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The vultures of Spain skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny accuracy
- netsharc 7y agoAh, click-bait in 280 characters? TL;DR (or "A lengthy summary posted using Twitter's clunky 'thread' feature; didn't read"): Portugal has laws that require farmers to dispose off their dead cattle, Spain doesn't.
- dajohnson89 7y agon=11 for one figure, n=60 for the other.
- throwwwwwwaway 7y agoHacker News, aka the living embodiment of "you must be fun at parties".
- Supermancho 7y agoTY
- darkwater 7y agoAccording to your definition of click-bait title, I would say that almost all the human literature would be "click-bait".
- bpodgursky 7y agoThat's not true? The "traditional" essay begins with a topic paragraph and a thesis statement, with later paragraphs supporting that assertion. Only new-form, gotta-read-to-the-end journalism hides the interesting lede at the end.
- opwieurposiu 7y agoI have seen elk wander back and forth across an invisible boundary all year, but the first day of hunting season you can bet they will not put one hoof into the game unit.
- mc32 7y agoAs mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the behavior has nothing to do with knowing a border but rather something important to vultures: lack of carrion on the other side because people on the other side observe different laws pertaining to animal disposal.
- Ensorceled 7y agoRight, that's their point: game, elk/deer/moose, will avoid areas where there are active hunters and seem to have a sixth sense about where those boundaries are, for instance retreating to game preserves on the first day of the hunting season for similar reasons to why the vultures respect borders (prey vs. predators)
- mc32 7y agoThe farmers aren’t targeting vultures directly. I mean the title is akin to saying “Starbucks uncannily observes landmasses when putting in new stores —they haven’t been observed to put them in the middle of the ocean (barring cruise ships). Or “Lions avoid the actual Sahara desert”.
- Ensorceled 7y agoYou're missing the point. In both cases, the animals are respecting invisible borders, in one case because there is no prey on the other side and in the other because there are predators on the other side. It's similar, not exactly the same, and respecting the invisible border is the point.
- celticninja 7y agoI think they adhere to, rather than respect, the border.
- maxerickson 7y agoI think much of the explanation for animals like elk is that they just shy away from humans on foot. That activity increases lots during hunting seasons.
- jtbayly 7y agoNo food for vultures in Portugal, so they stay in Spain. Amazing. \s
- vumgl 7y agoVultures can fly over the border but their nests and young offsprings can't. Maybe this small restriction got some influence over their flight patterns over time.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThe border is an imaginary line.
- trhway 7y agoMany borders follow natural features like say a mountain ridge, and such features affects air movement patterns, humidity/clouds, etc.
- alejohausner 7y agoThe article points out that this is NOT the cause. The border between Spain and Portugal crosses all sorts of divides and watersheds: the Tagus river starts in Spain, passes near Madrid, travels west, and empties into the Atlantic in Lisbon. In fact, 3/4 of the Iberian peninsula has rivers that feed the Atlantic, and the divide between rivers that feed the Atlantic and those that feed the Mediterranean is way on the East side of Spain, far from the political border with Portugal.
- sergioj97 7y agoIf you read the tweets, you're in for a big surprise!
- jorge-d 7y agoIt's funny because they even avoid Olivença, which is De Facto in Spanish side of the border but is disputed. Vultures knows what country it should belong to \s
- javierga 7y agoI googled this because if your comment and found out about the sovereignty issues. I had never heard about this conflict in my life. I guess if I was to ask the average Brit about the sovereignty conflict with Spain regarding Gibraltar they would probably be non the wiser...
- athenot 7y agoThere are a few others in Europe, in particular the Mont Blanc. Though in practice, it doesn't affect day-to-day life. https://www.politico.eu/article/peak-of-discord-mont-blanc-europe-border-france-italy/ https://www.politico.eu/article/peak-of-discord-mont-blanc-e...
- pier25 7y ago> Spanish farmers don’t collect dead cattle, but in Portugal, they must bury or burn all carcasses. This leaves no food for vultures, who have learned that the grass is always greener on the eastern side. Case closed.
- qqn 7y agoThank you so much for this tl;dr! I wish all eye-catching articles were similarly summed up in one caption and/or image.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoThis kind of attitude is what leads to people using Facebook memes to inform their entire worldview. The whole Twitter thread takes, what, 1 minute to read?
