60,000 Antelope Died In 4 Days, and No One Knows Why 206
An anonymous reader writes: The Saiga antelope has been hunted to near extinction. They've been put on the endangered species list, and they play a vital role in the ecosystems around Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, where their grazing helps get rid of fallen plant matter, which is prevented from decomposing by the cold temperatures. But earlier this year, a huge die-off hit the Saiga antelope herd in Kazakhstan, felling over 120,000 of them in a few short weeks. Scientists say an entire group of 60,000 died within a four-day span. The cause of this die-off is still a mystery. The researchers suspect some sort of bacteria, and early on pointed to Pasteurella strains. But those bacteria don't usually cause this much damage unless something else has weakened the antelope. "There is nothing so special about it. The question is why it developed so rapidly and spread to all the animals," one researcher said. They're looking into environmental factors, but nothing else seems too far out of the ordinary.
As they say (Score:5, Funny)
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Home, home on the range, where the deer and the an... erm.. deer and more deer graze?
Re:As they say (Score:5, Funny)
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You don't eat the meat of something that fell over and died of non-violent causes.
The reasons for this should be rather obvious.
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Re:As they say (Score:5, Interesting)
Its irrelevant. By the time you conclusively determine whatever killed the beasts isn't harmful to humans the meat will most likely have spoiled.
Lots of bacteria that might be destroyed by cooking fills the host will harmful toxins that may not be destroyed by cooking before the host dies. By the time you work all this out it will be to late for other reasons.
Basic survival rule: if you don't know what killed it, scratch eating it off the list of possibilities.
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You don't eat the meat of something that fell over and died of non-violent causes.
The reasons for this should be rather obvious.
Why would that stop a greedy corporation from trying to feed it to you anyway?
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Mostly that if it actually did kill a lot of people, the corporation would take a lot of heat for it. The corporations do frequently try to push the limits on that, and the punishment for that isn't nearly severe enough. But they do actually take considerable steps to avoid having it happen accidentally, and it's really not in their best interest to do it deliberately.
The biggest problem is in ground beef. If you add one infected animal to the hopper, you can make millions of pounds of meat dangerous. That'
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I'm not sure Kazakhstan has some serious food quality controls /s Seriously though, it was a tinfoil hat joke not to be taken so seriously lol
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Violence makes the meat taste better.
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We'll make jokes about stones when the only thing remaining is us and stones. :-(
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The remaining few (Score:3, Insightful)
The remaining few will have an evolutionary advantage over whatever kill the rest of them. Until a dumb ass human shoots them, that is, to put "the rarest specimens" up on his wall and brag about it.
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I always wanted to eat the first of a species.
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...a pandemic to cull the human herd too.
I think if 4 billion humans dropped dead next week, we'd all be better off long-term. We're probably overdue for something like this anyway, given how little genetic diversity humans have.
Y'know... unless you're one of the 4 billion that was killed off...
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Chances are the 4 billion wouldn't mind.
Re:Now we need... (Score:5, Funny)
By the sounds of it the "genetic diversity" between your parents wasn't much to talk about either.
Re:Now we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
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And yet a hell of a lot of environmentalists and other leftists heartily endorse this viewpoint. :( It's a common yearning that frequently makes it to the silver screen in the form of thinly veiled disaster movies.
I'm actually surprised it's already 2015 and still nobody has released a human-terminator virus like in "12 Monkeys".
Re:Now we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why some people think that population reduction can only occur through mass-murder/pandemic. People can have less babies you know.
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How do you go about convincing China, India and Africa to stop having so many kids? China did pretty good with their one child policy, but frankly the other two are out populating the rest of the planet.
Most of the developed world is in a population decline. The US is net positive because of our massive illegal immigration problem, if that was stopped we would also be on the slow population decline.
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It's been stopped. In fact the US's nett migration rates have been negative for many years now.
More people leave the US to go live in Mexico than enter the US from Mexico - and that's with legals INCLUDED.
There is no immigration problem, there is only rich exploiters desperate to have the people they exploit blamed somebody other than themselves so they invented a scapegoat. Getting the downtrodden to turn on another downtrodden group and blame them for their woes as opposed to blaming the people doing the
Re:Now we need... (Score:4, Informative)
Or you could not go full retard and try to drag politics into this.
