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Decline of Indian vultures
- aurareturn 2y agoQuestion: Did another animal take the role of the vultures? Nature is very efficient. If there opportunity, it seems like some animals might evolve to fill that role.
- derpilderp 2y ago[flagged]
- account42 2y agoThis is really one of the worst memes to have infected online discourse. If you have something worthwile to add say it insteady making yourself look like a fool in your attempt to mock the person you are replying to.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoI’d like to see a return to having the balls to stand by our low effort comments without couching them in meme format like the olden days. This format just means “ur wrong” and we used to have the spine to say that.
- trte9343r4 2y agoEvolution takes long time. But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people. And their excrements are highly toxic, and kill plants (unlike vultures). Nature is not always efficient.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people. I think the other issue here is that those wild dogs are highly protected by law, even when they do spread rabies and attack and kill people.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoNature is reasonably efficient for the goals of nature, but the goals of humanity do not often align with Nature's.
- soperj 2y agoWouldn't the spread of rabies and other diseases actually be a demonstration of nature being efficient?
- nyc_data_geek 2y ago>>Nature is not always efficient. that all depends on what you're optimizing for
- jna_sh 2y agoFor an animal to evolve to fill this niche, the niche would have to convey some advantage that favours their survival and reproduction (i.e. natural selection). Aside from the fact that this isn’t actually a terribly efficient process and is subject to lots of random effects, the niche in its current form as influenced by human activity is clearly not conveying a survival benefit, or the vultures wouldn’t have declined. A member of another bird species deciding to take to scavenging trash heaps whilst happening to have a mutation that protects it from diclofenac (which is toxic to lesser degrees in other non-vulture birds) is not impossible, but unlikely, and could very well be a process that occurs at a timescale that is incompatible with the rate of continued change by humans.
- account42 2y agoOther (especially non-avian) scavengers could have better reactions to the cattle drug that the article blames for poisioning the vultures and thus thrive when their competition is gone.
- kergonath 2y ago> Nature is very efficient. This is a meme and it is unfounded. In most cases, nature is good enough.
- pas 2y agoefficient at what? what's the measure, utility function, what are nature's KPIs? :) utilizing energy gradients? maybe, but there's plenty of that on Mars yet it's barren. so probably certain ecosystems can be more or less efficient at this, right?
- pvaldes 2y agoStriped Hyaenas would be the other choice, but the relationship with humans is more complicated
- nsjolj 2y ago[flagged]
- jmkx 2y ago[flagged]
- 4ggr0 2y agoIt's fascinating and tragic how AI generated comments are obviously present in this comment section. Anyone else find it unsurprising that this happens? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41078496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41078496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41095522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41095522
- gala8y 2y agoOh... why... oh why... I will never understand such behavior. What are incentives here?
- Sayrus 2y agoI'd imagine there are monetary incentives to having many accounts able to boost you and keep your post on the front page. Doing that with brand new accounts who have no comments and no karma is probably harder. In the cases listed, all the comments were heavily downvoted but there are other bots out there who have a positive karma.
- defrost 2y agoFWiW this network slid in unnoticed and unflagged in the past 20 days until someone noticed and pointed them out. eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612 (9 days ago) Since then they're mostly rapidly auto-flagged.
- grumple 2y agoGain reputation, use the account to manipulate us at a later time. HN is a high value target for the same regimes that use Reddit and other social media platforms to manipulate the US and Europe.
- gwervc 2y agoInteresting conspiracy theory, I'll now blame highly upvoted Rust stories as a Russian plot to make us lose time rewriting all our software.
- jna_sh 2y agoIf any readers want to explore this topic more, a useful term is “ecosystem services”, which captures the various ways that healthy ecosystems support human health.
- eminent101 2y ago>The authors estimated that between 2000 and 2005, the loss of vultures caused around 100,000 additional human deaths annually, resulting in more than $69bn (£53bn) per year in mortality damages or the economic costs associated with premature deaths. Isn't this a giant leap of faith to claim that the increase in the number of deaths must be caused by loss of vultures? Correlation is not causation! How did they rule out other confounding factors? How are they so sure that this increase is definitely due to loss of vultures? Some more details on the research methodology and these technical details would be nice!
- jna_sh 2y agoYou’re reading a summary of a working paper published in a mainstream news outlet. The submitted article links through to the full 95 page paper that has the methodology https://epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Social-Costs-of-Keystone-Species-Collapse_Evidence-from-the-Decline-of-Vultures-in-India_Working-Paper.pdf https://epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Soc...
- tgv 2y agoThe paper looks impressive; I'm going to read it further. But in the abstract they cautiously say "Our results suggest the functional extinction of vultures ... increased human mortality" (emphasis mine).
- jna_sh 2y agoUsage of “hedging” terms like this is normal practice in academic writing. For a variety of reasons, some social and political, some practical. The short explanation is that the current scientific process values humility.
