Reintroduce Megafauna to North America? 855
sneakers563 writes "A team of scientists is proposing reintroducing large mammals such as elephants, lions, cheetahs and wild horses to North America to replace populations lost 13,000 years ago. The scientists say that parks could be set up as breeding sanctuaries for species of large wild animals under threat in Africa and Asia, and that such ecological history parks could be major tourist attractions. 'Africa and parts of Asia are now the only places where megafauna are relatively intact, and the loss of many of these species within this century seems likely,' the team said."
Can anybody... (Score:1, Insightful)
I would have thought that they might lose some of their ability to handle the effects of megafauna...
Help me out here (Score:5, Insightful)
Really (Score:3, Insightful)
Enough! (Score:2, Insightful)
Those animals are dwindling in numbers for a reason and should remain as such. Believe it or not that's the nature of the Earth. Superior animals control populations of other animals and sometimes entire populations die creating chain reactions.
I am thrilled that we have advanced enough scientifically to help with animal populations but I really think that we should just let it go and let the Earth work the way it has for billions of years.
Shit happens -- let's work with the way the world works rather than trying to recreate how it was all the time.
Re:Can anybody... (Score:2, Insightful)
Dumb idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Let us not forget all of the other misguided attempts at relocation. (Rabbits and cane toads in oz, anyone?)
Lets not forget how far south the North American winter pushes - sure, I can totally see a lion in Nebraska... with 50mph north winds and horizontally falling snow.
If only... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A Little Late (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps there was a reason they all died (Score:2, Insightful)
I like elephants, lions, ligers, and tions as much as the next guy. Nonetheless, I'd rather have a nuclear plant near me then a wild animal preserve. I'd definately be a lot safer! I've heard some of those creatures can even do magic.
Re:Can anybody... (Score:1, Insightful)
Funny how on yahoos news page it is 2 lines below the article reference for introducing them to North America. From the other article:
Lions have killed more than 560 Tanzanians since 1990, scientists announced today. The victims include children playing outside huts and people dragged from their beds
Re:Great... (Score:0, Insightful)
And it's not "US imposed intellectual property laws" that are keeping those people from effective drugs, it's the fact that there AREN'T any effective drugs. HIV/AIDS will end when the people who have it finally STOP FUCKING HEALTHY PEOPLE and all die. Easy, quick, and morally unambiguous, ain't it? Then we can go back to spending money on diseases that people just randomly wake up with, as opposed to ones that we know exactly how the fuck to AVOID getting.
Re:Can it even work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Evolution is great for wiping up species when conditions change. If conditions change back then the survivors may find that they are not very well adapted to the new conditions.
Re:Perhaps there was a reason they all died (Score:1, Insightful)
Extinction (Score:3, Insightful)
So what you're telling me is that major extinctions happen without human intervention? Who knew? (Just don't tell the endangered species people.)
Re:Enough! (Score:2, Insightful)
My intended definition of "superior" was for hunting, killing, and consuming (in whatever manner) of other animals.
One species that can watch another dwindle and die without taking action? Personally, I don't think that's particularly superior.
You don't think it's morally superior. There's a difference you know.
As "Superior animals" I think humanity has a duty to protect other species.
I think we have a duty to protect only ourselves (as we were intended to do) and that *may* include protecting other species that we depend on for our survival. Introducing large animals from Africa to North America for tourism isn't something that is needed for our survival.
Re:Enough! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can it even work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's stop the ecological guessing games.
Why don't (Score:2, Insightful)
Introducing alien animals into the wild will cause native animals to die out. American zoologists arn't stupid. I smell a big corporation thinking it can make a quick buck, whilst appearing to be environmentally friendly.
Mac Zoo "Drive Thru": Order your gun at window number one. Pay at window two. Pick Gun up at window number three - lets go shoot me a MacElephant burger!
Re:A Little Late (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems the continent has had 13,000 years for it's ecosystems to adapt to the current state of things, why screw it up with sudden introduction of species that weren't actually here in the first place?
Maybe because in most places the ecosystem has not adapted very well at all. For the last several hundred years pretty much every large predator in North America has been brought to the brink of extinction except one, humans. Sure there are some mountain lions here or there, and a few wolves (that are mostly wolf coyote hybrids now), but they are all endangered species. The life of the typical wild herd animal, like deer, usually ends with being killed by a human or by dying slowly of disease or starvation. I can't tell you how many game animals I've disposed of because half their face was rotted away by some disease and there are no predators left to kill the sick ones.
With decreasing space for animals to live, the overcrowding and resultant disease and starvation is getting much worse. Now this proposal to introduce large foreign species may or may not help the situation. What really needs to happen is a reduction in human overpopulation, but I don't see that happening anytime soon either.
Re:The Wilds (Score:3, Insightful)
Breeding big cats isn't particularly difficult and if anything there's a huge excess of them in captivity. Most of them are mutts that are useless for conservation purposes.