- jcahill 7y agoWhy? What's the genesis of this difference? Does it have a tie-in to, say, a famous public health crisis? Who says there are no vultures on the Portugal side? Where can I learn more, if I want? Who works on this stuff? Pictures? The short-form summary that provides this requires the same number of clicks to reach from HN as your comment.
- soared 7y agoWhat? Click the link and scroll down - it answers this question. I won't enable you with an answer here, but it is a very interesting answer :)
- jcahill 7y agoYou should re-read my comment.
- swsieber 7y agoYour comment had put the punchline at the end, instead of the beginning, which is almost the same issue you're complaining about in the comment. Not only do you point out the issue with words, but with form as well. :) "Why is the comment so long? Why did I have to read to the end to figure out what your complaint was?"
- klhugo 7y agoYou definitely can not say the same about Canada geese :)
- qqn 7y agoFun fact: they're actually called "Canada geese", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_goose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_goose.
- klhugo 7y agoThanks!
- alejohausner 7y agoI always thought they were New Jersey geese. That's where most of them live.
- PedroBatista 7y agoPortuguese farmers don't bury dead wild animals, so obviously there are vultures in Portugal too. Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because of the unnaturally abundance of dead cattle, just a thought. Also, it's nice to be an arm-chair environmentalist as long as that dead cow isn't rotting next to your house.
- shkkmo 7y ago> Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because of the unnaturally abundance of dead cattle, just a thought. Pasture lands decrease habitat that would support the wild animal populations that would normally feed the vultures. Are you aware of any numbers indicating an unnaturally high vulture population? > Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because of the unnaturally abundance of dead cattle, just a thought. Nobody is trying to make the removal of corpses from inappropriate places illegal. They are trying to make it legal to leave some corpses in place.
- pvaldes 7y ago> Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because Because good and hard work In Spain there is a recent strong culture of protecting this birds, as result of the work for the last decades of several spanish associations like Fapas, Seo Birdlife or Grefa. And because money The farmers in this places are supposed to pay for removing dead sheep and cattle corpses by law, but they often pretend that the cattle was lost, look to other point whereas the vultures do the job for free and save the money.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoAccording to the series of tweets under discussion: 6/ A handful of nesting colonies remain in Portugal, says Joaquim Teodósio, a biologist working for the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (@spea_birdlife ), but the vultures that occupy them spend the daylight hours abroad. Also, it's nice to be an arm-chair environmentalist as long as that dead cow isn't rotting next to your house. The person writing these tweets in English has a Spanish language description in their profile that says in part (when translated): Science and environment journalist. I studied biology and scientific communication. (According to Google translate)
- microtherion 7y agoApparently, "vautours sans frontières" is not a thing…
- foxhop 7y agoOften less is more. One might say, let the animals work! Nature's solutions and systems are almost always the most efficient, whether regarding to energy, time, or health.
- jcahill 7y agoHalf of the comments: low-attention, high-misery demands that an already short summary of an interesting phenomenon be shortened to the minimum number of words possible, presented like it's not worthy of arousing your curiosity. The other half: people who didn't read the link providing baseless conjecture. Good stuff. Curiosity bad. 200-comment threads about minor releases of enterprise middleware only.
- kjeetgill 7y agoI gotta say, I agree with you and it looks like they're mostly going to get buried and flagged dead soon. But doesn't this comment just do the same? Like, for a top level comment it is even less about the article.
- jcahill 7y agoReplying so negatively to a particular comment when it's meta about the thread in general wouldn't have made much sense. HN's taboo against asking people if they've read the article is also wildly outdated -- its readership is too big and broad for the underlying assumption about tact being discursively superior to directness to hold. So you have to outright tell people they haven't read the article, when it's very apparent that they haven't. It's frustrating.
- dang 7y agoAlas, comments like this one perpetuate the problem you're complaining about, actually in a worse way because second-order phenomena are harder to deal with. For example, low-value dismissals tend to get downvoted and supplanted by better comments. But indignant meta-rants tend to get upvoted and sit at the top of the page, giving off fumes. That's where this one was until I marked it off-topic. Believe me I understand the annoyance of bad comments and shallow dismissals, but trying to fight them this way just makes the threads worse.