The data is all available at census.gov, you can look at it yourself. The population of the US is growing by less than 1%, and all the growth is due to immigration (illegal and legal). This isn't a political statement, stop trying to drag politics into it.
Re:Now we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
China has a negative population growth rate now.
India's population growth rate is slightly positive, but decreasing steadily. They should be negative growth in another decade or three.
Africa is a whole 'nuther issue. Of course, what Europe, North America, China, and India have in common is increasing standard of living. - maybe that would work for Africa too....
Re:Now we need... (Score:4, Interesting)
Education, particularly of women. There's a good talk (TED, I think) about how Bangladesh had tried all kinds of ways to reduce it's world-leading birth rate. None of them really worked. Then there was an unconnected program to send girls to school, and the birth rate fell through the floor.
By the way, the population growth rate of India has been declining since the 80s (and is currently less than the US in the 90s), and China's is currently less than the US. The world population growth rate is also in decline, and is currently less than the US in the 90s.
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Added bonus: Educating women will end Islam. At least as it is practiced today.
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Just like it did to Christianity a hundred years ago.
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Or, you know, use some kind of contraception, but that's for nerds and fags right?
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That's too simplistic an analysis. Contraception exists in the natural world, including as a built-in mechanism in many animals. There can be very good survival benefits to not getting pregnant at the wrong time. IIRC, lionesses, for example, can reduce their fertility during famines.
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Lots of people in "awe of life" use contraception. They just aren't in awe of every single sperm and egg in their bodies. They want some control over how often these get together. As science develops, they will also want to control specifically which sperm and eggs meet, to avoid genetic disease.
Eppuor se muove, crucifix boy
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So what have Japan, Italy, Estonia, and (until the recent immigrant influx) Germany done to collectively damage their DNA so badly?
Re:Now we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hardly a matter of one political bend or another - I just had Jehova's Witnesses on my porch trying to tell about the world that is to come, and how only the really good people will be in it (making for a much smaller population, they emphasized) and God's going to clean everything up...
But you'll see it as a trope in fiction of all stripes. There's some terrible disaster, and mankind re-emerges into a form that somehow fits the political biases of the author. A lot of people imagine that being in horrible circumstances like that, fighting for survival with less technology and an awful lot fewer people would make for a simpler, more real world and yearn for it.
Not that long ago, here on Slashdot, a bunch of people were explaining to me that in such a world, as a woman, I would go back into my biologically ordained role of reproductive servitude, which struck me as saying a lot more about their preoccupations, I thought, than anything else, but then people always seem to project their fantasies into these scenarios. (Especially since I'd already mentioned that I was in my forties, as well as being a martial artist and martial arts instructor and having an awful lot of skills useful in such a society.)
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Thank you for posting about your martial arts skills! I had a wonderful vision of you kicking the crap out of a misogynist basement dwelling neckbeard in a post-apocalyptic setting. :-)
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As charming as fantasy as that might be, one really would hope that common interest might have us focusing on such pressing needs as food and shelter. ...I guess it would depend on just how thin resources were on the ground.
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Being in my forties, it's a toss up whether I'd manage to have children at all, and autism is hardly the only thing that increases with maternal age (I seem to recall that there are some risk factors associated with paternal age as well). This was, in fact, my point - even if it was a high priority for their postulated struggling post-apocalyptic community to make babies (and seriously, I think you want to make sure you have the basics covered before you get on with the breeding) I am just not your best can
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What is skyrocketing is the number of middle class parents claiming that their precious snowflakes are "on the autistic spectrum" due to behaviour that thirty years ago would just be thought of as slightly annoying and self centred.
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Despite my self imposed limits, my family generally has tended to be kind of ridiculously fertile - in my generation there are almost forty first cousins (though admittedly some of my uncles and aunts went through multiple marriages to manage this feat.) My grandmother had my youngest and favorite Aunt, a retired CSI who now does medical auditing, when she was 46. ...of course, increased rates doesn't mean the absolute rates are high, just that they're higher than they would have been.
Eh. I've always been e
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No that's what you believe that the left actually believes.
