So says the International Union for Conservation of Nature.



Link

Every animal larger than a house cat will eventually be extinct in the wild.

I used to fret about such things. Now I understand that it's an eventuality.

Too many people.

By Dr. O's logic, since all children will eventually die, no one should worry if someone is mass murdering children or if they are dying in droves from preventable diseases...

Sad, sad, sad.

This is not my logic - it's your misstatement or misunderstanding of my logic.

My logic, to lay it out formally is . . .

Human activity will eventually wipe out all large animals.
There is nothing that can be done to stop humans from wiping out all large animals.
Therefore I do not fret about the wiping out of all large animals.

More broadly, I can state it as:
I do not worry about things that cannot be prevented.

You inserted "preventable" in your counter, which takes it outside of the scope of my initial thought.

All large creatures doomed to die? Not so see this link:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80bea ... er-plants/

or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomura's_jellyfish

Upwards of 20 BILLION 450 lbs jellyfish now inhabit the world's oceans, outnumbering humans by almost 4 to 1. The jellyfish have a unique survival skill, when they are about to die or being attacked they release all of their eggs and sperm into the water around them, creating literally millions of additional jellyfish for every two killed. Japanese fisherman so frustrated with jellyfish are hauling them up in their fishing nets, killing them on deck and then dumping the remains back into the waters, blissfully unaware that they are creating hundreds of millions more jellyfish offspring in the process.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Jellyfish-Inv ... id=3067877

All bets are that humans will have jellyfish around to keep us company!

I wonder how jellyfish will deal with inreasing ocean acidification?

Jellyfish are called the cockroaches of the ocean, because they can survive in almost any type of condition. They are in fact thriving because of human induced pollution, ocean dead zones ect:

http://www.aboutmyplanet.com/green-news ... ish-ocean/

I would expect that jellyfish that do not have to form hard shells, or hard body parts will continue to thrive in a more acidic ocean that reduces their food competition from vertibrates.

I expect human numbers will plummet before too many more decades pass with the numbers of surviving wild animals to then rebound.

Being the self centered creature that I am I would be far more worried about my own species survival than any other animals. With peak oil we could be concievably looking at "Peak Humanity".

Who knows maybe the jellyfish are strong now but I'm entire family of animals will fill evolve and fill up those ecological niches. The history of evolution has been replete with mass extinctions whether it was the first algae/phytoplankton extinction a billion years ago that wiped out most of the earth's algae or the "oxygen holocaust" that made life like us possible at the expense of bacterial life.

Extinction and even catastrophic mass extinctions are part of nature. I wouldn't worry about nature,nature is strong it can take of itself. I'm far more concerned about the seven billion human beings on the planet, who have probably far exceeded the planet's capability to sustain them.

I think the best chance for continued human survival at moderate numbers requires a substantial thinning of the human herd.

Sounds too much like, "I'm whooping it up at this party so don't go calling the noise warden".

Actually that is not the case.


link

Although jellyfish are currently taking over the ocean, their demise is on the horizon.

Are we on the path of the Jellyfish Humanoids
(the ultimate masters of the planet after the great die-off),
~75M A.D. timeframe anybody?

You play a lot of games mon dieu?

You have a heavy distortion around your outer ear - you use it to distort all sounds toward what you want to hear.

I'm not enjoying the ongoing depression at all. I'm not enjoying the environmental fallout of human behavior at all . . . but I'm not going to sit around like a silly ninny and wring my hands and fret about it.

If I can't change it, I mostly ignore it.