- jcahill 7y agoNow there's simply another meta comment at the top. When you mark that one off-topic, an irrelevant anecdote about elk that suggests possibly-not-reading-the-article will be on top.
- squeaky-clean 7y agoThe way everyone is writing this off as so obvious is annoying. Have you guys never found a bug that in retrospect was glaringly obvious, but all the symptoms looked bizarre until you found what made them all connected? This is a fun story the same way the "500 mile email limit" story is a fun story. Yeah the idea of "your timeout is so low that it times out unless you're sending a very local request, about 500 miles" is obvious and somewhat boring in retrospect too, but that twist is what makes them both fun stories/facts.
- edge17 7y agoActually, this reminded me about the impact pesticides etc. have had on Parsi death rights in India. Parsi people rely on birds of prey to consume their dead bodies in Dakhma's (structures intended for dead bodies to be exposed to birds that consume carrion). Due to the destruction of the population it's basically become much more difficult. More to read here if interested - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence#In_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence#In_India
- jfk13 7y agoI think you probably meant "death rites" (not "rights").
- jessaustin 7y agoPresumably they have rights to their rites.
- _AzMoo 7y agoThat is a fairly strong assumption for a good chunk of the world.
- plumenator 7y agoAbout a decade and a half ago CCMB (Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology), Hyderabad actually bred vultures for this very purpose. I don't remember if they ended up solving it.
- personlurking 7y agoIn case anyone is interested Great Big Story: The Vultureman of Spain (3m14s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQKaYUEknCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQKaYUEknCU "Manuel Aguilera wants you to know there’s no reason to fear vultures. The ornithological guide has gone as far as climbing into an animal carcass to get closer to the birds of prey. He’s spent 40 years studying the griffon vulture, and has dedicated his career to changing peoples’ perceptions of the birds, hoping to have others realize that they are majestic creatures to revere and protect."
- celticninja 7y agoKnowing they are scavengers I would not be afraid of them, by the time they bother you you will be dead. They won't attack anyone who has any way to defend themselves.
- umvi 7y agoNo matter what the story is, someone will always post the comment "In other news, water is wet" or "No news here, this has been known for 10 years" or something to that effect. All bugs are shallow given enough eyeballs, I suppose.
- Stratoscope 7y agoYeah, any old vulture could have told you about this.
- jessaustin 7y agoThis comment is of a similar nature, I feel.
- perlgeek 7y agoTalking to a foreign ATC is just too much of a hassle... :-)
- DoreenMichele 7y ago10/ It's not just vultures at stake: the collection, transportation and disposal of dead animals is costly and polluting. Maybe Tibetan Buddhists, who feed their dead to vultures as a form of burial, are on to something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2376190/Chopped-fed-vultures-glimpse-closely-guarded-tradition-Tibetan-sky-funeral.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2376190/Chopped-fed...
- berkes 7y agoI wonder if, given enough distance, this is actually a really good way to avoid deceases. Burying or burning is a good "rite" or meme, that will avoid many deceases. In the way that it favours cultures who dispose of their dead this way, have a benefit over those who leave them "lying around", so to say. Would a sky-burial work similar? Or does that simply spread the risk of contamination over a large area that it only helps cultures in really sparse areas?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoVultures play a critical role in disease control and waste removal. They are actually one of the most important scavengers in Africa and are believed to consume even more carrion than mammalian scavengers like hyenas. Vultures also eat rapidly and feed in large groups which allows them to consume carrion quickly. This reduces the risk of disease spread from flies or bacteria. Vultures are resistant to many diseases so they don’t contract or spread diseases like tuberculosis or brucellosis even if the animals they are consuming died from those causes. https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/02/02/endangered-vultures-critical-to-disease-control-in-africa/ https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/02/02/endangered-vu...
- m12k 7y agoReminds me of this explanation of why during the 2012 election, Obama won the counties where the most prehistoric plankton had died: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/obama-s-secret-weapon-in-the-south-small-dead-but-still-kickin https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/o...
- tobr 7y agoIn short: plankton -> fertile soil -> cotton farms -> slavery -> African-American votes.
- xenonite 7y agoon the same story, with nice graphics: https://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/ https://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-electio...
