6 ms·

Birds are a great way to measure changes in ecosystems. They are, relatively, easy to spot and there are few enough species that it’s possible for a lot of nerd

Birds are a great way to measure changes in ecosystems. They are, relatively, easy to spot and there are few enough species that it’s possible for a lot of nerds to know all of the local ones well enough to do routine informal surveys. People have been noticing changes in bird distributions for a long time. Cattle Egrets have spread with agricultural development and are now common in Australia, a continent they were previously not found on. Things moving north with climate change is just the next step really.

ethbr0 3y ago
They also have the benefit of being able to travel large distances through an environment (air) still largely unrestricted by humans. Long distance land movement for terrestrial wildlife is more fraught these days.
- ImaCake 3y ago
  This is only true for a subset of birds. Many birds either avoid or are unable to fly through dense urban areas. Maybe this is more a thing in Australia where most of our birds are not migratory.
ceejayoz 3y ago
> Things moving north with climate change is just the next step really. Including, unfortunately, tick and mosquito borne disease. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-lyme-and-other-tick-borne-diseases-are-on-the-rise https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-lyme-and-other-tick... I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum) isn't a thing, but they're getting closer and closer to my area.
- PcChip 3y ago
  Never heard of meat allergy, that sounds like a nightmare situation
  - eppp 3y ago
    I have it, its not really that big of a deal to me.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum) isn't a thing From that Wikipedia link: > The bite of the lone star tick can cause a person to develop alpha-gal meat allergy, a delayed response to nonprimate mammalian meat and meat products. Non-primate mammalian. Plot twist: cannibalistic cultures as adaptations to living in areas highly permeated by organisms spreading alpha-gal meat allergy.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    And dare we ask how this was experimentally determined :cringe:
    - i_am_jl 3y ago
      "Alpha gal" is the short name for a sugar that occurs in most mammals, but not primates. Cannibalistic experimentation wasn't necessary.
      - ano-ther 3y ago
        Good explanation. Presumably it would also be quite unpleasant to be allergic to your own muscles.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Kinda ironic because eating too much red meat is one of the major causes of climate change besides fossil fuels. Cow farts/manure (methane), the use of many many kilos of vegetarian food to produce one kilo of beef.. It's something that will have to change. It seems to be a way that nature balances itself. According to the UN livestock is the cause of 14% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ And beef is by far the worst out of them: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0477/production/_121534110_0d88cbbb-c0ea-4ce7-99bd-f0b154892b33.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0477/production/... I don't eat much meat myself, but I'm not fully vegetarian or vegan either. I try to balance it more (though mostly because of animal welfare reason, not climate change).
- thomasahle 3y ago
  > I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" isn't a thing Sounds like climate change is taking care of itself
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Honestly, that's what's so frustrating about the "life goes on" dismissive argument some folks use to dismiss calls for climate action. Yes, it's true. Not every species goes on, though, and those that do don't necessarily enjoy the process.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I'm not sure if you're joking, but I honestly do think that adaptations of this sort, and zoonotic diseases in general (like Lyme disease or COVID) are the weapons of ecosystems that want humans to stay away.
    - mr_00ff00 3y ago
      What do you mean by this? Like COVID is the result of an evolutionary process that selected a disease that kept humans away? That doesn’t make sense, in fact, it’s way more likely for diseases to become less deadly over time. Killing humans or making them very weak is bad for its survival.
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        I'm making a few assumptions in order to lump COVID in here, I'm just not familiar enough with it's dynamics in bats to argue about it specifically. I do think the principle is the same though. In a recent biology class we spent a few lectures talking about Lyme disease, so I am familiar with that one. Here's the idea: Ticks aren't born with Lyme disease, they get it from an animal and then transfer it to another animal. Not all animals are competent hosts for Borrelia Burgdorferi (the bacteria that causes Lyme disease). If a tick bites an infected deer and then bites you, you're unlikely to be infected (although if you do, then both you and the deer will suffer for it). Mice however, are competent hosts for B. Bergdorferi. If a tick bites an infected mouse and later bites you, you are likely to become infected. Neither ticks nor mice experience significant negative affects from being infected (I'm told that bats are this way with COVID). Although it must at least be an energy drain on the mouse (or the bat), whose metabolism supports the manufacture of high concentrations of the pathogen. So look at it from the perspective of the pathogen. You have a limited complexity budget. You can't hack every single immune system, you have to be choosy. (Bacteria get their diversity from horizonal gene transfer, so data about which adaptations are effective in the current environment is sort of gossiped around.) You're going to take the path of least resistance, and that path is determined