Chinese Paddlefish, One of the World's Largest Fish, Survived the Meteor That Killed the Dinosaurs. But They Couldn't Survive Us. (nationalgeographic.com) 84
Native to China's Yangtze River, these fish grew 23 feet in length, but haven't been spotted since 2003. From a report: The Chinese paddlefish and its close relatives have been around for at least 200 million years. The species, reaching up to 23 feet in length, survived unimaginable changes and upheavals, such as the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs and marine reptiles like plesiosaurs that it swam alongside. In its time, flowering plants evolved, and came to populate the shores of its ancestral home, the Yangtze River, in modern-day China. Much later, bamboo came on the scene, and well after that, giant pandas. In the last few thousand years, a blink in evolutionary time, the land filled with people, and China became the most populous country on Earth. In the muddy waters of the Yangtze, the paddlefish lived as it had for eons, using its special sword-like snout to sense electrical activity to find prey, such as crustaceans and fish. But there's one phenomenon this ancient species, sometimes called the "panda of the Yangtze," could not survive -- humans. A new paper published in the Science of the Total Environment concludes that the species has gone extinct, mainly due to overfishing and dam construction. It's "a reprehensible and an irreparable loss," says study leader Qiwei Wei of the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, who's been looking for the animal for decades.
Re:"Us" (Score:5, Insightful)
We could talk about the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, a partial list of recent North American extinctions is given here [currentresults.com] if you like. Most of us appreciate being part of the human race though and don't think that the actions of English speakers is fundamentally separate from speakers of other languages.
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Literally everything on that list that's actually recent was confined to a single stream/pong/brook/etc or migrated into the third world as part of their reproductive cycle.
How about the Great Auk? Or is stretching across the whole North Atlantic still too confined for you? Or is it too far back to count even though we literally hunted them to extinction?
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Re: "Us" (Score:2)
I can't believe I have to share the planet with people like you.
Re: "Us" (Score:2)
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Not Bachman's Warbler. Nor Eskimo Curlew. There are more items on the list that are full species. While species definitions do take into account location/distribution, there is a lot more to species or subspecies designations. Location alone does not designate a subspecies.
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If something has territory outside the US the US isn't responsible for it.
I feel sorry for most USA citizens. It's an attitude like this from a minority of your citizens which is the reason all of you are stereotyped as "ignorant and self centred assholes"
NicknameUnavailable - so let's look at your argument - if a country was to hunt commercial aircraft that fly over their country, are they not responsible for it because the aircraft also travels over other countries? If you were hunting the damn thing then you contributed to it's downfall. You are responsible (doesn't mean solel
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I feel sorry for most USA citizens. It's an attitude like this from a minority of your citizens which is the reason all of you are stereotyped as "ignorant and self centred assholes"
Congrats on preemptively invalidating whatever argument you thought you had in the minds of anyone who isn't a pompous blowhard.
NicknameUnavailable - so let's look at your argument
lol, you think you have that right?
Re:"Us" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"Us" (Score:4, Funny)
How do these things taste?
Was paddlefish any good?
Any of the other species listed on this thread?
If so, then indeed...it was a great loss.
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There is a related paddle fish in North America. It was endangered because it was tasty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So, probably it was pretty good.
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Problems we have in Canada is Chinese poachers who need bear gall bladders to make their penises hard or whatever.
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Mismod b gone
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Lol. The very first entry is this:
Unless Americans have some very odd names for single streams?
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Re: "Us" (Score:1)
The conversion is about species going extinct. You're the one who decided to restrict the debate to streams, perhaps because it suited your opinion narrative.
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Except the Columbia basin pygmy rabbit is not extinct... (and the original posters point still stands, a small inbred population living in a confined area)
https://www.fws.gov/wafwo/arti... [fws.gov]
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I think the difference (if there is one) is that with the earlier extinctions -- the passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, etc. -- people genuinely had no idea concept that the entire species could be wiped out.
