6 ms·

Animals We Ate into Extinction

69 points by shawndumas 9y ago

partycoder 9y ago
We are in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, the extinction event with the highest extinction rate. Killing the animals is part of what we have done to destroy species, there's also habitat destruction. And if we are smart enough and we melt the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we are next in line after we release enough methane to recreate Permian-Triassic extinction event. "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." ... then go extinct.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  "the extinction event with the highest extinction rate." Sorry, that is not correct. The K–Pg extinction event wiped out around 75% of all living species, apparently within the span of a couple of years.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - partycoder 9y ago
    The P-Tr extinction event is acknowledged as being the most severe of all. One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds... which is a self-reinforcing phenomenon: as temperature raises, methane release accelerates, reinforcing the temperature raise which reinforces the methane release and so on... That could realistically happen again within our lifetime.
    - Santosh83 9y ago
      So does anyone know exactly what brought the planet back to normal after the release of all this methane? Why didn't the Earth careen into an unstoppable spiral of planet-wide heating like Venus did?
      - yoodenvranx 9y ago
        That is what I was wondering as well. The climate on eart seems to be very britty and very robust at the same time. What stops it from going completely crazy?
        pavlov 9y ago
        Maybe it's a variation of the anthropic principle? Earth is not a Venus simply because we're here to observe it. We don't (yet) have data about climates on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. It could be that Earth is an extreme outlier in having a stable climate system.
        jacobush 9y ago
        Yes and no - I think it is life that is the stabilising factor. Venus probably never had any. Also it's much closer to the sun.
      - Turing_Machine 9y ago
        Much of the Earth's original carbon supply has been sequestered in the form of carbonate rocks. Much of the planet is covered with miles of them. That carbon isn't going anywhere.
      - partycoder 9y ago
        While Venus could have an atmosphere capable of supporting life at one time, Venus' hydrogen is believe to have been ejected into space by solar winds due to a lack of a magnetosphere capable of countering them.
    - Turing_Machine 9y ago
      "One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds" You mean "one possible cause among many" (including, ATW, meteor impact, volcanism, sea level change, sea oxygen content change, sea acidity change). That doesn't make it one of THE causes. The word "possible" needs to be in there. There's no conclusive evidence for any of these.
qume 9y ago
No moa [1] Britannica, really? It's not even on the 'birds that don't fly' on the next page! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Came here to say just this, and the Haast Eagle as well...
  - WillReplyfFood 9y ago
    They died for the glory of the british empire. Civilization and animals everyhwere beware!
    - fenwick67 9y ago
      Actually it was the Māori not the British.
- pvaldes 9y ago
  And australian horned turtles, and Galapagos tortoises, and...
qume 9y ago
A nice alternative version of this would be 'Animals We Ate into Proliferation'
- justinator 9y ago
  We can play the home version: chickens cows pigs I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop. I guess there's some geese and ducks. I would salmon, but does farming of them displace more of the habitat loss we've cost them with damns, mining, oil fields, etc?
  - phillc73 9y ago
    I think it depends where you are, regarding the use of sheep. In Australia and New Zealand, lamb consumption is quite popular. Australian figures from 2016 show 9.5kg of lamb consumed per capita[1]. From the article: "This means that with underlying population growth, the total volume consumed in Australia is forecast to edge above 240,000 tonnes cwt by 2020, which will account for 46% of Australia’s lamb production." Which means there's a further 250,000 tonnes exported. The UK appears to be even higher in absolute numbers. Average purchase per week per person of mutton and lamb was 35 grams, which equates to 1.82kg per annum[2]. With a population of 63 million, that is once again a fairly large consumption of sheep. [1] https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-news/2016-australian-lamb-consumption-figures-demonstrate-resilience/ https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-news/2016-austr... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-household-consumption-of-mutton-and-lamb-in-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-househo...
  - masklinn 9y ago
    > I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop. It very much depends on the country. Australia, NZ, South Africa and muslim countries consume significant amounts of sheep meat e.g. 5.5kg per capita in Saudi Arabia, 7.4 in Australia, 3.2 in Iran, …
  - KGIII 9y ago
    > goats for milk and the odd lambchop. Just to avoid confusion, lamb chops come from lambs - sheep. It's probably just a grammar issue, but I figured I'd note this. Also, goat is delicious. Americans don't eat much goat or sheep, but they are regularly eaten elsewhere.
beloch 9y ago
Humans likely hunted several species to death after reaching North America, including: - North American horses (several species) - North American camels - Giant Bison - Tapirs (several North American species) - Llama's (several North American species) - Stag Moose - Gomphotheres (several species, similar to elephants) Several other species of North American megafauna, such as North American lions and giant beavers likely went extinct due to human activities even though there's no evidence they were hunted directly. e.g. The extinction of most of their prey likely did the lions in. It's actually quite shocking what humans with rocks, sticks, and empty bellies were able to do. There can be little doubt that the domestication of animals for food has spared countless other species from a similar fate over the last ten thousand years.
- RachelF 9y ago
  Humans did the same thing, causing a mass extinction of around half the large mammals in Australia and many other species when they reached the continent around 40,000 years ago. Not only did we hunt large animals, but we burned the forests regularly, driving more to the brink. The same thing happened around 1000 years ago when we reached New Zealand and Madagascar. Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done.
  - chicago_wade 9y ago
    > Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done. Unless global warming gets sufficiently bad, in which case that will be the worst damage.
- pvaldes 9y ago
  > The extinction of most of their prey likely did the lions in Maybe, but the opposite situation is also possible. You can wipe the preys if you remove the predadors. We had see this in New Zealand for example where Tasman devil has protected decens of species of smaller marsupials, extinct in the continent but not here. This is the same big scale experiment that we are playing currently in Africa. In one or other case the result is the same, almost all european big mammal fauna vanished; and a replace is still missing for the equivalent of european elephant, european rhinos or north american cheetah.
singularity2001 9y ago
10? How about hundreds? (in Australia and Americas alone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals
- hamstergene 9y ago
  How about billions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction The evolution itself is made of extinctions. All current species exist because their ancestors have pushed some of their contemporaries to go extinct. These lists are just those we know about.
dom0 9y ago
> Humans are not always great at self-moderation Humans are never great at self-moderation.
- dTal 9y ago
  I was going to post a snarky reply to this, but thought better of it.
memburcar 9y ago
Who knows - we could see the resurrection of the woolly mammoth - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-mammoth-resurrection-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-mammo...
11235813213455 9y ago
It's really sad at how the number of wild animals keeps decreasing, while number of useless pets is increasing. The future is not going to be nice Having a pet, nowadays, makes no sense, I hope this tendency can change
RickJWagner 9y ago
Eat more mosquitoes.
- EADGBE 9y ago
  Ironically, they're saying the exact same thing of us. On their HN, none-the-less.
flarg 9y ago
Can I commend the writing on this Web site? I know traditional encyclopedias have been over shadowed by Wikipedia, but the standard of writing and information density does not compare to what went before.

