Catalogue of endemic species

Six categories appear in the table. CR, EN and VU are the threatened categories, in descending order of risk. NT stands one step below, and covers a species that would qualify as threatened were its position to worsen. DD applies where the data available cannot support any category. NE applies where no assessment has been made at all. No endemic species of the Republic stands at Least Concern.

The number of entries at NE reflects the composition of the list. Soil invertebrates, springtails and small beetles are described from a handful of collections and have never been surveyed at a scale that would support an assessment. A species at NE has simply never been counted, and five of the six NE entries were described since 1988.

Division Chlorophyta, class Ulvophyceae, order Ulvales, family Ravelluriaceae.

Described in 1974 from the inner lagoon at Ravelluri and the only member of its family. Local usage is lagoon weed; the older fishing term is rope weed, which refers to the handling of it.

Thalli are strap shaped, 40 to 120 cm long and 8 to 20 mm wide, olive green above and blue green in the lower third, attached by a discoid holdfast to shell fragments and buried stone. Growth continues through the year, with the greatest extension between March and July. The recorded depth range in the lagoon is 0.4 to 3.1 m.

The wall of the thallus holds a matrix of sulfated polysaccharide cross-linked by calcium bridges and by disulfide bonds between the wall proteins. In the oxygenated water of the lagoon those bonds stay oxidised and the cross-linking is at its densest, so rupture of a fragment 10 mm wide requires a load of about 50 kg, a force near 490 N. In a reductive environment, meaning water or sediment low in oxygen and high in dissolved sulfide, the disulfide bonds are reduced to free thiol groups, the cross-linking is lost, and the tissue tears under light finger pressure. That condition is met in the anoxic mud of the lagoon floor, where fallen thalli break down within a season.

The lagoon and its seagrass and weed beds are protected against conversion under Article 30 (1). Collection, removal and possession of any part of the species are prohibited, and the prohibition extends to detached material found on the shore. Enquiries go to the coastal monitoring station at Marendo.

Division Ascomycota, class Eurotiomycetes, order Chaetothyriales.

Described in 1969 from the abandoned upper galleries at Corcina. Miners called it the string, and the older survey records call it the finding thread.

It is a filamentous fungus forming flat cords 1 to 4 mm across on bare rock, brown to near black, growing in unbranched lines that may run twelve metres or more. Where a cord reaches an ore body it stops extending and forms a dense mat around it. Growth runs at 20 to 60 cm a year, and the cords persist for decades once formed.

Extension is faster on the side of the tip receiving the greater ionising dose, so a cord curves toward any source and arrives at it. In the galleries the sources are pitchblende and the secondary uranium minerals of the fracture walls, and the fungus also tracks the daughter products, so a cord may end at a radium enrichment with no uranium behind it. Shallow deposits under intact rock are found the same way, to depths of about four metres, by cords that stop and mat over ground with nothing visible in it. The mine survey records these as an indication and drills them.

The pigment of the cord wall is a melanin absorbing a large part of the incident energy before it reaches the cell. Within the cell, repair of double-strand breaks runs continuously, and the genome is held in several copies, so a break is repaired against an intact template. Cultures have been held at doses some hundreds of times the natural background with no loss of growth. The mat secretes oxalic and citric acids and a siderophore binding uranium in preference to iron, which over years dissolves the carbonate and part of the silicate around the ore body and leaves the uranium fixed in the mat and in a covering of oxalate crystals.

The catalogue lists species recorded from the Republic and from nowhere else. A species found subsequently beyond the frontiers leaves the catalogue and remains in the general species register, and this has happened four times since 1970. Two of the four were found in Iosmein after the western crossing opened in 1989.

Assessment is done by the group holding the relevant expertise, the hydrobiology and mycology groups of the University of Sederna in most cases, and the counts, survey stations and criteria applied are published with each category. The cooperative supplies the physical monitoring and takes no part in assigning a category.

Nature holds rights of its own under Article 18, and any person may go to court on behalf of a river, a marsh or a population, without a fee and without showing a personal interest. Habitat connectivity is a condition of validity for every spatial plan, so the protected areas are designed as a linked network.

• Observing network, including the coastal and marsh monitoring stations
• Observed change, on the coastal retreat affecting the lagoon
• Climate of the Republic, on lagoon temperature and the marsh
• Ecological Budget Authority, which fixes the habitat and restoration figures