California, Mexico, in a patch of turbid, warm water no other porpoise species on Earth can tolerate. So it has picked a spot uniquely for itself.
It was not even described by science until 1958. We had barely fifty years to get to know it before we nearly destroyed it.
How? Not by hunting the vaquita directly. The vaquita is killed by nets set for a completely different animal — the totoaba fish, whose swim bladder is sold on the black market in China for thousands of dollars per bladder. The vaquita and the totoaba are similar in size.
They share the same waters. A gillnet set for one catches and drowns the other.
The vaquita cannot breathe underwater.
There is no escape.
They only swim.
In 2025, acoustic and visual surveys confirmed sightings of between 7 and 10 individuals — and critically, at least one or two calves, including the calf of a female researchers have named Frida, after Frida Kahlo, who can be identified by her bent dorsal fin.
For three consecutive years, scientists have reported no substantial decline. The vaquita is still reproducing. But to catch one, the other dies.
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society maintains the only permanent large vessel inside the Vaquita Refuge year-round, working alongside the Mexican Navy. Mexico has placed 193 concrete blocks on the seafloor in the Zero Tolerance Area to snag illegal nets.
And yet illegal fishing continues, as people can be desperate for survival themselves. The cartels that control the totoaba trade are not deterred by blocks on a seafloor on top.
Seven to ten animals. That is the entire species.
Imagine the loss of just one — just one, and then the next one — and then one by one until the flame is gone. Every individual matters at this scale in a way that is almost impossible for the heart to endure.
But every now and again our small numbers get hope. Genome sequencing of a vaquita captured in 2017 revealed something remarkable — the species had already survived a major population bottleneck in the ancient past, long before humans arrived. The few remaining individuals appear surprisingly healthy despite their critically low numbers. The vaquita may be genetically tougher than we imagined. That is not permission to lose more of them. It is a reason to fight harder.
I want to give them a voice, and hopefully we can aid the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's efforts to save them.
ANIMAL TWO The Northern White Rhinoceros
Ceratotherium simum cottoni
Status: 2 females alive.
Functionally extinct.
No living males since 2018.
Two.
Just two.
This might be a glass box in a museum.
Who are the two ladies? Najin and Fatu. They are mother and daughter.
They live at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, inside a specially constructed boma, guarded around the clock by armed rangers. Zacharia Mutai has been their primary caregiver for years. He knows their personalities.
Fatu — twenty-four years old — is energetic, mischievous, prone to charging across the plains or wallowing in mud when it rains.
Najin, her mother, is calmer, measured, keeping her daughter in check the way mothers do.
They are all that remains of the northern white rhinoceros. Once found across East and Central Africa. By the 1970s, decades of poaching had reduced the population to around 700. By the mid-1980s, only 15 remained in the wild. Civil conflict made conservation nearly impossible across their entire range.
The last male, Sudan, died at Ol Pejeta on March 19, 2018. And with him, any possibility of natural reproduction. Najin and Fatu cannot carry pregnancies naturally. The subspecies is classified as functionally extinct.
But science is not finished.
The BioRescue consortium has produced 38 pure northern white rhino embryos using sperm collected and frozen from now-deceased males.
Those embryos exist.
They are viable.
They are being transferred into southern white rhino surrogates. Embryo transfers were attempted in July 2024, December 2024, and May 2025.
None has yet resulted in a lasting pregnancy — but the procedure itself has been proven possible.
"We will save them." — Jan Stejskal, BioRescue Project Coordinator, 2025
This is a race.
A chance.
A hope.
And if this works,
we might be able to help other dimming lights.
Scientists are racing to achieve a pregnancy while Najin and Fatu are still alive — because only they can teach a new calf how to be a northern white rhinoceros. The knowledge of what it means to be this animal lives in these two.
That is what we are racing the clock for — to preserve whatever we can.
And if all we can be is a glass box in a museum, that must be done while there is still time.
They matter and always will.
ANIMAL THREE
Rabbs' Fringe-Limbed Tree Frog
Ecnomiohyla rabborum
Status: Extinct.
September 26, 2016.
Yes.... EXTINCT!!!!!
Year first discovered: 2005
Last call heard in the wild: 2007
Year the last individual died: 2016
Years from discovery to extinction: 11
In Just 11 Years GONE!
His name was Toughie. A two-year-old boy named him.
Toughie did not particularly like to be handled — he would pinch a handler's hand in what his caregiver called his way of saying let me go.
He was the last Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog alive on Earth, and on September 26, 2016, he was found dead in his enclosure at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
The species was discovered in the mountains of central Panama in 2005 during a race to rescue as many amphibian species as possible before a wave of deadly chytrid fungus swept through the area. Researchers described it as collecting animals from a burning house. Toughie was one of those collected. His species was not even formally named until 2008 — three years after he was already living in captivity in Atlanta, already the last of his kind without anyone fully knowing it yet.
The species occupied a remarkable niche in the Panamanian cloud forests, gliding between the high canopy trees by spreading its enormous, fully webbed hands and feet.