69 points by shawndumas 9y ago

We are in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, the extinction event with the highest extinction rate. Killing the animals is part of what we have done to destroy species, there's also habitat destruction. And if we are smart enough and we melt the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we are next in line after we release enough methane to recreate Permian-Triassic extinction event. "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." ... then go extinct.

Turing_Machine 9y ago
"the extinction event with the highest extinction rate." Sorry, that is not correct. The K–Pg extinction event wiped out around 75% of all living species, apparently within the span of a couple of years.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- partycoder 9y ago
  The P-Tr extinction event is acknowledged as being the most severe of all. One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds... which is a self-reinforcing phenomenon: as temperature raises, methane release accelerates, reinforcing the temperature raise which reinforces the methane release and so on... That could realistically happen again within our lifetime.
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    So does anyone know exactly what brought the planet back to normal after the release of all this methane? Why didn't the Earth careen into an unstoppable spiral of planet-wide heating like Venus did?
    - yoodenvranx 9y ago
      That is what I was wondering as well. The climate on eart seems to be very britty and very robust at the same time. What stops it from going completely crazy?
      - pavlov 9y ago
        Maybe it's a variation of the anthropic principle? Earth is not a Venus simply because we're here to observe it. We don't (yet) have data about climates on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. It could be that Earth is an extreme outlier in having a stable climate system.
        jacobush 9y ago
        Yes and no - I think it is life that is the stabilising factor. Venus probably never had any. Also it's much closer to the sun.
    - Turing_Machine 9y ago
      Much of the Earth's original carbon supply has been sequestered in the form of carbonate rocks. Much of the planet is covered with miles of them. That carbon isn't going anywhere.
    - partycoder 9y ago
      While Venus could have an atmosphere capable of supporting life at one time, Venus' hydrogen is believe to have been ejected into space by solar winds due to a lack of a magnetosphere capable of countering them.
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    "One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds" You mean "one possible cause among many" (including, ATW, meteor impact, volcanism, sea level change, sea oxygen content change, sea acidity change). That doesn't make it one of THE causes. The word "possible" needs to be in there. There's no conclusive evidence for any of these.