It's very uncomfortable the the rise of West happened alongside a great deal of ecological destruction, but it's what happened, and we didn't know any better. We DO know better now, and while we are by no means perfect, the last 50 years have seen great improvements in protection of species.
There is a
And with that, you lost the people who care (Score:4, Insightful)
We still have pigeons and parakeets, just not those particular kinds. What is there that is like the paddlefish?
You are just like those people who claim someone mildly annoying is a nazi, you diminish the actual tragedy before you of losing a truly unique species in your rush to condemn someone who is blameless.
So in the end what you just did is took anyone who did care and pushed them away, because obviously the loss of the paddlefish is no big deal if it's equivalent to other minor losses - that is on you.
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We could talk about the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, a partial list of recent North American extinctions is given here [currentresults.com] if you like. Most of us appreciate being part of the human race though and don't think that the actions of English speakers is fundamentally separate from speakers of other languages.
Passenger pigeons are an interesting case. Prior to Columbian contact, they were not very numerous as evidenced by archeology of Amerind middens. After the removal of that human keystone species, all kinds of ecological havoc ensued, inducing overbreeding of the pigeons. Eventually, the European immigrants started eating them and wiped them out.
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Why is all this shit about things going extinct in the third world written in English?
Because this is an English website and therefore rarely links to foreign language content, and English (and German) are the languages of science.
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Because the English speakers demand cheaper and cheaper consumer goods, which China produces at the cost of its environment. None of us are 100% innocent in what's happening to our planet.
The meteor (Score:2)
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Msmash is having quite the day. TWO articles in one morning on our sins against the Earth Mother. All that's missing is some kind of Donald Trump angle to the story.
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Then all the people in Germany who weren't directly involved in the Holocaust shouldn't bear any responsibility for its outcome.
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Yes, you did say that. You said, to use your own words, "If one has no control over the situation they bear no responsibility for the outcome".
If some 12-year old in Germany had no control over the Holocaust, why should they bear any responsibility for it? Why should they feel any guilt for what happened? They weren't involved with it.
And yet, example after example can be given of one person from one group doing something and the entire group bearing the blame. One wacko from Islam blows themselves up? A
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Yes. This is correct.
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I've met right wing NRA gun-nut hunters with whom I have little in common.
So brave.
One thing this lib-tard and those wingnuts did have in common was the basic understanding that it is a tragedy when you wipe out an entire species.
As the parent poster noted, WE didn't wipe them out.
Contrary to popular opinion on the left and elsewhere, hunters do understand that when you wipe out an entire species there is nothing left to hunt so they like to make sure extinction doesn't happen and I respect that about them quite a lot.
Well, you get that much at least.
You on the other hand are just a waste of oxygen.
That's so sweet. Do you talk all the boys that way, or do you really like me in that special way?
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Where's my iPhone 12! Western workers are entitled brats who refuse to live in worker dormitories! Corporations need access to 1 billion additional wallets!
It is collectively "us", because WE clearly haven't stood up to prevent, mitigate or reverse enough of these catastrophes; be it by protests, voting (elections and with your wallet), activism or revolution. Ecosystem disruptions like this will effect all of us and usually not in a good way, even if you didn't directly participate. The only excuse you
Re: Fuck your collectivist guilt peddling. (Score:2)
âoeThe only excuse you have is if you genuinely didn't know about it.â
Good post but I take issue with that one line.
When it comes to natural consequences, there are no excuses period. Not knowing laws of physics does not excuse us from having to hit the ground if we fall. I bring this up because I see people acting as if this was true with environmental issues, as if somehow we will be excused from having to live in a toxic hellscape if we didnâ(TM)t know we created it.
In this important sense
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Good luck protesting in China.
Good luck voting in China.
Good luck with any kind of activism in China.
Good luck with revolution in China.
Good luck convincing China to care about those things without war.
Good luck convincing everyone to go to war with China to push your idea of virtue.
