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THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Ibon » Sun 20 May 2018, 08:04:14

We have had several herpetologists here during the past years who are exclusively studying the impact of the decimation of amphibian populations due to Chytrid fungus. One researcher from Germany is an expert on frogs and toads of Panama. His most recent visit only partially confirms the bounce back of some species. There is no doubt that chytrid fungus globally has represented a major extinction event for amphibians and Central AMerican tree frogs have been particularly vulnerable. After millions of dollars of research it is still not clear what caused the chytrid fungus to spread. What is encouraging, as is being reported, is that some species suffered over 99% population loss and then have now slowly rebounded. In a population of millions of frogs it only takes a small fraction to have resistance to then recolonize their habitat. That is like a major influenza virus wiping out 98% of humans and then the couple of million resistant survivors bouncing back.

There are a couple of dozen species of tree frogs from the American tropics that are no longer found in the wild and are being captive bred in clean room laboratories free of the fungus. All attempts and re introductions have failed since these captive bred frogs are not resistant to the fungus and when reintroduced get infected.

Here is a recent blog entry from Mount Totumas regarding one species rediscovered here after not having been seen for 10 years

http://blog.mounttotumas.com/?p=3001

Starrett’s Tree Frog Isthmohyla tica

Andreas Hertz, an expert on Panama’s amphibians, and his colleague Alex Shepak visited us in early January. This was Andreas’s 3rd visit to Mount Totumas surveying amphibians.

The Pandemic of chytrid fungus (Chytridiomycosis) effecting many amphibian species around the world is a focus of Andreas’s work. Many species formerly common in Central America are now feared extinct, a few have bounced back.

During their visit Andreas located a critically endangered Tree Frog, the Starrett’s Tree Frog Isthmohyla tica. This frog has not been seen on the Pacific side of Panama or Costa Rica in over 10 years. Here is the red list IUCN reference of this species:

http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/55675/0

There is hope that the remnant populations of this and other critically endangered amphibian species are made up of individuals with disease resistance. This may enable some species to bounce back. For this reason Andreas and Alex were taking tissue swap samples for further investigation.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
blog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/
website: http://www.mounttotumas.com
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 20 May 2018, 16:33:02

"...only partially confirms the bounce back of some species. There is no doubt that chytrid fungus globally has represented a major extinction event for amphibians and Central AMerican tree frogs have been particularly vulnerable... some species suffered over 99% population loss..."

Thanks for the 'ground-truthing' on this, Ibon.

Most valuable.

Meanwhile:

Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines

http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089

From the abstract:

...In our sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851/27,600) ; that is, they have decreased in population size and range.

In the 177 mammals for which we have detailed data, all have lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species have experienced severe population declines (>80% range shrinkage).

Our data indicate that beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization.

We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.
Last edited by dohboi on Sun 20 May 2018, 16:43:28, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Tue 22 May 2018, 11:52:10

mans Are Just 0.01% of Life on Earth, But We Still Annihilated The Rest of It

https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-are ... als-plants

And note: "Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, makes up about 60 percent of all mammals on Earth "
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Tue 22 May 2018, 15:05:45

dohboi, you obviously hate all humans, even though you are one.

How can you even stand to exist? Don't get me wrong, I would never encourage suicide and share the view that in most circumstances, otherwise healthy humans who kill themselves or others are mentally ill.

But YOU unrelentingly attack virtually everything that other humans do, apparently because they somehow do not meet your standards. Yet I have no clear understanding of what those standards of behavior might be, and I am baffled by your behavior in this Forum. There does not appear to be any clearly discernable benefits to humanity or to the whole ecosystem in what you are doing.

FWIW, humans are animals, behaving the way that animals behave, only slightly moderated by intelligence and culture. Surely everything that happens today, and all of the resultant circumstances, are part of Nature's plan. :mrgreen:
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Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Cog » Tue 22 May 2018, 15:10:53

I see no true advantage for bio-diversity from a human point of view.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 22 May 2018, 17:07:58

KJ,
A thoughtful post. I would, and have tried, have said it differently.