qume 9y ago

No moa [1] Britannica, really? It's not even on the 'birds that don't fly' on the next page! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa

mrmondo 9y ago
Came here to say just this, and the Haast Eagle as well...
- WillReplyfFood 9y ago
  They died for the glory of the british empire. Civilization and animals everyhwere beware!
  - fenwick67 9y ago
    Actually it was the Māori not the British.
pvaldes 9y ago
And australian horned turtles, and Galapagos tortoises, and...

qume 9y ago

A nice alternative version of this would be 'Animals We Ate into Proliferation'

justinator 9y ago
We can play the home version: chickens cows pigs I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop. I guess there's some geese and ducks. I would salmon, but does farming of them displace more of the habitat loss we've cost them with damns, mining, oil fields, etc?
- phillc73 9y ago
  I think it depends where you are, regarding the use of sheep. In Australia and New Zealand, lamb consumption is quite popular. Australian figures from 2016 show 9.5kg of lamb consumed per capita[1]. From the article: "This means that with underlying population growth, the total volume consumed in Australia is forecast to edge above 240,000 tonnes cwt by 2020, which will account for 46% of Australia’s lamb production." Which means there's a further 250,000 tonnes exported. The UK appears to be even higher in absolute numbers. Average purchase per week per person of mutton and lamb was 35 grams, which equates to 1.82kg per annum[2]. With a population of 63 million, that is once again a fairly large consumption of sheep. [1] https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-news/2016-australian-lamb-consumption-figures-demonstrate-resilience/ https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-news/2016-austr... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-household-consumption-of-mutton-and-lamb-in-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-househo...
- masklinn 9y ago
  > I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop. It very much depends on the country. Australia, NZ, South Africa and muslim countries consume significant amounts of sheep meat e.g. 5.5kg per capita in Saudi Arabia, 7.4 in Australia, 3.2 in Iran, …
- KGIII 9y ago
  > goats for milk and the odd lambchop. Just to avoid confusion, lamb chops come from lambs - sheep. It's probably just a grammar issue, but I figured I'd note this. Also, goat is delicious. Americans don't eat much goat or sheep, but they are regularly eaten elsewhere.

beloch 9y ago

Humans likely hunted several species to death after reaching North America, including: - North American horses (several species) - North American camels - Giant Bison - Tapirs (several North American species) - Llama's (several North American species) - Stag Moose - Gomphotheres (several species, similar to elephants) Several other species of North American megafauna, such as North American lions and giant beavers likely went extinct due to human activities even though there's no evidence they were hunted directly. e.g. The extinction of most of their prey likely did the lions in. It's actually quite shocking what humans with rocks, sticks, and empty bellies were able to do. There can be little doubt that the domestication of animals for food has spared countless other species from a similar fate over the last ten thousand years.

RachelF 9y ago
Humans did the same thing, causing a mass extinction of around half the large mammals in Australia and many other species when they reached the continent around 40,000 years ago. Not only did we hunt large animals, but we burned the forests regularly, driving more to the brink. The same thing happened around 1000 years ago when we reached New Zealand and Madagascar. Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done.
- chicago_wade 9y ago
  > Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done. Unless global warming gets sufficiently bad, in which case that will be the worst damage.
pvaldes 9y ago
> The extinction of most of their prey likely did the lions in Maybe, but the opposite situation is also possible. You can wipe the preys if you remove the predadors. We had see this in New Zealand for example where Tasman devil has protected decens of species of smaller marsupials, extinct in the continent but not here. This is the same big scale experiment that we are playing currently in Africa. In one or other case the result is the same, almost all european big mammal fauna vanished; and a replace is still missing for the equivalent of european elephant, european rhinos or north american cheetah.

singularity2001 9y ago

10? How about hundreds? (in Australia and Americas alone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals

hamstergene 9y ago
How about billions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction The evolution itself is made of extinctions. All current species exist because their ancestors have pushed some of their contemporaries to go extinct. These lists are just those we know about.

dom0 9y ago

> Humans are not always great at self-moderation Humans are never great at self-moderation.

dTal 9y ago
I was going to post a snarky reply to this, but thought better of it.

memburcar 9y ago

Who knows - we could see the resurrection of the woolly mammoth - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-mammoth-resurrection-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-mammo...

11235813213455 9y ago

It's really sad at how the number of wild animals keeps decreasing, while number of useless pets is increasing. The future is not going to be nice Having a pet, nowadays, makes no sense, I hope this tendency can change

RickJWagner 9y ago

Eat more mosquitoes.

EADGBE 9y ago
Ironically, they're saying the exact same thing of us. On their HN, none-the-less.

flarg 9y ago

Can I commend the writing on this Web site? I know traditional encyclopedias have been over shadowed by Wikipedia, but the standard of writing and information density does not compare to what went before.