Re:Fuck your collectivist guilt peddling. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not going to feel particularly bad about any of them though. The world is in flux. Species come and they go one way or another. The notion that everything that's alive today should be kept alive for ever in some kind of virtuous quest to preserve the world as it is horribly misguided. In our own efforts to advance humanity and raise the standards of living for billions of people around the world we're going to end up killing off a lot of other species. Some accidentally and no doubt a few intentionally.
If part of the cost of China going from an infant mortality rate of 1 in 10 to fewer than 1 in 100 is this fish species, then that's an okay trade in my book. The extinction rate for all the species on Earth is 100% unless we can figure out how to get off of our planet and start spreading throughout the universe.
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A. Species of all kinds are decreasing at a much faster rate than what is normal.
B. The lack of adequate biodiversity will eventually lead to an ecosystem collapse. People canno
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A "geologically short period of time" is the entire existence of homo sapiens. It would take thousands of generations of humans before we returned to any semblance of normal if the ecological collapse that we're witnessing continues. People cannot survive without certain types of pla
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Humans have been really good at moving into new habitats during a period of time where life was abundant everywhere - lots of edible plants, lots of game to hunt etc.
We are unlikely to do quite so well if we see massive die-offs. There ARE people living in the desert, sure, but that's a very hard kind of living and not one we're likely to survive as a species if it's all that's left to us.
Re:Fuck your collectivist guilt peddling. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fuck your collectivist guilt peddling. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Apologies but are you suggesting that the Chinese wouldn't have fished and dammed these animals to extintion, had it not been for the rest of the humanity who kept buying Chinese products? How would've that prevention worked? Say, Reagan in the 80's (when environmentalism was already a thing) or any president/congress past that should've embargoed China to... merely slow down their industrialization and dam building efforts? If so, maybe still not too late to keep China honest in their claimed environmental
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Turns out you killed them (Score:2)
When was the last time you shopped at Walmart?
Are you saying you don't?
By keeping rural china poorer than they might have been otherwise, they had no choice to hunt the paddlefish to extinction just to eat.
You want to protect the environment? Make people well off enough they no longer have to hunt to live. I have been to poor and rich nations across the globe, and without exception the worse a nation is economically the more the environment suffers for it.
In the meantime, you have probably caused countle
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It's all spotted owl being passed off as fish anyway.
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Qiwei We managed to say "it's a reprehensible and an irreparable loss," between bites of the freshly prepared paddlefish.
And does anyone have the DNA? (Score:2)
I think we are maybe 80 years out from being able to bring these things back from DNA, (if we survive) but we must have it, frozen or digitized. Most (by diversity not numbers) lifeforms on earth are probably headed for extinction in coming centuries, best to have a backup.
Re:And does anyone have the DNA? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is a problem with captive wildlife in general.
Suppose you have sperm and eggs for a nominally-extinct breed of tiger. You fertilize an egg, implant it in a surrogate tiger, and it gets carried to term and grows up. You then somehow get it pregnant with sperm from another tiger of the same breed from a zoo halfway across the earth, watch it carry a litter to term... and kill the cubs within moments of birth, because the tiger has no fsck'ing CLUE how pregnancy or birth actually works. The only 'instinct
Re:And does anyone have the DNA? (Score:5, Insightful)
DNA isn't really a backup. The species are dying because the ecosystem in which they lived is destroyed. Bring one back to life, boom, it's dead again. You'd have to resurrect the plants they ate, the billion different bacteria in their gut, the predators and prey, the open space, the climate...
DNA isn't a backup now. But one day it may be.
Back in World War 1, there was no magnetic recording tape and the only way to record sound was to cut a groove into wax or metal. That wasn't really practical for use in a wartime area, so they developed something called "sound ranging" that they could use to determine where gunfire was coming from. It recorded to motion picture film. Such a recording taken at the very end of the war when the fighting stopped was converted to a sound file in 2018 and you can hear it now.