- eitland 7y agoThis subthread made me smile - and then think: Krishna Shamanth @KrishnaShamanth Apr 9 I've seen them vanish.. Very sad.. Whenever I visit a village, I look for vultures... Nowhere to be seen... I guess they all reborn as govt employees of some divisions and politicians. Lizanne Whitlow @LizanneWhitlow Apr 9 The cleanup crews are very necessary in our world
- hevi_jos 7y agoWell given than in Spain vultures are feeded by the remains of butchers, while in Portugal those remains are burned down(I believe), it is not a big surprise. I have seen them being feeded in mountains at the north of Spain called Picos de Europa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picos_de_Europa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picos_de_Europa Laws change abruptly across boundaries, so it is not a surprise that vultures know when they are feeded or not. Birds or animals are not stupid. Animals that are hunted know exactly when the hunting season starts and ends. I have seen deer separate in sexes when the hunting ban expires(because the law forbids females to be hunted down), so you will see females with offspring completely relaxed in front of people.
- socialist_coder 7y agoI think the funniest part of this story is how much Portugal spends on the corpse removal & burning. The vultures do the job for free! Another example of this is in The Biggest Little Farm. The farmers have a problem with gophers. The "traditional" ways of handling gophers are all very expensive or have bad side effects. They figure out that if they attract owls to their farm by building owl houses, the owls take care of the gophers. Both of those are good examples of letting nature work for you, rather than you trying to work against nature. For humans to have a sustainable future for tens of thousands of more years, I think we need to figure out how to work side-by-side with nature rather than try to bend nature to our will.
- rozab 7y agoIt reminds me of an article posted on HN a while back [0] about how zebra mussels have helped clean up Lake Erie. It's written by a modern druid, who laments that humans so often avoid the ecological solutions mother nature has provided us. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20359876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20359876
- selectodude 7y agoAnd then birds and fish eat the dead zebra mussels and die of heavy metal poisoning. It's a solution, but it's not a very good one.
- eric_h 7y ago> zebra mussels have helped clean up Lake Erie [...] modern druid, who laments that humans so often avoid the ecological solutions mother nature has provided us. Zebra mussels are an invasive species that were transported to Lake Erie (and the rest of the Great Lakes) via unnatural and unintentional methods. They also make murky water more clear which does not have anything to do with how clean or healthy a body of water is. They're more like cane toads in Australia than the restoration of the wolf population in Yellowstone. But apparently they make for bigger salmon in Lake Ontario https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87843464 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=878434... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 7y ago
- rossdavidh 7y agoFrom the thread: "Representatives of BirdLife International, a nature conservation partnership, in both countries argue wildlife will benefit from the integration of sanitary policies across European borders." ...but I was thinking the exact opposite. Because at least they didn't have BOTH countries doing this, the vulture population can survive in decent numbers on the Spanish side, and whenever Portugal comes around the vultures will figure it out and come back. But, if Spain and Portugal had both, for years, reduced the supply of food available to vultures, the population would have either died off or had to move much further away. Sometimes, avoiding a big mistake everywhere is more important than avoiding a big mistake anywhere.
- aaron695 7y agoInvisible barriers: Differential sanitary regulations constrain vulture movements across country borders DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2017.12.039
- tr3ndyBEAR 7y agoCould the fact that the Spain/Portugal border is influenced by geography also be a major factor? Both the border and the birds' flight patterns are likely heavily influenced by geography
- bnegreve 7y agoIt's not just the first tweet, read the whole thread. > The Portuguese-Spanish border follows river valleys and is not associated with abrupt changes in climate or land-use. > The reasons for the mismatch are historical. In 2001, Europe’s answer to the mad-cow disease (BSE) crisis was banning the abandonment of dead livestock. [...] [Conservationists] convinced European Union legislators to delegate the choice to member states. Some countries, like Spain, resumed cattle abandonment under special conditions. Portugal never changed its laws.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago"The vultures of Spain skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny accuracy" is a stunningly dishonest way to report this. Based on the pictures supposedly supporting this headline, which open the thread... if you had the vulture data and didn't know where the borders were, you would be totally unable to guess where the borders were. Rather, most of Portugal is included within a larger region where vultures mostly don't go, because they can't find food there.