Re:Great... (Score:2, Insightful)
HIV isn't a passively transmitted disease. You have to do something to get the disease (unless you are raped, but how frequent is that?).
Rape is actually quite common in all cultures, especially in cultures that do not have a legal system with strong controls on sexual crimes or the ability to enforce them. Women are usually the victims of rape, partly due to culture and partly due to their lack of physical strength compared to men.
Condoms aren't so new and complex as to have currently active patents on them.
Unfortunately, in many cultures, condoms are strictly taboo. This is true even in some cultures in the United States.
Re:Can it even work? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we might need the cure a bit sooner than that
Re:A Little Late (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Help me out here (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that I disagree with your choices. Im currently living in DC and wouldnt mind if it were overrun by animals.
Re:What?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A Little Late (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, those wild places like iowa [theiowachannel.com]
Re:Dumb idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Who says that lions and tigers have the same adaptations? Also there is more than one breed of tiger. Yes, a Siberian tiger could probably survive in Nebraska. A Bengal tiger? Probably not. Seeing as how (thermally) the lions' habitat is closer to the Bengal tiger I'd say the the same thing about the lions' survival.
Re:Quick reality check (Score:1, Insightful)
I think you'll find that that particular event was profit-driven, not a scientific thing. But heck, let's bash those over-educated intellectuals anyway...
Re:We should slaughter the ones we have left! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's the other way around, but whatever. And there isn't much point of being at the top of the food chain if we keep making the food chain smaller and smaller by eliminating other species, which even if we don't eat can hurt us by starving species that we eat which in turn would eat the extinct animals, etc etc
Re:The Wilds (Score:2, Insightful)
Arrogance of Man (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A Little Late (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why don't (Score:5, Insightful)
What gets to me is that this is the shotgun method of protecting wildlife. Reproduce it en masse and numbers will take care of it. Not going to happen. Impact on wildlife will be made less when we stop chowing up the countryside to put in homes because we want not only new houses but new land too. We've got plenty of cities and suburbs chock full of disused and underused land where new buildings could easily replace old, where we can easily with modern technology put in efficient dense housing that won't become slums if we truly don't want them to...
Instead we demolish farmland and forest, put in subdivisions, subdivide the properties over the decades and make it denser, then leave it behind as too old and we chow up some other forest or farm and put in another subdivision. In CT in the USA, the woods in the western hills are being sliced through at an alarming rate for the middle exec level wealthy who work in the white collar city jobs and commute home to $1M+ homes that are built up into the woods and across former farms. Meanwhile the cities they work in are falling apart and full of six-family apartments that are boarded up and with a little investment and hard work could be made into fairly spacious single-family townhouses right there.
Most of these people will as they and their kids get older simply move on the ever "newer" developments, fleeing from the cities while continuing to work in them or in office parks on the immediate periphery, fueling the developers who keep grinding the countryside up and leaving us with decreasing space for the wildlife.
Here, that is the major issue. That is what is destroying the environment. Clearing of wild places to put in expensive houses, all the societal support things that go with them, roads to get there, etc. Meanwhile we're wrongly concerned with old things like mining and so on. Those are fanciful targets of the usual socialist suspects. I'm not, I live in a city, and there's plenty of good space still here just waiting to be improved on for the good of anyone living here. But people refuse to even consider it, leave it to the poor, and move on to their formaly wild now suburban confines comfortably far from the "old places" but still near enough to make money off of them.
Re:Can it even work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Evolution is great for wiping up species when conditions change. If conditions change back then the survivors may find that they are not very well adapted to the new conditions.
Evolution doesn't wipe out anything. Changing conditions or better competitors coming along does.
If conditions change back new spcies will evolve to fill the new conditions.
Re:We should slaughter the ones we have left! (Score:5, Insightful)
Geez. I have mod points and I have to give up moderating in order to respond to this. Thanks.
So, based on the fact that Mountain Lions can kill people, should we also go after dogs? According to this site [tchester.org], in the U.S. between 1979 and the late 1990s, over 300 people were killed by dogs. That means your family dog is much more likely to kill you than any "wild animal".
Mountain lions are moving in next door to everybody.Not me. I live in the suburbs. People can choose to live wherever they want. If you choose to live in a hurricane zone, you will have hurricanes. If you choose to live in an earthquake zone, you will have earthquakes. If you choose to live in an area where Mountain Lions, Bobcats and Alligators live, you will see those animals (BTW, there are relatives of the Mountain Lion in Florida).
If people can't handle living in an area where wild animals live, either people should learn to deal with the results of their choice in living arrangements...or they should move.
For the record, I think bringing elephants and lions here to the US is a bad idea.