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And you're dead wrong, even if all the cadavers mysteriously and magically turned into basic mineral components and were sprinkled all over the planet (instead of rotting wherever they dropped dead, contaminating air and water with diseases durably over the following weeks).
An 8 billion human population is overall better for mankind and also arguably for the planet, than just 1 billion.
Long-term, a forcibly reduced populati
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While lauding human potential, you omit cost, which considering how many people with even modertely useful degrees are under or unemployed; you're not getting those sunk costs back. And that is going to get worse as the population climbs.
Regarding diversity, the Idiocracy argument applies, as that diversity is heavily skewed in one direction, which ends up not being diverse at all. It takes more than sheer numbers.
Not advocating for any instance of a Final Solution (god knows no one is wise enough to select
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Unemployment has nothing to do with population numbers. Many (most ?) countries in this world enjoy low unemployment figures with growing demographics.
No, diversity is not skewed in any direction. A vast number of different factors help or hamper in the reproductive success of any given individual, and as the population inc
Re:Now we need... (Score:5, Informative)
Many extinct species would beg to differ.
http://news.discovery.com/anim... [discovery.com]
Re:Now we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many extinct species would beg to differ.
How can they do that? They're extinct.
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> > Many extinct species would beg to differ.
> How can they do that? They're extinct.
"Would". As in if they weren't extinct, they would say that. Oh wait, no they wouldn't!
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Many extinct species would beg to differ.
How can they do that? They're extinct.
What part of "would" didn't you understand?
The part where you would have missed the joke.
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An 8 billion human population is overall better for mankind and also arguably for the planet, than just 1 billion.
Many extinct species would beg to differ. http://news.discovery.com/anim [discovery.com]...
Why do you hate evolution?
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An 8 billion human population is overall better for mankind and also arguably for the planet, than just 1 billion.
[citation needed], and also false dichotomy. With current practices, the Earth is provably over its carrying capacity. We have the technology to fix the problems, but do we have the will? Film at eleven.
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What about the drastic decrease in the bio-diversity of everything else on the planet?
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The same applies: I think it's a bad thing, just as it would be a bad thing to see happen in humans.
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People have been claiming we were hitting peak population since we hit 1 billion. Improved technology has prevented true overpopulation from happening. Those places with an actual growing population will either die out, or figure out a way to deal with it.
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I wouldn't know. My answer to the future would be O'Neill Cylinders. That would solve the future population problems.
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Feel free to lead by example. Until you do, why should anyone listen to you?
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I think you're wrong.
The logistics of dealing with that many dead bodies all at once would simply overwhelm the systems of even the most advanced and richest countries. Emergency management simply could not keep up. Bodies would lie in the street, rotting, attracting pests and disease... and the other 3 billion would die soon after as they are overwhelmed by those.
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> I think if 4 billion humans dropped dead next week, we'd all be better off long-term. ... dead ... all be better off
> 4 billion humans dropped dead
> we'd all be better off
> 4 billion
So trivially we wouldn't "all" be better off, because this plan involves extinction of 2/3rds of humans, and they would assuredly be much worse off (being dead). It seems unlikely that the remaining third would be all that much happier about the situation.
I don't think your sentiment is all that common. Interesti
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Emphasis added.
The dead would not be better off in any term. Plus, you appear to assume that you'd remain among the living.
Will you demonstrate the courage of your conviction by leading the way and making a personal sacrifice? Because simply waiting for something to happen and the outcome to be determined by nature's lot
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And what would a 4-billion cullig do to our genetic diversity?
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That rather depends on how the 4 billion is distributed, doesn't it? If it included all the females I suspect it'd go down rather steeply within 80 or so years.
Let's suppose it was uniform across race, sex, age, eye colour, blood group, yada yada - just as if they were drawn at random. Given that the population was at that level within my lifetime and we seemed to cope OK I'd say there'd be no effect at all.
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My understanding was that the part of our genes that are race specific is actually smaller than those which simply vary from individual to individual. If that is true then I would think that any death is some reduction of diversity.
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Don't know why you're wittering about race, it's Irrelevant. Are you one of those people who reads words but not sentences?
Any person born after 1974 inherited the genes of 2 people born before 1974. You won't have had many mutations in a few decades. Therefore, effect on diversity = nil.