not by your eventual target, but by all of the paths not taken--by the degree to which the other hosts put up a fight. Then look at it from the perspective of all of the potential host immune systems. There's an incentive to not being in last place--then you'll be chosen for specialization against--but there's also no need to overallocate resources to this fight. It's like a multiparty prisoner's dilemma except the optimal solution is that we all defect against one of us. So there's this tension where B. Bergdorferi is looking to specialize re: hosts and each host genome has to "decide" how to handle it. (of course it's not a decision, it's evolution, but it's convoluted to talk about collaboration in terms of deleterious coincidences and selective pressures). For reasons unknown, B. Bergdorferi's ancestor's genome "chose" to specialize with the mouse. The effect of this "choice" is that it is more concentrated in areas where mice don't have many predators, and less common in places where they are well-hunted. The impact of human settlement is uneven: It bothers the raptors more than it bothers the mice. So we have this situation where Lyme-disease-causing bacteria is concentrating in tick guts specifically where humans upset the preditor/prey balances around the mouse. And recall that this outcome, where it's the mouse and not some other tick-victim that ends up being the competent host, it's the result of tension between the genomes of all the things that ticks bite. So I ask: is it mere coincidence that it ended up being the mouse that B. Bergdorferi specialized against? Or have the forest dweller genomes "collaborated" to achieve this outcome. I don't think it's that wild to assume collaboration. Sure, they didn't sit down and discuss it, but given that human-driven habitat loss is a significant driver of extinction, I think there would be a selective pressure towards collaborative outcomes that keep humans out of the forest and away from ones that make the forest more inviting to humans. Perhaps there were cases where the B. Bergdorferi ancestor specialized in other ways, but we don't know about them because instead of forests there are parking lots in those places. In this way, I expect that zoonotic diseases are a sort of immune system against habitat loss. Hypotheses are no good if not falsifiable, so here's the prediction: novel zoonotic diseases will spring up in places where human-caused habitat loss proceeds in novel ways. If we change how we live such that we don't create a safe haven for mice but do create one for some other creature, then the ecosystems that we're destroying will collaborate in new ways to cause that creature to be a threat to us. I'm not sure where to look in history for examples of this, otherwise I'd be writing a paper about it, but I hope you can see how it would plausibly be applied to COVID as well. > Killing humans or making them very weak is bad for its survival. That B. Bergdorferi harms humans is good for the survival of the deer and the owls and the snakes and the bears which share a habitat with ticks. It is the collective adaptations in their immune systems which determine that mice are competent hosts, which is what causes B. Bergdorferi to come in contact with humans at an increased frequency. So no, killing humans is not bad for the organisms that matter in this case. I'm sure they would be quite happy to be rid of us.
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  Yeah, I used to love hiking the trails with my dog, but I've pretty much given that up these days. I love hiking, but spending an hour after picking ticks of myself and the dog is not worth it.
- danShumway 3y ago
  Also note that it's not just an allergy to red meat. Sometimes I see this laughed off as "haha, forced vegetarian", but from Wikipedia: > alpha-gal is also found in cat dander and in the drug cetuximab See also https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/products.html https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/products.html -- alpha-gal allergies can sometimes interfere with which vaccines you're able to take.
pfdietz 3y ago
You can also do bird surveys now with call recognition. The Merlin app (which is free for your phone) has a sound recognition capability. It's cool to stand out in an area with low ambient noise and have it recognize bird calls in real time. It usually gets it right.
- moneal 3y ago
  You can also run BirdNET on a RPi and record all day. It's very cool the patterns you can find. Also birdweather.com as a map of collected data
- Cpoll 3y ago
  That's neat, I didn't know about Merlin. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
Swizec 3y ago
> there are few enough [bird] species For the record, there’s surprisingly many bird species. 10,000 bird species vs only 5,400 mammal species, 4,650 lizard species, 250 marsupial species. Granted there’s 33,000 species of fish and over 900,000 species of insect. But those are way harder to observe.
- everforward 3y ago
  10,000 feels surprisingly small to me. Not that I'm arguing with your perception, I just find it interesting. There are 195 countries, so if those species were evenly distributed by country there would be 51.2 bird species per country.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    Well they did go through a severe evolutionary bottleneck with that asteroid. We almost didn’t have birds at all. I guess an interesting question is why are there so few mammalian and lizard species? Only 28 per country.
- ImaCake 3y ago
  I find birds both easier to find and identify than marsupials though! But I do appreciate that I am technically wrong here, next time I make this argument I can be more correct as to why birds are useful, thanks! :)

ethbr0 3y ago

They also have the benefit of being able to travel large distances through an environment (air) still largely unrestricted by humans. Long distance land movement for terrestrial wildlife is more fraught these days.