The great French director Jacques Tati made a film in 1949 called Jour de Fête. A French company convinced him to film it in a new color process they invented that wouldn't infringe on Technicolor patents. Tati had some doubts so just to be safe, he set up a standard black and white camera next to the color camera and filmed everything on both cameras. The French company went out of business and some sources say that their process may not have even worked correctly. Tati had to edit and release his black and white footage. 46 years later, almost 20 years after Tati's death, his youngest daughter took the old color negatives he saved and using modern computer technology it became possible to produce a color version of the film. So the fact that DNA isn't a backup in 2020 doesn't mean in, say, 2070 it may indeed be a backup.
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> You'd have to resurrect the plants they ate, the billion different bacteria in their gut, the predators and prey, the open space, the climate...
Not really. Just look at cats.
First, before someone insults them and claims they're 'domesticated', know that any self-respecting cat would view that as the ULTIMATE insult. Cats are not domesticated... they entered into a unilateral peace treaty with humans, under terms mostly dictated by the cats themselves, and both cats and h00manz have mutually prospered f
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Whose cytoplasm and embryonic processes are you going to plug your salvaged DNA into? Don't tell me that stuff is any less the product of a separate evolution as the nuclear DNA itself. DNA is a great start, but let's not kid ourselves about the difficulties that Jurassic Park glossed over. You need whole cells to do the job right (ideally egg and sperm, I suppose, unless you've got the tech for turning some other cell into a zygote, but then I'd wonder what compromises are involved in that tech).
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Most people forget that overwhelmingly, the majority of life - and almost all of it's diversity - is single-celled organisms. The number of microbes in and on your body is very likely considerably larger than the number of humans on the planet (unless you've recently had a massive dose of antibiotics as well as 90% third-degree
200 million years! (Score:1)
'Us' meaning China's environmental policies (Score:1)
This is a country that has had melamine in baby food.The authorities there are poisoning the people and the land in a way that's reprehensible and against their long term interests. It's shocking.
there is an american species too (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sad (Score:3)
When the dam was built, the fish was caught upstream without a paddle.
Thanks.
Suckers! (Score:2)
Times up bitches!
Once again the myopic focus on CO2 kills (Score:4, Insightful)
damn construction
Lots of reasons to build a damn but "clean" energy is a big one of them. Maybe these fish would still be around if international pressure on China had focused on more than just CO2?
The eco[system] is a system! Care for the environment requires system thinking. It demands a careful analysis of every action. Cutting CO2 by switching to LED lamps everywhere might help reduce warming but what are the impacts of all that extra semiconductor production, what about the disposal of all those plastics? I am not saying LEDs are not net win for example but you should not just assume that! You should not assume it applies to all applications for lamps.
One very basic rule probably does work. The more human activity there is in a place they worse things are for wild life. Most of the western world is below the replacement rate and its happened without any anti-freedom one-child policies; but for some reason everyone is falling all over themselves to 'fix' that by importing/admitting immigrants in huge numbers. That needs to stop if any of use want keep the world around us green an beautiful and full of life. We need to understand why the social and economic pressures in places that still have people reproducing well above the replacement rate are and probably help address the in those places if we care to make the 'whole world a better place'
The other thing is we need to get serious about other now very clearly proven out threats. Its uncomfortable but plain that far more than 'warming' invasive and non-native species are having far greater and more immediate effects on wild life. Overseas travel and trade (especially of agriculture products) really needs to be looked at with a critical eye.
Its worth thinking carefully about these things because right now doing what is actually right for the environment does not align well with our right-left politics. Both liberals and conservatives a like need to sacrifice a few sacred cows if we are going to create a policy that can really address this problem. The western-political-left though really needs to stop vilifying the right which is right to reject a lot of their proposals, because they are correct about the fact the carbon-carbon-carbon-omg-carbon drum beat is leading to a lot of things that will be economically devastating for them but absolutely wont prevent the coming mass-extinction event which threatens to upend all our lives (or at least those of our children/grandchildren) anyway.
Fucking Depressing (Score:2)
Shit going extinct left and right. It sucks ass. Bigger animals are especially prone to this it seems, probably because of the higher food requirements and bigger habitat needs.
But Couldn't Survive the Chinese (Score:1)
South Dakota population? (Score:1)