I think this is what is behinds Cogs seemingly brash comments on the other thread.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 22 May 2018, 17:10:58

Cog wrote:I see no true advantage for bio-diversity from a human point of view.


I believe that is a true statement. It does nothing to dispute the need for biodiversity. It is evidence you have a blind spot somewhere.

You are like a blind man saying you doubt color exists because you can not see it. My condolences.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Cog » Tue 22 May 2018, 18:24:51

Need for whom?
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 22 May 2018, 18:53:15

Well, taken to the literal extreme, no-biodiversity would mean you are the sole living thing on the planet. Slightly less extreme would imply nothing alive except humans.

Which of these definitions do you adhere to?
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 22 May 2018, 18:56:40

Also my Wife just reminded me that with no other organisms you not be able to poo, various organisms are required for digestion.

Which reminded my that a substantial part of our genetic makeup comes from bacteria. Of course that was in the past and you are talking future.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Cog » Tue 22 May 2018, 19:54:57

Newfie wrote:Well, taken to the literal extreme, no-biodiversity would mean you are the sole living thing on the planet. Slightly less extreme would imply nothing alive except humans.

Which of these definitions do you adhere to?


Bio-diversity enough to insure that humans continue to survive is sufficient. At least for me. We seem to be doing fine without giant dragonflies and trilobites.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Tue 22 May 2018, 20:23:17

Newf wrote: "You are like a blind man saying you doubt color exists because you can not see it. My condolences."

Nicely put.

and: "my Wife just reminded me that with no other organisms you not be able to poo, various organisms are required for digestion."

Your very wise wife beat me to it. We actually have lots and lots of organisms on and in our bodies doing all sorts of 'services' for us.

"The bacteria cells in our body outnumber human cells 10 to 1, she says, but because they are much smaller than human cells, they account for only about 1 to 2 percent of our body mass—though they do make up about half of our body's waste"

https://www.popsci.com/science/article/ ... rry-around

For the larger issue...can we just point out that oxygen is a nice (for us and most non-plants currently on the planet) little 'benefit' of 'biodiversity'? But maybe, as a more highly evolved being, Cog does not need such trifles as oxygen?
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 22 May 2018, 20:51:29

Cog wrote:
Newfie wrote:Well, taken to the literal extreme, no-biodiversity would mean you are the sole living thing on the planet. Slightly less extreme would imply nothing alive except humans.

Which of these definitions do you adhere to?


Bio-diversity enough to insure that humans continue to survive is sufficient. At least for me. We seem to be doing fine without giant dragonflies and trilobites.


In fact we are not “doing fine”. We are doing as fine as a mug of yeast half way through its last doubling. We desperately need some top level predator to keep our population in check. The irony is we are likely be be our own predator.

While we do not now need giant dragonflies and tribulites you need to remember that we did not arrive where we are in one giant step. We were not always what we are. We evolved through countless iterations. At any given point had we passed through a biodiversity minimum it would have changed what we are today. For better or worse?

No one alive today knows which species we require for our species to live and prosper. Even if it was knowable on a physical level there are psychological impacts which change who and what we are. You may be blind to this but others are not.

I think it is expressed in your total lack of humility, not always but far too often. I’m sure you don’t see it that way, when you reflect upon yourself you see what you can see. In this you are not unique. But if you have no humility, if you have no sense of it then how can you know you are missing it?

The good side of this is you tend to be very transparent, painfully blunt. So there is an honesty there which is to be admired. The bad side is you can be terribly blind and that means you often missinterrpret folks, you get paranoid.

Biodiversity link? You see what you see. We need pigs, cows, chickens. Not much else. I need whales, and petrels, and humming birds. It feeds a part of me that has died in you. You long for liberty? I find no liberty in mans company, I find it in nature. It is the liberty of life.

60103E02-B620-440A-A711-1485E1A4E13C.jpeg




Sorry for being so damn preachy.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Tue 22 May 2018, 20:59:05

Nicely put again.

The following is slightly off topic, but just to point out that I don't always just post bad news :) :

The US is running out of bombs!!!


