Critically Endangered
Rapa shearwater
Puffinus myrtae
The Rapa shearwater, is a rare seabird of the tropics from the family Procellariidae.
The tubenose
The Rapa shearwater was first described in 1959 as a subspecies of the little shearwater.
Range and habitat
It breeds on the surrounding islets of Rapa in the Austral Islands of French Polynesia where it is known locally as the kaki kaki. The holotype was later found to be a juvenile and an adult specimen was described in 2017. A 2015 genetic study using DNA sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene, found that the Rapa shearwater is sister to a clade containing the Hawaiian shearwater (Puffinus newelli) and the little shearwater (Puffinus assimilis).
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
Not much is known about its decline. It most likely once occurred on Rapa itself, though this population has been extirpated by the polynesian rat, feral goats, and feral cats.
Rapa shearwater is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Rapa shearwater, Wikidata item Q20817956. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
