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Remember When Elephants Had Tusks?
Boing Boing links to an interesting story today. If an antibiotic kills 95% of a germ species, but 5% bear a gene for resistance, indiscriminate use of it will result in a surviving line of entirely resistant germs. But on a slightly larger scale, genetically tusk-free elephants are gaining ground relative to their tusked brethren, says one study, thanks to a nasty antibiotic called poaching. If elephants don't have the decency to go extinct, maybe they'll just hang around to tusklessly remind our grandchildren where billiard balls originally came from, and to invite us to ponder what the last poacher was thinking as he shot the last tusked elephant.
Too late.
"Tusk You!"
How that poacher is going to get that gun past zoo security...
I seriously doubt they'll go extinct, but tusked elephants may go extinct in the wild.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Equating poaching with antibiotics is really wrong... but I agree that indiscriminate use of antibiotics is a bad thing.
That's okay. Their feet still make great stools.
It is part of trend. Tens of thousands of years ago, elephants had 6 tusks instead of just 2.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
While the bacteria example has been around for a very long time and is commonly known, it is not very often that the same trend is extrapolated to the larger, more relavent world.
What we have to ask ourselves though, is, are we doing this to any other animals as well? Forcing evolution, as it could be called? What will be the long term effects? Tuskless elephants is one thing, but there could potentially be something very dangerous coming, besides super bacteria, of course.
Heh. I just googled for a link on Rapa Nui history to post in response to the "last tusked elephant" comment before I followed the link and discovered that was mentioned in the first sentence of the article.
Some versions I've heard of the story indicate that the statues were built to praise the bird-man who would bring back the birds and the trees to the island. So they were cutting down their last trees in an effort to fix their environment. Dunno if that's the way it really played out.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Somebody mod this funny. What a pun!
I welcome it, just like seedless watermelons. The dang tusks keep getting caught in my cheek, and you never can find a good place to spit them out without seeming like a total slob.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Damn, I'm going to be rich.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Godzilla is coming!!!
A: With a blue tuskless elephant gun, of course.
Q: How do you shoot a yellow tuskless elephant?
A: Have you ever seen a yellow tuskless elephant?
Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw the tuskless elephants coming over the hill?
A: "Here come the tuskless elephants over the hill!"
Q: How do you tell if there have been tuskless elephants in your refrigerator?
A: Footprints in the peanut butter, and no rips in the saran wrap.
Q: What did Charles de Gaulle say when he saw three tuskless elephants in sunglasses coming down the path?
A: Ribbit.
Q: What did Jane say when she saw the tuskless elephants over the hill?
A: "Here come a bunch of grapes over the hill". She was colorblind.
Q: How do you get down off an tuskless elephant?
A: You don't. You get down off a duck.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I have advocated this before , but one sure way to stiff up the elephant populations and to eliminate illegal poaching is to create elephant farms. ,a new source of food and a strong elephant population. . .
In doing so we create a reputable ivory trade , a great source of work for the local communities
I am not talking about factory farming as i find that disgusting , It should be rather free range
It could also double as a safari trip , ivory could be harvested via profitable hunts (then sold on , including selling of the meat)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The fact that actions like this occur is more then likely based on immediate circumstances rather then a long drawn out through process. If I am staving and I find some apples the fact that I could take the apples and plant the seeds and have even more apples is more then likely going to be eclipsed by my immediate need to eat and the real necessity to hunt and gather NOW rather then farm LATER. Concerning the last tree, they may have cut it down for the immediate need of getting a fishing boat in order to eat NOW rather then the fact that there are no more trees to build boats LATER. In modern society, added with a touch of greed and self absorbtion, you get people who satisfy their needs (real or perceived) NOW rather then their kids needs LATER. Look at how many retire in their old age, no planning for LATER.
Nothing suprising here... move along...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
If the Chinese could own elephant herds, this wouldn't be a problem. The owners would make sure that the elephants would grow appropriately and profitably. They would make sure that the beneficial attributes of the elephants would never disappear.
Instead, today no one can own the Chinese elephants. And even if you do own them, you can't harvest the ivory in the tusks and sell them in a legitimate market. And because China is a communist society, sustainable profits are actively discouraged. Since no one owns the elephants, the tragedy of the commons is inevitable.
Take, for instance, the massive herds of cattle owned across the world. Cattle have developed a neat trait to ensure their continued survival: They have the most valuable meat of all animals that are domesticated, and they do most of the work themselves. This makes cattle valuable to their owners, and ensures that each cow is going to see a long, healthy life, followed by a quick "harvesting". Cattle will never go extinct as long as they produce the tasty meat we so love and crave, and as long as people are allowed to own cattle and exploit them.
The link to the Easter Island story is extremely relevant. The Easter Island people didn't have a sense of ownership of the trees. I don't know what they were thinking, and I don't think their descendents have a good clue either, but I can tell you that if they viewed the forest as an investment, and the things the forest produced as a valuable commodity that could be owned and bartered for, then the forest would still be there. I guess that somehow their society lost these basic rules and devolved into a free-for-all as people tried to provide for themselves in an increasingly barbaric society.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
"Maybe I can feed my family for one more week"?
Sorry to say this, people, but some things in life are not that simple.
On CNN the other day, I heard this referred to as "survival of the fittest," which was one of the dumbest things I had heard in weeks. The anchor implied that because tuskless elephants used to be 5% of the elephant population and now they're 8%, this means that more elephants are being born with the tuskless gene, which could be completely false. If I have 100 elephants, 5 of them tuskless, and I kill 37 of the tusked elephants, 8% of the elephants are now tuskless - Darwin it ain't.
THIS was one of the dummest thing I've read in weeks.
If you kill elephants, and some survive because of a genetic trait: It's survival of the fittest.
In this case, the fittest being the ones less likely to be shot due to a genetic predisposition to refrain from growing big shiny tusk with high resale value.
You can't take the sky from me...
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end...
Don't mock me. I once accomplished a +5 Troll.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The reason for the lack of tusks isn't evolution, it is evidence of an "Intelligent Designer".
"This is, of course, a possibility, but till now there is no clear genetic proof that it can occur," Vivek Menon, executive director of the Wildlife Trust of India, was quoted as saying. But hasn't your population balance just changed? So surely you now have less 'tusked' genes available in the pool?
Your statement shows ignorance of what happened with alligators. What the GF post proposed doing with elephants has been done with alligators in the Mississippi Delta. Poachers threatened to drive the Alligator extinct, and the US government's solution was to sponsor alligator farms, and make alligator meat and hides so ridiculously cheap, that poaching was not profitable.
The reason that the alligator poachers never joined in the action is because unlike poaching, starting alligator farms requires a lot of capital, and I'm not sure if it was even profitable. All I know is that it was deemed more cost effective than shutting down poachers.
I'm not saying that the same solution can be done with elephants though; I'd imagine that it is much more costly to farm elephants than it is to farm alligators. Hence, it is possible that it might not be as easy to undercut elephant poachers than it is to undercut alligator poachers. But that is a separate question.
Relax...this is all a grand scheme by the Ministries of Transportation in countries that have native Elephants to improve the safety of their taxi system(s)
i don't care
Best. Satire. Ever.
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