The males guarded water-filled holes in tree trunks. After the eggs were laid, the females left — and the males stayed, backing themselves into the water each day so that the hatched tadpoles could scrape and feed on the living skin of their fathers' backs.
It was the only known frog species where tadpoles fed directly from their father's body.
Imagine the father CARES for the kids and gives them PIECES of THEMSELVES. Its rather a heart pounder that.
That behavior —
that entire system —
vanished from the world on September 26, 2016.
And what is another reason why....they had Toughie right.
The last known female died in 2009.
The last other male was euthanized in 2012 at Zoo Atlanta. And so Toughie was alone.
Being the LAST ONE! Imagine that level of pain. It is just you. No other human around. No Mom....No Dad....No Possibility at all of children.
For years he was silent.
Then one morning in 2014, his caregiver heard something — a call, the only advertising call of the Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog ever recorded.
No one knows what made him call after nearly a decade of silence.
No female ever came.
No one ever will for not a one could.
His image was projected onto the side of the United Nations Building in New York. Onto St. Peter's Basilica.
A 2014 National Geographic film caught him on camera. Scientists named a species after conservationists George and Mary Rabb — and then watched that species end.
A Double Form of Extinction...and that means another
Light Not Listed Here also ended.
And yet there is a preservation: Toughie's call — the only call of his species ever recorded — exists.
His caregiver in 2014 caught it on his phone. You can hear it. And you can when you do I imagine see his handler's face.
A voice from a species that no longer exists, calling into an empty forest, looking for someone who was never coming. But he called and cried...
I AM LONELY!!!! I NEED SOMEONE!!!! COME TO ME!!!
If we get permission, we will include a reference to that audio in the book so readers can hear what extinction sounds like. It sounds like a frog calling alone in the dark.
We are building the books — and we need you.
For EVERY ANIMAL facing Extinction we are doing our best to create three books:
A nonfiction record of the animal.
The organizations working to preserve their habitat
(If it exists and can be saved)
And one children's narrative about that species existence, a fiction story, making them something more tangible than a glass box in a museum. Something, you interact with. Something you feel and relate to and understand they matter as we all matter.
These books need images.
They need art.
They need every visual document we can gather.
And you cannot trust it to an AI Generator
As it HAS to be REAL!!!!
I need help.
We are calling for:
Photographers — professional, amateur, or accidental. If you have photographs of the vaquita, the northern white rhino, or any critically endangered species, please reach out. Attribution will be given. Every image documents history. We need permission of the creator to use it in any way needed for the books and for efforts to keep their voices in the hearts of everyone.
And from these accurate photographs, we need illustrators and artists — drawings, paintings, digital work, sketches, watercolor, charcoal, manga, realistic, abstract. Any style. Any medium. If it captures the animal, we want to see it. If you SAW these animals and drew them please give us permission. Once more you will get attribution.
Scientists and researchers — if you have worked with any of these species and have documentation or field notes you are willing to share or discuss, your knowledge belongs in these books.
Recordings!!! If you have recordings of any animal threatened with extinction VERIFIED that it is really that animal please also submit it.
We are also calling for preservationists, handlers, zookeepers, and caretakers — anyone who has worked directly with a species facing extinction or who has already watched one go.
If you sat with Toughie.
If you fed Najin and Fatu.
If you stood watch over an animal that was the last of its kind.
If you pulled species out of burning houses and brought them home and tried.
If you have notes, memories, photographs, recordings, or simply stories of what it is like to look into the eyes of these dear creatures —
We need your voice in these books.
The nonfiction record matters. The science matters. The human story of the people who showed up every single day for an animal that the world had mostly already forgotten Matters.
There is no detail that doesn't matter.
That story belongs in these pages too.
The children's narratives especially need real behavior. Real personality. Real detail.
What did they eat?
How did they move?
What made them unusual?
What made you love them?
A handler who spent years with an animal knows things no scientific paper will ever capture.
That knowledge is going to vanish too
If we do not write it down and that could be catastrophic.
On Occasion...
WE GET LUCKY
And FIND ONE, A GROUP, A POCKET
That was THOUGHT EXTINCT.
And if the future people don't know HOW TO HANDLE THEM
they can make a mistake this knowledge could grant.
I want permission if you'll grant it for you to be in that story.
Real Name or Penname
A description or a likeness too if you want.
Any Intellectual property remains yours, but I need FULL-PERMISSION for usage once granted.
To submit: the Volunteer and Collaborators Wanted Form needs to be submitted.
Again: all contributors receive full written attribution.
All submitted work remains the intellectual property of the creator, but we need full usage rights.
Anything given for anything to do with The Animal Celebration Project and The Dimming Lights — Extinct Animal Project needs full access and permission from books to webpages.
Teens must have a parent or guardian as advocate. All communication with minors will be fully transparent and monitorable.
Every animal that gets documented matters. Every voice that is struggling to say it is still here — matters.
The LIGHTS around the world are DIMMING we must capture them as the timer is running even on the photographer's camera and I mean to catch them all.
(Pokemon just hit my head. I wonder if that is what they meant to do with that show?....)
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