- netsharc 2y agoIt's a scary realization that a lot of climate scientist, including the IPCC, give us the lower number that they can be more confident with, because the higher number will get people yelling "Crackpot!" at them. (the number being temperature rise, CO2 concentration rise, and all the bad things).
- Coolbeanstoo 2y ago99% invisible did a good episode on the loss of Indian vultures and its effects. I found it quite interesting. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/
- fuzzythinker 2y agoRadio Lab's "Corpse Demon" is great too. https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
- ethbr1 2y agoCannot recommend enough. One of my favorite Radio Lab episodes.
- whatsdoom 2y agoRadiolab also did an episode [1] which I really enjoyed, excited to listen to the 99% one [1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon edit: I saved this comment to reply back and by the time I did others had posted the same thing
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago> The researchers also found that the effect was greatest in urban areas with large livestock populations where carcass dumps were common. I think this is the real problem. Modern sanitation doesn’t depend on vultures. Having carcass dumps near population centers is going to cause problems even with vultures.
- mattmaroon 2y agoThe overall methodology is highly suspect but “vultures are good” is probably accurate.
- moffkalast 2y ago"Vultures are great when there are piles of rotting dead animals laying in the street" would be even more accurate.
- kergonath 2y agoNot necessarily in the streets. Even if the carcasses are in landfills or in the countryside, scavengers are useful.
- VikingCoder 2y agoI once had someone on Reddit comment back to me, "Why should I care about biodiversity?" As someone who grew up watching "Life on Earth," I could not relate to their question at all. It was like if someone asked me, "Why should I care about oxygen?" And of course, I had the shame that if I can't explain something simply, then I don't really understand it. I still don't have a great answer that I can offer. But wow, this seems like another footnote I should add to my answer.
- nyc_data_geek 2y agoBecause we are all interdependent, and monocultures fail. Loss of biodiversity means you are more likely to die of starvation. Loss of habitat means you are more likely to die of disease. Loss of biodiversity means less resiliency to a changing climate and world. We get a lot of our medicines and medical treatments from plants and animals, historically and to this day. If not for those creatures, these avenues of progress may well be inaccessible dead ends. Life is a unique information form given rise through evolution. Elements are plentiful in the universe, but as far as we know, the information in the DNA of a species exists nowhere else. Thus, every species unique in the universe - we don't even know what we don't know about life yet, but we do know that every species extinct is an irreplaceable loss to the frontiers of knowledge we mostly haven't even managed to explore yet. Some reasons offhand.
- ffsm8 2y agoYou're making it sound a lot more straightforward then it is. We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields! Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human? The medicine is a valid point, but I don't think random people on the Internet would prioritize that higher then cheap food, which we just established is enabled by sacrificing biodiversity. While I'd agree that biodiversity is probably important, finding reasons for why - which actually matter to the average Joe - isnt quiet as easy
- jihadjihad 2y ago> The scavenging bird would always hover over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses Reading this sentence gave me the unsettling feeling of cattle carcasses tossed into the trash, along with a feeling of, "surely that doesn't happen in the US?" It turns out that landfilling a carcass seems to be a legitimate option (item 3 at [0]), and isn't something I'd ever thought about before. 0: https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/UT/Cow_Mortality_Disposal.pdf https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/UT/Cow_Mort...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- konfusinomicon 2y agojust dont encourage burying them..farmers have a knack for hitting fiber optic lines when they bury dead cows
- dreamcompiler 2y agoIt doesn't happen as often in the US because unlike in India, cattle in the US get eaten and thus they don't frequently die of natural causes.
- hollerith 2y agoAnd when it does happen, there's probably something wrong the the carcass, e.g., it died of an infection.
- turrican 2y agoGrew up in ND/MT. In my experience the ranchers would use a tractor to move the carcass somewhere deserted, and then let the coyotes do the final clean-up.
- thih9 2y agoThe timeline looks scary, it looks like it took about a decade to introduce a regulation that would help protect the vultures (and humans). > By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero (...) Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98% (...) Wikipedia claims that before this, a vulture species "was thought to be the most abundant large bird of prey in the world"[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-rumped_vulture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-rumped_vulture
- valarauko 2y ago> The timeline looks scary, it looks like it took about a decade to introduce a regulation that would help protect the vultures To be fair, the cause was conclusively identified as diclofenac only as late as 2004-2005. Even in papers published as late as 2003, various other, more likely culprits were being investigated, including pesticides, pathogens, or food scarcity. India moved to ban veterinary use of diclofenac by early 2005, slowed down by pushback from the Ministry of Agriculture for lack of an effective alternative vulture safe drug, which were only really demonstrated in studies in early 2006. Later that year diclofenac was banned.
- aurelien 2y ago[flagged]