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What we think of wild nature is nothing compared to what used to exist. Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic
by spodek 7y ago
What we think of wild nature is nothing compared to what used to exist.
Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. North America had more large wildlife than Africa. Whales as far as the eye could see all day long. Walruses in the Thames in London.
I did a couple video essays on what I learned from a wonderful book The Once and Future World:
My video essays: https://youtu.be/ZLAvBiols2Y https://youtu.be/ZLAvBiols2Y and https://youtu.be/U4NZdciDozI https://youtu.be/U4NZdciDozI
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature-Could/dp/0307362183 https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature-Could/dp/030...
- subsubzero 7y agoWhat amazed me was after reading Unbroken (WWII novel set in the pacific) was the incredible amount of sharks in hawaii and the surrounding islands. A family member who was in the pacific theatre backed this up. Shark schools so dense that sailors would be attacked after they fell in. This was barely 70 years ago so alot has changed in terms of animal population.
- koheripbal 7y agohttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worst-shark-attack-in-history-25715092/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worst-shark-attac...
- akiselev 7y agoThank you. Despite being in the midst of a pandemic, that is the worst thing I've read all week. It looks well cited, although I don't have the heart to check the sources...
- joejerryronnie 7y agoQuint, the old shark hunter from the movie Jaws was said to have survived the USS Indianapolis (the character not the actor)
- dfsegoat 7y ago“Black eyes... dolls eyes”
- hnu0847 7y agoThere's a Hardcore History episode about the event: https://dchhaddendum.libsyn.com/ep5-nightmares-of-indianapolis https://dchhaddendum.libsyn.com/ep5-nightmares-of-indianapol...
- monktastic1 7y agoReminds me of a quote from Charles Eisenstein. He cites The Once and Future World and then channels Steve Nicholls in Paradise Found: "Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.” I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now." (I posted the MacKinnon section here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787)
- crazygringo 7y agoI'm not sure exactly what those quotes are referring to, but many reports of European settlers to the New World, while technically true, were greatly misleading. Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife. When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By the time they explored the continent, the population was mainly gone, far in advance. So there's a strong theory that the incredible over-abundance of wildlife the Europeans saw was actually a huge ecological imbalance, as many animals had lost their natural (human) predators. And that phenomena such as millions of passenger pigeons blocking out the sun overhead weren't "natural" at all, but actually severe ecological imbalance. (This isn't to say, of course, that now we haven't swung way too far in the other direction. But just that the tales of abundance aren't necessarily a naturally balanced state either.)
- dntbnmpls 7y agoPassenger pigeons, bison, wolves, etc. Here is an interesting map of the historic and current grizzly bear ranges. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/historical-and-current-grizzly-bear-range-north-america https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/historical-and-current-gri... It is truly amazing how nearly completely we wiped the continent of wildlife. Many of our teams are named after the animals we wiped out. Florida Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, California Golden Bears, Michigan Wolverines, etc. > Whales as far as the eye could see all day long. The near extermination of whales along our shores changed geopolitics. One of the reasons why commodore perry "visited" japan was to open japanese ports to our whalers.
- gota 7y agoOh, wow! For anyone that can't see the picture - the historical range shows grizzly bears past Texas and well into Mexico
- billfruit 7y agoAnd Jaguars were one time to be found with in territory that is presently USA.
- sethammons 7y agoI hear they are starting to come back in southern Texas.
- kirykl 7y agoAs a counter, overpopulation isn’t necessarily a good thing. The waste alone can create issues on land and water.
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoPopulation was balancing itself for millions of year. We call overpopulation a population big enough to annoy us.
- bolasanibk 7y agoThis is an npr article on the size of fish caught by tour boats. You can see the size reduce over the years. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...
- JensRex 7y agoUnblocked: https://archive.ph/mVxhG https://archive.ph/mVxhG
- Someone 7y agoAlso, the amount of fish a ship caught decreased tremendously once steam powered ships were introduced https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1013 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1013 (scroll down to figure 2)
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoWildlife encounters by Lewis And Clark https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/994/254987 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/994/254987
- anonytrary 7y agoIf you put a 20 mile perimeter around every point of North America that had continued human activity, what percentage of North America would be covered? Is it more than we'd expect? At a first glance, it seems like there are still vast reached of North America that remain completely untouched by humans. Nevertheless, is so sad that humans have effectively pushed animals outside of their habitats. Animals are smart enough to avoid humans, just as a deer is smart enough to avoid a wolf, but at some point the world is only so big.
- camillomiller 7y agoDo you think that halting our activities for a few months will have a significant effect on wildlife growth?
- stevespang 7y ago"Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic" . . . until the Chinese factory fishing boats arrived and murdered them all
- m463 7y agoOne foggy morning I walked out to the rock at Morro Bay and as I got out on this spit of land, I realized that what I thought was a big sand dune was actually all birds, a huge see of birds. They started taking off and obscured the sky. There are places still.