Too many people on this earth. Too many things working against nature........
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Too many people on this earth. Too many things working against nature........
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Horrific, Night Parrot. We humans, on the whole, are bumbling along, bighting the hand that feeds us & blithely ignoring the implications of our profligate behavior. There are few indications that we are shedding our addiction to getting & spending & laying waste our environment.
i wonder if these birds are now dependent on the rubbish handouts, so if waste were to be suddenly disposed of in another fashion maybe they'd die of starvation en masse.
i believe this happened in europe where there was a shift in rubbish disposal to deeper underground so gulls could no longer access it, and so the area could not naturally support the massively overinflated gull population so there was mass dieoff
Would this mean gradual removal of the rubbish would be a preferred approach, zosterops?
The animals that survive into the future will be those that adapt best to the human environment. Eating human waste is an obvious adaptation. I was reading about swamp wallabies, they have a wide home range centred on a small sheltered area of shrubs, so they are perfectly adapted to hobby farms and are thriving. Antechinus like to live in houses, a good survival strategy. Lyre birds also do quite well in gardens and their numbers are on rise in my area. Any animals that rely on large undisturbed areas will probably not survive wild into the 22nd century.
that seems a logical answer, however i fear some of these birds may be completely dependent on these artifical food sources, maybe if they are several generations tip-dependent they would have lost some of the natural foraging instincts, so may in considerable trouble
and even if a gradual weaning off rubbish were achieved, what is going to happen to the huge surplus bird population that the land cannot naturally support? 'they will fly somewhere else' (to other areas where the lands' bird carrying-capacity is already at natural limits) .
On melbourne's outskirts at rubbish tips i've witnessed congregations of ~7,000 Silver Gulls and ~5,000 Little Ravens at a single site (conservative estimates), hundreds of white ibis and straw-necked ibis, pelicans, common mynas and starlings (thousands), as well as a few whistling kites and swamp harriers. many of these tips have been operational for many years, i'd be surprised if the resident avian denizens get food anywhere else.
I'm not sure what's going to happen to the birds when the tips are closed (as some of these sites are sheduled to in coming years). to the next tip?
Well at least that's good news about swamp wallabies, lyre birds and antechinus. I have antechinus that call in at night looking for scraps but, knowing what male antechinus do in the good times, I don't feed them for their own sake.
Too many people indeed.
When I was born - in 1946 - the whole of history had led to a human population estimated at between two and a quarter and two and a half billion. Let’s say 2.4 billion for ease of calculation. In a single lifetime (and I’m not dead yet!) it has grown to more than three times that figure and is now nearing seven and a half billion.
That’s the real problem. We can all buy less and recycle as carefully as we can ( and I strongly believe that we should). But in evolutionary terms it will only delay the inevitable by a few eye blinks. As long as the world’s increasing number of humans need room for more houses and additional farmland to provide food then we’ll keep clearing more land and creating more waste.
The most useful environmental tool may well be the vasectomy knife. :-)
Let's hope that we can smarten up a bit before nature starts culling us - because her methods tend to be fairly extreme.
Greater dependence on human rubbish & artifacts combined with declining natural habitats doesn't augur well for many species. If the seventh mass extinction includes Homo sapiens or, if you prefer, Homo stupidis, then there is hope in the long term for the survival of life on Earth although those species dependent on humans will no longer be around. Sadly, humans have yet to understand the importance of biodiversity which is evidence to support the notion that humans have evolved into Homo stupidis.
Chris 333 - I have been arguing for some time that the population increase is the real issue and the other issues stem from this, any chance that you can get me the world population figure for 1957 as I like your argument and want to adjust it for my circumstances
Peter
There's a website called GeoHive that's dedicated to population statistics. It provides data from 1950 onwards and claims 1957 global population (taken at the middle of the year) was 2,863,042,795, an estimate sourced from a UN publishcation.
www.geohive.com/earth/his_history3.aspx