ImaCake 3y ago
This is only true for a subset of birds. Many birds either avoid or are unable to fly through dense urban areas. Maybe this is more a thing in Australia where most of our birds are not migratory.

ceejayoz 3y ago

> Things moving north with climate change is just the next step really. Including, unfortunately, tick and mosquito borne disease. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-lyme-and-other-tick-borne-diseases-are-on-the-rise https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-lyme-and-other-tick... I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum) isn't a thing, but they're getting closer and closer to my area.

PcChip 3y ago
Never heard of meat allergy, that sounds like a nightmare situation
- eppp 3y ago
  I have it, its not really that big of a deal to me.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum) isn't a thing From that Wikipedia link: > The bite of the lone star tick can cause a person to develop alpha-gal meat allergy, a delayed response to nonprimate mammalian meat and meat products. Non-primate mammalian. Plot twist: cannibalistic cultures as adaptations to living in areas highly permeated by organisms spreading alpha-gal meat allergy.
- foobarian 3y ago
  And dare we ask how this was experimentally determined :cringe:
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    "Alpha gal" is the short name for a sugar that occurs in most mammals, but not primates. Cannibalistic experimentation wasn't necessary.
    - ano-ther 3y ago
      Good explanation. Presumably it would also be quite unpleasant to be allergic to your own muscles.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Kinda ironic because eating too much red meat is one of the major causes of climate change besides fossil fuels. Cow farts/manure (methane), the use of many many kilos of vegetarian food to produce one kilo of beef.. It's something that will have to change. It seems to be a way that nature balances itself. According to the UN livestock is the cause of 14% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ And beef is by far the worst out of them: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0477/production/_121534110_0d88cbbb-c0ea-4ce7-99bd-f0b154892b33.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0477/production/... I don't eat much meat myself, but I'm not fully vegetarian or vegan either. I try to balance it more (though mostly because of animal welfare reason, not climate change).
thomasahle 3y ago
> I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" isn't a thing Sounds like climate change is taking care of itself
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Honestly, that's what's so frustrating about the "life goes on" dismissive argument some folks use to dismiss calls for climate action. Yes, it's true. Not every species goes on, though, and those that do don't necessarily enjoy the process.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I'm not sure if you're joking, but I honestly do think that adaptations of this sort, and zoonotic diseases in general (like Lyme disease or COVID) are the weapons of ecosystems that want humans to stay away.
  - mr_00ff00 3y ago
    What do you mean by this? Like COVID is the result of an evolutionary process that selected a disease that kept humans away? That doesn’t make sense, in fact, it’s way more likely for diseases to become less deadly over time. Killing humans or making them very weak is bad for its survival.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      I'm making a few assumptions in order to lump COVID in here, I'm just not familiar enough with it's dynamics in bats to argue about it specifically. I do think the principle is the same though. In a recent biology class we spent a few lectures talking about Lyme disease, so I am familiar with that one. Here's the idea: Ticks aren't born with Lyme disease, they get it from an animal and then transfer it to another animal. Not all animals are competent hosts for Borrelia Burgdorferi (the bacteria that causes Lyme disease). If a tick bites an infected deer and then bites you, you're unlikely to be infected (although if you do, then both you and the deer will suffer for it). Mice however, are competent hosts for B. Bergdorferi. If a tick bites an infected mouse and later bites you, you are likely to become infected. Neither ticks nor mice experience significant negative affects from being infected (I'm told that bats are this way with COVID). Although it must at least be an energy drain on the mouse (or the bat), whose metabolism supports the manufacture of high concentrations of the pathogen. So look at it from the perspective of the pathogen. You have a limited complexity budget. You can't hack every single immune system, you have to be choosy. (Bacteria get their diversity from horizonal gene transfer, so data about which adaptations are effective in the current environment is sort of gossiped around.) You're going to take the path of least resistance, and that path is determined not by your eventual target, but by all of the paths not taken--by the degree to which the other hosts put up a fight. Then look at it from the perspective of all of the potential host immune systems. There's an incentive to not being in last place--then you'll be chosen for specialization against--but there's also no need to overallocate resources to this fight. It's like a multiparty prisoner's dilemma except the optimal solution is that we all defect against one of us. So there's this tension where B. Bergdorferi is looking to specialize re: hosts and each host genome has to "decide" how to handle it. (of course it's not a decision, it's evolution, but it's convoluted to talk about collaboration in terms of deleterious coincidences and selective pressures). For reasons unknown, B. Bergdorferi's ancestor's genome "chose" to specialize with the mouse. The effect of this "choice" is that it is more concentrated in areas where mice don't have many predators, and less common in places where they are well-hunted. The impact of human settlement is uneven: It bothers the raptors more than it bothers the mice. So we have this situation where Lyme-disease-causing bacteria is concentrating in tick guts specifically where humans upset the preditor/prey balances around the mouse. And recall that this outcome, where it's the mouse and not some other tick-victim that ends up being the competent host, it's the result of tension between the genomes of all the things that ticks bite. So I ask: is it mere coincidence that it ended up being the mouse that B. Bergdorferi specialized against? Or have the forest dweller genomes "collaborated" to achieve this outcome. I don't think it's that wild to assume collaboration. Sure, they didn't sit down and discuss it, but given that human-driven habitat loss is a significant driver of extinction, I think there would be a selective pressure towards collaborative outcomes that keep humans out of the forest and away from ones that make the forest more inviting to humans. Perhaps there were cases where the B. Bergdorferi ancestor specialized in other ways, but we don't know about them because instead of forests there are parking lots in those places. In this way, I expect that zoonotic diseases are a sort of immune system against habitat loss. Hypotheses are no good if not falsifiable, so here's the prediction: novel zoonotic diseases will spring up in places where human-caused habitat loss proceeds in novel ways. If we change how we live such that we don't create a safe haven for mice but do create one for some other creature, then the ecosystems that we're destroying will collaborate in new ways to cause that creature to be a threat to us. I'm not sure where to look in history for examples of this, otherwise I'd be writing a paper about it, but I hope you can see how it would plausibly be applied to COVID as well. > Killing humans or making them very weak is bad for its survival. That B. Bergdorferi harms humans is good for the survival of the deer and the owls and the snakes and the bears which share a habitat with ticks. It is the collective adaptations in their immune systems which determine that mice are competent hosts, which is what causes B. Bergdorferi to come in contact with humans at an increased frequency. So no, killing humans is not bad for the organisms that matter in this case. I'm sure they would be quite happy to be rid of us.
yoyohello13 3y ago
Yeah, I used to love hiking the trails with my dog, but I've pretty much given that up these days. I love hiking, but spending an hour after picking ticks of myself and the dog is not worth it.
danShumway 3y ago
Also note that it's not just an allergy to red meat. Sometimes I see this laughed off as "haha, forced vegetarian", but from Wikipedia: > alpha-gal is also found in cat dander and in the drug cetuximab See also https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/products.html https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/products.html -- alpha-gal allergies can sometimes interfere with which vaccines you're able to take.

