Killer Mice Gang Up On Sea Birds

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Barinthus
Matrix got it right - Humans are natural.... as virus.

actually matrix got it quite wrong. Matrix says that mammals instinctively seek to achieve a balance with their environment but actually as a rule mammals have to wait for the environment to force a balance on them. Overgrazing, is not at all unusual for mammals and even predators can get out of whack at times and overhunt their prey. If disease or drought or any other non predator related adversity seriously diminishes the population of their prey, the predators don't change their reproductive rate or kill rate so starvation ends up reigning in the predators just as it controls the population of the prey.


Oddly human birthrates are declining world wide in spite of a lack of general starvation. This suggests that perhaps humans are almost the only mammals who "instinctively" seek to achieve a 'balance' with their environment.

[Dis]

what will the mice eat when all the birds are dead?

Won't somebody please think of the mice!

[Immortal Wombat]

I think in the West at least it's probably the environment forcing balance again. The social and economic environment rather than the natural one, but still.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
I think in the West at least it's probably the environment forcing balance again. The social and economic environment rather than the natural one, but still.

forcing?? hardly. humans could breed like bunnies under these circumstances easily and yet birthrates are declining. Other creatures also encounter adversity before actual starvation sets in and yet in general their mating behavior and birthrates are totally unaffected during such periods.

Isn't it odd that human populations increased so very slowly in the precivilized era in which we were already top of the food chain and didn't yet face the epidemics that densely populated civilization would allow to curtail our population? I suspect that in many early cultures primitive (but somewhat effective) efforts at birth control were used when resources seemed scarce.

[Immortal Wombat]

It is hard to breed like a bunny if you spent your 20s clubbing and your 30s having a career to earn enough money to raise a kid. Society is introducing its own restrictions which are leading to lowered birthrates.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
It is hard to breed like a bunny if you spent your 20s clubbing and your 30s having a career to earn enough money to raise a kid. Society is introducing its own restrictions which are leading to lowered birthrates.

absolutely. But such behavior is hardly virus like is it? (to be fair it was bart and not you who made that comparison but that's what my responses have been directed at).

[Barinthus]

Well I did not have the individual breeding behavior in mind when I said that.

Generally in the first world birthrates are falling but in third world people are breeding like crazy. Just take a look at population increases over last 2000 years.

Also the way we consume the planet's resources is viruslike. There was an article on CNN.com in which they showed sat pictures of couple areas and compared today's to those of 20 years ago. Very appalling.

If you look at mother nature's tendencies regarding animal populations related to their eating habits and so on - as in those that eat plants tend to have higher population than animals that prey upon those vegetarians - human population should be at around 10,000 worldwide yet it is not.

It is my sincere belief that as a species we need to start to exercise self-restraint and start acting in the planet's interests as opposite to our own gluttonus materialistic interests.

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Geronimo
absolutely. But such behavior is hardly virus like is it? (to be fair it was bart and not you who made that comparison but that's what my responses have been directed at).

No. I was agreeing with your first point and disputing the second.

Hopefully we can achieve that which viruses never will: the ability to organise and structure our resource consumption to prevent ourselves and the host "organism" (Gaia) from dying. Or alternatively, become a space-borne planet virus first.

[Barinthus]

Amen, IW

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Barinthus
Well I did not have the individual breeding behavior in mind when I said that.

Generally in the first world birthrates are falling but in third world people are breeding like crazy. Just take a look at population increases over last 2000 years.

Also the way we consume the planet's resources is viruslike. There was an article on CNN.com in which they showed sat pictures of couple areas and compared today's to those of 20 years ago. Very appalling.

If you look at mother nature's tendencies regarding animal populations related to their eating habits and so on - as in those that eat plants tend to have higher population than animals that prey upon those vegetarians - human population should be at around 10,000 worldwide yet it is not.

Do not delude yourself. resources are voraciously consumed by all other living things. The apparent balance aspect arises largely from competition and the much slower rate at which other organisms have been able to win a larger share of resources for themselves in the past. However, there is evidence of massive total resource depletion in the distant past. The rapid consumption of the 'primordial soup' in which life originiated was almost certainly an early example of this and the depletion of atmospheric CO2 upon which the first photosynthetic organisms relied was another. In both cases the resource was consumed to the point at which most lifeforms could not even survive at the new reduced levels and in the case of CO2 it was accompanied with the secretion of a massive blanket of toxic gaseous waste into the atmosphere that killed off the vast majority of species on the planet and made enormous areas of the biosphere uninhabitable to Earth's original organisms.

Those earlier depletions were the result of a new finite resource being exploited by newly evolved organisms. Exploited until due to consumer die off in the face of scarcity, it was no longer possible to consume the resource faster than it could be replenished. For humans it is the lack of credible competition within our vast and expandible ecological niche which allows us to use an ever increasing share of available resources combined with the new resource needs of our evolving culturally created capabilities. depletion of resources is the natural result of an organism pioneering first exploitation of new resources. All organisms follow that pattern at first.


As to a calculated population of 10,000 that number is clearly a number some pseudo scientist with an agenda pulled out of his arse. There are a great many species that are vastly more geographically specialized than humans and with even larger body sizes that numbered in the millions and in the case of creatures like buffalo approached scales of a billion on a single continent.

Originally posted by Barinthus
It is my sincere belief that as a species we need to start to exercise self-restraint and start acting in the planet's interests as opposite to our own gluttonus materialistic interests.

I completely agree. We have brains and we should use them. There is no reason for us to pattern our behavior on the self destructive examples of all of the other creatures on this planet.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by St Leo

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Screw up? Hmmm, albatrosses or mice... I really don't care, so why bother?

We are risking a nasty chain reaction in animal populations.

What chain reaction? It's an extremely remote, isolated island!

By introducing the mice, we rocked the boat. It's in our interests to stabilize it.

How? Why? I'd say it's in our interests to either study this actually very interesting behavior or to just ignore it since it doesn't affect us.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
There are mice elsewhere. The albatross are endangered. And since diversity of species is a Good Thing, we should take measures to protect the albatross.

I'm sorry, but there's no possible harm from losing a species of Albatross that lives on an isolated island.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


I'm sorry, but there's no possible harm from losing a species of Albatross that lives on an isolated island.

Do you reject an aesthetic approach that would argue that the preventable loss of any non harmful irreplacable ancient and unique thing - such as a species - is always a deplorable turn of events?

Granted I don't think albatross will go extinct regardless of what we let these mice do, and this island population doesn't seem particularly distinct from other albatross but it sounds as if in general you think any loss of species that has no economic consequences is entirely inconsequential.

I hope I'm wrong.

[Kuciwalker]

Do you reject an aesthetic approach that would argue that the preventable loss of any non harmful irreplacable ancient and unique thing - such as a species - is always a deplorable turn of events?

Yes, because it's retarded.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

Do you reject an aesthetic approach that would argue that the preventable loss of any non harmful irreplacable ancient and unique thing - such as a species - is always a deplorable turn of events?

Yes, because it's retarded.

Retarded? sufficient intelligence would preclude such an argument? In which case it is easily refuted in a way that would satisfy all intelligent observers?

Think of it in terms of keeping our options open. We have far more options with a living species than we do with an extinct species.

For the record what are your feelings on the Talibans campaign to destroy ancient works of art because they held that images of living things are idols? Are you cavalier about the destruction of anything regardless of whether it's replacable or not?