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Wildlife Returning To Chernobyl
The wilderness is encroaching over abandoned towns in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. One of the elderly residents who refused to evacuate the contaminated area says packs of wolves have eaten two of her dogs, and wild boar trample through her cornfield. Scientist are divided as to whether or not the animals are flourishing in the highly radioactive environment: "Robert J. Baker of Texas Tech University says the mice and other rodents he has studied at Chernobyl since the early 1990s have shown remarkable tolerance for elevated radiation levels. But Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina, a biologist who studies barn swallows at Chernobyl, says that while wild animals have settled in the area, they have struggled to build new populations."
I could've sworn there was an article on this in some magazine several years ago.
It's an interesting article, but it mainly talks only about mammals and occasionally vegetation. The effect of radiation on high reproduction insects would be far more interesting.
Are these bionic AMD-64 running mutant radioactive wildlife critters, or something?
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In Florida Avon Park Bombing Range is also full of wildlife as is the Savannah River site in South Carolina.
Bombing and radiation is better for wildlife than sub divisions.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
But now there is an article about it on the internet, making it original, novel, and fit for Slashdot.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
And yes, the DNA of most animals in the area is pretty effed up, but surprisingly most of them appear healthy and reproduce normally. Only goes to show how much redundancy and resilience is built into the DNA / replicating mechanisms we use.
Truth is, even with a sufficient number of a-bombs accross the world, we'll have a very hard time wijping all of humanity and wild life. Life's a tough mother f*cker, hard to destroy. I believe the word "adaptation" would describe this well.
Bearded Dragon
Are there any scientists/historians out there who can comment on whether the radioisotopes involved are the types that would work their way up the food chain? It seems this would make a big difference in which critters thrived and which ones couldn't make it...
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
O.K., we have a game story about odd moments in games filed under "Politics" instead of "Games" and an environmental story filed under "Hardware" instead of "Science". Methinks maybe some /. editors have been spending a bit too much time in Chernobyl themselves, and it's had a deleterious affect on their "1337 categorization skillz".
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's hard for even high radiation levels to kill *everything*. Life adapts and survives. Radiation is far less damaging to wildlife than human presence is.
The looser is always the one that migrates. I'm not complaining much because that's what drove apes out of the forest and on to the plains to become the first hominids.
hmmm, are you sure you're not contradicting yourself? you're saying that are apes that migrated out of the forest, and the go on to say,
The looser is always the one that migrates.
which is a hypothesis that really doesn't have much validity. change, ie. evolution, almost never happens at the center of a population. at least not the kind of change that drives evolution. it happens at the edge, on the boundary, or wherever there is an unexploited niche, whether it be taking to the air, or returning to the see, or taking advantage of some previously unexploited resource. when it comes to the apes they left the forest because they could no longer find sufficient resources there, whether due to increased competition (unlikely), or due reduced resources.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
However at the same time there is a small potential for beneficial mutation to result, and as the successful pool is smaller the chances of such a mutation to propagate are a bit higher.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
But, so long as less corrupted genetic material can migrate in, you'll get a superfical appearance of normalcy.
You know, if the animals live to leave offspring, it's not superficial appearance of normalcy, it's normalcy, never mind all the curruption going under.
The purpose of an animal, is, after all, precisely this.
As about 1/3 of offspring being malformed, this is far from bad for the wildlife. If 1/2 was, they'd do fine, hell, if 3/4 were, they'd do fine. Even if none of them had mutation, most of the animal offspring would die in infancy for plenty of other reasons (like natural predators).
In a sense... yes.
I bred at less than my replacement level. If everyone in the word were to follow that tendency, we would be able to half the population by roughly 2050 and half it again in the 20 years after that so by 2100 the population would be roughly 1.5 billion. The chinese made some of these extremely hard choices with regard to overbreeding and overpopulation and have benefited from doing so.
The problem is that ignorant poor people and some religious people are going to breed us to the point where things are unpleasant all the time at the best or downright ugly and murderous at the worst.
Overbreeding would be no problem if the overbreeders and their descendants were limited to a fixed plot of land. That way the descendants of people with sustainable breeding habits could live in a paradise while the overbreeders lived in hell on earth, died of starvation, and killed each other over precious water and living space.
But no-- their descendants would feel they had a right to spread equally into everyone else's land. Thus spreading the consequences of their poor breeding choices.
You can buy all the CFC's you want, conserve til you bleed, eat only grains (because meat is so inefficient) and eventually that will all be pointless unless a lot of humans die fast from something. Too many humans is the fundamental problem-- not global warming, not limited oil, not limited food, not limited water.
If we do not address this fundamental problem- then everything else we do is similar to ignoring the huge hungry rampaging elephant in the room while we keep replacing the carpet and drapes.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Not to mention that, to humans, the ability to maintain and grow populations isn't all we care about. If one agreed with that, they might find Haiti to be a role model :)
If a pair of animals can give birth to twenty young and two make it to breeding age to do the same, the population is holding steady with that 1 in 10 survival rate. For humans in the first world, that would be seen as atrocious.