pfdietz 3y ago

You can also do bird surveys now with call recognition. The Merlin app (which is free for your phone) has a sound recognition capability. It's cool to stand out in an area with low ambient noise and have it recognize bird calls in real time. It usually gets it right.

moneal 3y ago
You can also run BirdNET on a RPi and record all day. It's very cool the patterns you can find. Also birdweather.com as a map of collected data
Cpoll 3y ago
That's neat, I didn't know about Merlin. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/

Swizec 3y ago

> there are few enough [bird] species For the record, there’s surprisingly many bird species. 10,000 bird species vs only 5,400 mammal species, 4,650 lizard species, 250 marsupial species. Granted there’s 33,000 species of fish and over 900,000 species of insect. But those are way harder to observe.

everforward 3y ago
10,000 feels surprisingly small to me. Not that I'm arguing with your perception, I just find it interesting. There are 195 countries, so if those species were evenly distributed by country there would be 51.2 bird species per country.
- Swizec 3y ago
  Well they did go through a severe evolutionary bottleneck with that asteroid. We almost didn’t have birds at all. I guess an interesting question is why are there so few mammalian and lizard species? Only 28 per country.
ImaCake 3y ago
I find birds both easier to find and identify than marsupials though! But I do appreciate that I am technically wrong here, next time I make this argument I can be more correct as to why birds are useful, thanks! :)