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Well.. you were talking about assuming the population reduction was uniform. (I didn't feel like pointing out how unlikely that is). I ignored sex in your comment since it's kind of hard to reproduce without one of each. As for age.. I ignored that because anyone who is no longer of reproductive age is no longer going to contribute. So.. I was left with race.
As for your 1974 thing.. it's pretty nonsensical. First of all, your pre-1974 parents may or may not still be alive. Even if they are they are unlik
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Wishing 4 billion humans dropped dead indicates there's something seriously abnormal with your mental processes. Nearly every human on earth will think you're a dangerous whacko.
On the other hand, wishing 4 billion humans would stop breeding is much more palatable, while accomplishing the exact same environmental goal. A significant percentage of the population in rich countries now are voluntarily going childless anyways, you just have to convince the people in poor countries (which are responsible for alm
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Perhaps the better option would be to just stop trying to cure diseases we have t
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the planet could easily a decent multiple
should have read:
the planet could easily support a decent multiple
Graaaaains (Score:5, Funny)
This is how The Pronking Dead starts, you know.
They were raptured (Score:5, Funny)
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Mod +1 Funny.
Re: They were raptured (Score:1)
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It was at least 120,000 over a few weeks. No doubt someone just mis-estimated.
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Lol if you believe these fairytales.
It was actually me. I was hungry and trying to bulk so I ate them all.
Maybe (Score:2)
Walter Palmer bought himself a Chu-ko-nu
Environmental factors (Score:1)
They're looking into environmental factors
Yeah, I think it was probably something in their environment as well.
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Cyanide gas leaking from melting 'perma'frost?
Not saying it was aliens but... (Score:5, Funny)
It was aliens.
Well.. (Score:3)
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I've wondered a lot about the average age of posters, and if that has changed. A lot would be explained (including some matters of timing) by a strong influx of the 15-22 year olds.
Well on their way (Score:1)
> 60,000 antope in 4 days
Wait. WHERE'S CARTMAN?
Whose fault is it? (Score:1)
Climate Change? (Score:1)
Interesting: "their grazing helps get rid of fallen plant matter, which is prevented from decomposing by the cold temperatures". I wonder if bacteria or other pathogen may be thriving because of temperature increases?
Pasteurella multocida (Score:1)
P. multocida WILL kill you in a week, no, ifs, ands or buts about it. I know this first hand.
It's got to be transmitted to you first and usually, that's from a bite.
If a mosquito or biting fly has become a transmission vector, this is a massive problem for all advanced land based animals on this planet.
Russian saigas (Score:1)
Next time don't name your antelopes after an automatic shotgun
Maybe (Score:2)
Anyone have eyes on where Walter James Palmer is right now?
Acacia Tree is Suspected (Score:3)
The current explanation, pins this on the Acacia Tree and this only happens when the antelope population is too large.
I couldn't find full articles that weren't behind paywalls, so this will have to do as reference: http://arthurmag.com/2010/01/0... [arthurmag.com]
Climate Change (Score:2)
The summary pretty much answers it's own question:
"...their grazing helps get rid of fallen plant matter, which is prevented from decomposing by the cold temperatures."
It very will could be that "Climate Change" has caused slightly warmer temperatures, which has hastened the decomposition of the food they depend on. With less food, the animals become weaker and more susceptible to sickness. Similarly and possibly in conjunction with, the bacteria in question may become more prevalent in slightly warmer temp
Re:You didn't listen (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how global warming could lead to the extinction of Free Software Foundation.
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Oh come on, like you never wanted to hunt down RMS...
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Nah, we live all over the world. It will take a lot of climate change to destroy ALL of the suitable habitat for humans.
A population crash is likely, though.
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It's going to take a while, seeing as they can't hold a screw driver.
At least, they are not screwing the world, nor driving other species into extinction.
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We warned you about global warming, and you didn't listen. Who will be the next victims of our inaction? Dolphins? Housecats? Gnus?
How about we warn the dolphins, then wait until after the housecats then start doing something?
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So I hurd.
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My guess is some of that super toxic hydrazine reached the ground from the Russian Soyuz launch failure in May. [spaceflightnow.com]
Chemistry 101: Abort, Retry, Fail
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Antelope is already plural, like sheep or deer.