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
We can build something as extraordinarily powerful as a nuclear weapon because there is a lot of energy to be released from the fission of uranium or plutonium or whatever. This energy is stored in the bonds inside the unstable nuclei, and we just let it out. It was originally put in there when some exploding star made the uranium nuclei in question, long before the solar system was formed. We do not have to provide that energy.
Thing is, there are not similar reserves of naturally-occurring antimatter to be mined, because... well, it's kind of obvious. The problem is this: current (and any sensible-sounding future) methods of antimatter production involve actually putting in at least the amount of energy you want to get out. That mass won't come out of nowhere you know. So while it's all fine to say that an antimatter weapon would be scary because a really really small one could knock the planet off course, I have to ask you where you you think we're gonna get that much energy from. Maybe from a nuclear power plant? The amount of uranium used is going to be the amount you'd need to make a normal nuke big enough to do the same job, isn't it (that is to say, more than could conceivably be acquired)?
Also, what makes you think that the threat of total annihilation would bring peace? The threat of total annihilation is here already. Russia and the USA maintain far more weapons than they need to completely destroy the other, partly as protection against missiles being hit while still on the ground, etc. If all the world's weapons were to be detonated, it would likely destroy human life on the planet. If such a thing as a world-destroying antimatter bomb ever existed, people would do what the Soviet Union and the USA did with their nuclear arsenals: basically agree not to use them, and go on fighting with conventional weapons (yes, I know they didn't officially fight each other at any point, but USSR armed the Vietcong, US armed the Mujahideen, etc.).
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Wow, now you're saying that being a soldier is riskier than being a US civilian? Man, stop it, you are really blowing my mind here. Someone had better mod you insiteful, uh, insightful.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Except that the US isn't suffering from over population. That is what drives me nuts. There are places in Australia where rabbits are destroying the habitat because of massive over population. Killing off a few in Texas just isn't going to help. Killing hundreds or thousands in Texas isn't going to help. The Population of the US is pretty much flat and soon to be slightly declining once the Baby boomer's start to die off. In Europe and Japan you are seeing the same thing or a strong decline. That will do nothing to really help since the over population problem is other locations.
I am all for people having only enough children that they can raise. I am all for adoption as well if you want a very large family. But this "I only had a replacement" thing is just posturing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
But they won't, and so all you accomplished is selecting yourself out of the gene pool.
We have a ton of resources on the planet. Supporting more humans with the resources that we have is a reasonably easy problem technologically. Yes, we have a high population compared to what a species without agriculture (and modern agriculture) could do, but we have those things. The earth could handle a bunch more population, but the trends indicate that human population growth is slowing quickly enough that it won't be a real issue.
The appropriate tactic here isn't to have less kids, it's to have as many kids as you think you can reasonably educate. The only way we'll be able to keep quality of life up as a species is to have as high a percentage of well educated people as possible - that way there will be people around to suggest and implement rational solutions to problems.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The article says radiation levels are 10 to 100 times normal background. This range is probably beneficial for humans and most other animals. Living there probably isn't bad from the standpoint of background radiation; but I wouldn't want to eat food grown there or live in a house without a dust filter.
Things are getting better there faster than predicted, and if careful study is done we'll have more data for the theory of hormesis with respect to radiation.
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The fascinating thing about technologically advanced regions is that the reproductive rates are much lower than low tech areas. This is because in technologically advanced cultures children have a higher cost/benefit ratio than in lower techs. Lower techs need the children to tend the field, watch the sheep, etc. etc. Where as higher techs need to spend money to educate and groom their children into productive roles.
I find this particularly neat in that the easiest deterent of overpopulation is perhaps technological proliferation.
Star Pirates
I'd be content with us not being so damn schizoid over what we want out of the third world. We can't just walk in, depose the government, and leave. We might as well annex any country we invade. We need to either be neutral and free or imperialist and rule with an iron fist. We can't have ourselves going halfway through.
Essentially, we should probably wipe those who oppose Us off the face of the earth and regulate the beliefs to become more western and Christianized.
for idiots: it's meant to point out the absurdity in trying to "finish the job"
+5, Truth
I think this misrepresents how evolution works, as does much popular fiction -- yes, I'm looking at you, Michael Crichton!
Evolution works by random mutation and survival of the fittest. There are two important things to recognize here:
1. The mutations are _random_. They do not happen because a species needs them to survive.
2. Survival of the fittest can only prune out what doesn't work. It can never create what will work.
If the mice and rats happened to have individuals in their populations that were more tolerant of the hostile environment around Chernobyl, then those individuals would breed through the population, and yes, the mice and rats would have a shot at success.
Also, if any mouse happened to receive a mutation that helped, their shorter breeding cycle would help that beneficial mutation move through the entire population more quickly.
BUT -- it is inaccurate to imply that "protection" (resistance) will evolve just because it is needed. No amount of "it would be good if this creature had this feature" can make it happen. If the creature needs the feature to survive, then unless the feature is already hiding somewhere in the creature's genome, the creature will die and go extinct.
The proof of this is in the literally millions of extinct species throughout history. If evolving to survive a threat (such as the radiation around Chernobyl) happened just because the creature needed it, we'd be up to our hips in dinosaurs right now.
By the way, popular reporting often gets this wrong as well -- see most articles on antibiotic resistance.