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New Zealand Exterminates Rats
-brazil- writes "It's well-known that one of the worst things humans can do to a biosystem is to introduce new plants and animals that the native species are unprepared to compete with. The NZ government has been trying to reverse one such such ecological disaster in a project to exterminate rats from Campbell Island, where they were introduced by sailors 200 years ago, spread like wildfire and proceeded to severely decimate or outright eradicate many species of native seabirds. After massive deployment of rat poison two years ago, the island has now been declared a rat-free bird sanctuary, and some species that only survived in captivity will be re-introduced. Still, full recovery is estimated to take hundreds of years."
severely decimate or outright eradicate
Decimate is to remove 1 in 10
The name comes from a punishment from the Roman army. One of the pinishments available to a commadning officer was that the men shoudl line up, every tenth man would be told to step forward. The rest of the unit were then ordered to beat these unfortunates to death.
One famous use for such a practice was during the hunt for Spartacus, Crassus punished his army using this method when the slave rebellion escaped.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"The name comes from a punishment from the Roman army. One of the pinishments available to a commadning officer was that the men shoudl line up, every tenth man would be told to step forward. The rest of the unit were then ordered to beat these unfortunates to death."
This is also used in digital signal processing for decimation where one out of ten data values in the data stream are severly beaten out of existance.
Yes - horses are an introduced species in the US, Australia, NZ, and other places. However, for the most part, they are controlled and domesticated, and therefore pose no real threat to the environment.
However, free ranging horses cause all sort of environmental havoc. There a many free herds of brumbies (Aus. term for wild horses) in the Snowy Mountains and far north of Australia - and as a result, there are horse culling operations that fly around, shooting and baiting the herds.
It's not the fact that animals are ugly or little that makes them deserving of extermination, it is the fact that they are feral. They are out of control, and exterminating a natural balanced ecosystem. In the case of Campbell island, the rats exterminated dozens of unique and beautiful species of birds. If a herd of horses had done the same thing (and they are capable of it), they would be a target for extermination, too.
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Decimate can be legitimately used to mean "kill in large numbers" today, regardless of the word's origin. A check of any dictionary will confirm this.
A word's etymology is not the same as its definition.
Rats are smart. They adapt really fast to new kinds of poison. When they find food they send a test rat and watch it for a while. Only when this rat seams to be fine they go for the food. The period rats watch the scaperat got longer during the last decades. Its a real problem for rat poison manufactures. There must be some rats left. Rats that learned to avoid the pellets.
or perhaps more accurately, in opposition to.
It is impossible to be "in opposition to" nature. Nature has no goals.
Well, don't laugh, but it's been done before... Rats and mice were introduced (from boats) on Kerguelen, a large island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. When it was discovered that they ate the birds, eggs and chicks of many species, you know what those geniuses did ? Introduce cats !
Cats that soon figured out it was easier to eat birds that nest on the ground and have to fighting habits than rats that hide underground...
Results: many birds are now extinct, cats and mice are everywhere: they litterally crawl over you, researchers in the only station have shooting contests with BB guns numbering in the thousands per hour, cats have reverted to a rogue state and taken possession of the island...
A lot of effort has been put into exterminating rats and cats from a tiny island no bigger than a football field, but it took years. Years! And plenty of $$$.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The only reason they're saving these birds is because they're cute and rats aren't.
If there were endangered native rat species unique to that island in danger of being wiped out by very common birds, you could bet your ass they would be saved.
Australia has native endangered rodents and marsupials that they are trying to save. NZ only had two native mammal species (both are bats and pretty ugly) and they are the subject of conservation work. NZ is trying hard to wipe out cute deer and bunnies that are destroying bush and farmland.
Cute has nothing to do with it.
It is true - exept that people have been able to mechanically reproduces the Dodo processing and germinate the seeds. This keeps getting rediscovered about every ten years, to great shouts of excitement about saving the tree species, but has been happening since the 1930s. See Douglas Adams "Last Chance to See", I think.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
the point wasn't meant to be that humans are not a part of nature or are unnatural, but rather that the actions that humans take are not. One only need look at our ability to create chemicals and materials that do not exist in nature to see that we have developed a sort of power that transcends nature.
" However, something completely unforseen was that these rats would wreak havoc on this territory. There would really have been no reason to look for such a possiblity at the point the boats were created."
this is part of the problem i believe. granted it is not really practical, as well as morally questionable whether should, condemn those people who inadvertently brought rats over with them in their boats. the problem is that we continue to behave just like them in regards to technology today. our attitude seems to be 'well let's build it and worry about the problems later', rather then 'okay, here's this neat idea, let's try to think about the possible negative ramifications of it and then decide whether or not we should proceed'.
and of course, anybody who would dare to take the second position would be laughed at as either a lunatic or a luddite.
as somebody wrote earlier (and has been noted many another time) it is very difficult to reverse change (although i would disagree that it is not possible), to put the genie back into the bottle. this means that we need to have a little more foresight and vision before we unleash all of these new technological wonders upon the world, such as GE organisms, etc. because whenever a new technology is developed, we always focus on its positive qualities, and put it forward in its best possible light.
and then later we start asking ourselves "what the f**k did we do?'
so lets start asking those questions before instead of after.
p.s. - if you're at all interested in this sort of thing, i recommend two books by jerry mander - 'four arguments for the elimination of television' (written in the early 1970s) and 'in the absence of the sacred' (written in the mid-1990s). they're both fairly quick reads, and even if you don't agree with them (as one of my friends did not), you'll probably find them at least interesting (as he did).
fuck you.