You're making a false assumption (Score:2, Insightful)
Do note that many big cats, mountain lions and siberian tigers for example, inhabit cold regions. And in fact, lions ranged over most of eastern Europe and Asia up until the 2nd century AD. And cheetahs were once found as far north as northern Iran. The US certainly has some geographical areas with more temperate zones than along the coast of the Caspian Sea.
Re:The Wilds (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it just me, or shouldn't we save our own mega-fauna before saving others? Reachieving the balance that existed in the 1600s seems far more important than that which existed 13k years ago.
Besides, I don't see anyone trying to bring back the wooly mammoth!
Re:A Little Late (Score:4, Insightful)
But, these scientists really don't have a clue what kind of buzz saw they would face trying to introduce foreign predators in to the U.S. Farmers and ranchers who have substantial political clout, especially with the current administration, would fight it to the death unless its in heavily fenced parks more like zoos. They need to look no further than the massive resistance there has been to protecting and reintroducing the grizzly and wolves.
I saw on the news a week or so ago states around Yellowstone are probably going to resume hunting the formerly endangered grizzly bear if they are foolish enough to wander outside the bounds of the park. Ranchers have zero tolerance for predators, and they control most of the land not in parks.
One reason elephants are endangered is they don't mesh well with farmers or any kind of civilization because its nearly impossible to stop them from demolishing farms, unless you put them in small areas with major, expensive, fencing.
Re:The Wilds (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem isn't just cost, although that was apparently the major issue as they just don't have the money. Designing a proper and effective system to manage elephants at a place like The Wilds seems to me like a logistical nightmare.
Re:We should slaughter the ones we have left! (Score:4, Insightful)
No it doesn't. There are more than 300 times as many dogs in the United States than there are moutain lions. Dogs are more dangerous because there are more of them, not because they are more dangerous per animal. Your family dog is not more likely to kill you than a mountain lion.
Now that we've gotten past that part it would be safe to say that it would be very extremely unlikely to be killed by either a dog or a mountain lion.
Re:Quick reality check (Score:3, Insightful)
See, the problem is that nobody can ever agree on what it means to be "natural," and whether "nature" is a desirable goal in itself.
Re:A Little Late (Score:1, Insightful)
I have a better idea.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not protect and preserve the species that are still there, along with their natural habitats?
The big reason why these species disappear is because they are sold in parts to western kapitalistic megalomaniacs, and because we otherwise manage to screw up the world in a fantastically shortsighted way. Putting up parks accross another ocean isn`t going to solve either of both, so what difference does it make?
Ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
Elephants and cheetahs never lived in North America. Are they talking about Wolly Mammoth and Mastadons? Because if they are that's not the same thing.
Maybe we should just go to the zoo to see elephants, instead of dedicating land for them. Next thing you know the friends of the earth freaks will let 100 elephants loose near a major city and the spca will have to shoot them all.
Man what a great idea! And to think what worthy causes your tax dollars go to...
Re:What about wolves, bison, eagles? (Score:2, Insightful)
The creatures proposed for introduction into the American wilds are shrewdly chosen to try to re-implement the ecosystem as it stood before the first humans arrived. The suggestions serves several purposes: firstly, in a renewed ecosystem the wolves, bison, and eagles - and many other endangered animals - would find it easier to survive. Our modern, truncated ecosystems are one reason why we have trouble keeping native animals alive.
Secondly, we are establishing new breeding populations of endangered species. By giving over some of our land we put our money where our mouths are, and take some real responsibility for the long-term survival of these animals, rather than endless lecturing the 3rd world about how they need to protect biodiversity.
Lastly, the US is able to police it's wilderness areas far better than over-strapped 3rd world police, who are often corrupt, engaged in tribal warfare or terrorism, or who just plain don't care. It has been demonstrated already that the existing populations of these animals are dwindling, and we have every reason to expect that to continue. They aren't going to survive in their "native" habitats, either we make alternative arrangements for them, or we say goodbye to them.
Not that it matters. It has also been amply demonstrated that Congress wouldn't know a good idea if it up and bit them in their collective asses, Republocrat or Demolican, it makes no difference. By the time they realize the crisis is upon us, the megafauna will be gone...
Who are these "scientists"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Too many times the word "scientist" is banterred about to try to bring legitimacy to some wild claim. I'm no biologist, ecologist, etc, but I do know that just about every time we've intentionally or accidentally introduced species that aren't native to an area it's been a disaster. If you want examples, look no further than jack rabbits in Australia, zebra mussles in the great lakes, invasive algae in the mediteranean, and countless other examples.
About the only thing we have introduced to an area that hasn't been a disaster are the crops we farm. I suspect the only reason is that human influenced crops aren't hardy enough to survive on their own without us looking after them very carefully. Wild corn, or wild chickens don't seem to be taking over anywhere for instance.
Could the so-called scientists present some credentials please? This sounds more like media garbage than actual science.