" ... the industrial base of the munitions sector is particularly strained ..."

"Some suppliers have dropped out entirely ...Other key suppliers are foreign-owned ..."

" ... as the U.S. is expending munitions at a rapid rate ... "

"As to diversity in the industrial base, well ― there isn’t any, with the authors concluding that Raytheon and Lockheed Martin account for about 97 percent of the DoD’s munitions and missile procurement funding."

https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/20 ... make-more/

Or perhaps some here do see this as bad news? :)
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby vox_mundi » Thu 24 May 2018, 11:30:56

Lawns, Huh, Good God! What Are They Good For? Absolutely Nothing!

Americans devote 70 hours, annually, to pushing petrol-powered spinning death blades over aggressively pointless green carpets to meet an embarrassingly destructive beauty standard based on specious homogeneity. We marvel at how verdant we manage to make our overwatered, chemical-soaked, ecologically-sterile backyards. That’s just biblically, nay, God-of-War-ishly violent.

Image

To understand the sheer inanity of devoting 40 million acres, nearly half as much land as we set aside for our biggest crops, to an inedible carpet, we need to back up—beyond the modern lawn’s origins with a real estate family peddling the “American Dream” as Whites-only cookie-cutter suburbs—to the evolution of grass.

... We mow our lawns every few weeks. This coaxes our grass into growing its roots outwards, rather than down, spawning more sprawling shoots, in hopes of enabling any one blade to avoid overzealous grazers. However, the $47.8 billion to $82 billion we spend annually on overcutting and landscaping (FYI: we spend $49.47 billion in foreign aid) effectively amounts to trying to kill the grass while offering it life support. We trap it in prepubescence—too young to reseed, racing desperately ever-outward to find reproductive refuges that doesn’t exist.

We cut ourselves equally: Thirty-five thousand people, 4,800 of which are children, are treated annually for mower-related injuries—resulting in 600 youth amputations. The Royal Statistical Society even awarded the fact that nearly eight times more Americans are killed by lawnmowers than Islamic terrorists International Statistic Of The Year.

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Newfie's Solution

“Continual amputation is a critical part of lawn care. Cutting grass regularly—preventing it from reaching up and flowering — forces it to sprout still more blades, more rhizomes, more roots, to become an ever more impenetrable mat until it is what its owner has worked so hard or paid so much to have: the perfect lawn, the perfect sealant through which nothing else can grow—and the perfect antithesis of an ecological system.”

According to University of Florida ecology and conservation professor Mark Hostetler, that’s no hyperbole: Producing no seeds, nectar, or fruit, few creatures can use can use lawns as habitat. Biodiversity-wise “it’s almost like concrete,” he told Earther.


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Nature Bats Last

According to the EPA, we use 580 million gallons of gas each year, in lawnmowers that emit as much pollution in one hour as 40 automobiles driving— accounting for roughly 10 to 18 percent of non-road gasoline emissions.

We also dump roughly 10 times more fertilizer on our lawns than on crops, notes Columbia’s Earth Institute. These fertilizers and the 67 million pounds of pesticides with which we drench our lawns ever year degrade, releasing compounds like nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than CO2.

All America’s farmland consumes 88.5 million acre feet of water a year. Lawns, with a fraction of the land, drink an estimated two-thirds as much. Most municipalities use 30-60 percent of drinkable water on lawns.


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The Robots Will Appreciate It Though
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Thu 24 May 2018, 13:51:25

:lol: :lol:

Thanks, vox. I got rid of my lawn long ago.
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Thu 24 May 2018, 14:54:02

A while ago somewhere we had a discussion about biomass. Here is some relevant info I need to absorb.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/05/15/1711842115
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Re: THE Biodiversity thread Pt. 2(merged)

Unread postby dohboi » Thu 24 May 2018, 23:01:13

Yeah, like this little nugget:

...the mass of humans is an order of magnitude higher than that of all wild mammals combined ...


And that's not even counting the much larger mass of all the ag animals we grow for food and wool...
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