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Did Insects Kill the Dinosaurs?
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Asteroid impacts, massive volcanic flows, and now biting, disease-carrying insects have been put forward as an important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs. In the Late Cretaceous the world was covered with warm-temperate to tropical areas that swarmed with blood-sucking insects. A theory explored by researchers at Oregon State suggests these bugs carried leishmania, malaria, intestinal parasites, arboviruses and other pathogens. Repeated epidemics may have slowly-but-surely worn down dinosaur populations while ticks, mites, lice and biting flies tormented and weakened them. 'After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them.' The confluence of new insect-spread diseases, loss of traditional food sources, and competition for plants by insect pests could all have provided a lingering, debilitating condition that dinosaurs were ultimately unable to overcome."
Exactly. Dinosaurs were pretty widespread globally, including some in areas where I doubt many mosquitos or other insects were prevalent. Weren't there large dinosaur-like creatures living in the seas and oceans also?
parasites don't suddenly appear out of thin air and reduce their hosts to extinction
they gradually evolve in tandem with their hosts, and they make sure they always leach off the host's resources, and never kill their host
a parasite is not interested in killing its host. because then the parasite dies too
and a parasite is evolved to infect its host very carefully and specifically. dinosaurs did not suddenly get worms that no other creature ever got before. the worms evolved as the dinosaurs evolved
as for biting insects, this was a major new change. but again, it's not like mosquitoes materialized out of thin air and vampirically drained all the blood in the world. they slowly and gradually evolved to the job they do better and better, but never THAT good a job. never, never, did they kill their hosts. because this would then kill the mosquitoes
so frankly, this story is braindead on some fundamentals of evolution and parasites
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The whole timeline appears a bit fubar here.
"After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them"
Um, the Cretaceous period lasted 75 million years. So while it's plausible that insects caused outbreaks of disease in localized populations I really don't see how anything of pandemic proportions can be inferred. As far as evolved resistance goes, well, the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for a LONG time. Much, much longer than mammals. Unless the diseases described all appeared about 65 million years ago, then there's just no logic here.
Besides that, dinosarus may have died out but many other species did not. This includes reptiles, which would have been affected by the pathogens according by these researchers.
The more I think about this, the more it smells like bullcrap.
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Did insect-borne illnesses weaken the dinosaur species that went extinct before the meteor impact that ultimately led to their extinction, or did the geologic changes caused by the meteor impact weaken the dinosaurs to make them more susceptible to illness?
~Mike (Titan_X)
The sharks, ceolocanths, and 'gaters may beg to differ with ya...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
It might work! But only if that insects - along with carrying various diseases - also carried giant, planet-killing asteroids with them. If we just call the "Dinosaur Period" the Jurassic through Cretaceous, that lasted from 200 million years before now to 65 million years before now (+/- 5-10 million years). I find it kind of hard to swallow that Dinosaurs couldn't build up an immunity to disease over a period of 135 [i]million[/i] years. Viruses can evolve and change hundreds of times in the course of a human lifetime (which you can't even measure with Geologic time). If Viruses were around for 135 million years when Dinosaurs were around, the Dinosaurs had to have pretty hefty immune systems to be able to cope with all the new viruses evolving. And considering that they actually lasted until a giant rock fell out of the sky, I'd say that getting head colds probably didn't do them in.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Com'on. Somebody needs a graduate degree and/or funding gotta come up with some sort of original research, regardless of how far fetched it is. Welcome to the dark side of academia.
- Aids (originally from Chimps?) takes years to kill, allowing the host to infect others.
- Bubonic Plague was a disease for rats. It killed a lot but not to the extent of exterminating entire species. Humans have developed resistance.
- Ebola? Endemic in some monkey species, outbreaks amongst humans cause so much damage that the disease fails.
- Malaria: kills a lot, but humans have developed resistance here as well.
Now if you postulate Intelligent Design . . . Bye Bye Dinos.Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new
They were new? I am by no means an authority on the subject, but from what I remember learning about evolution, one-celled-organisms came along before cell colonies. Further, small cell colonies (bugs and such) came around before big ones (dinosaurs and such). I even recall learning that the first self-replicating DNA strands were much more virus-like than bacteria-like...since the whole membrane and organelle system didn't come about until a bit later.
So, by the time the dinosaurs were around, the world should have already been densely populated with viruses, bacteria, and small bugs which could find the guts of a dinosaur to be fertile breeding grounds.
I really don't see how these things, and the diseases they cause, could have come around after the fact. Maybe some more sinister versions of them, more specifically targeted at the dinosaurs of the day, came around after the fact, but I don't think that alone would account for a mass extinction.
If you have corrections to offer, don't hold back (not that you would).
There is no intelligence involved in the parasite - they cannot make the decision not to wipe out the host species.
/frank
A Parasite that develops and is virulent enough to wipe out its host species will go extinct as a result of doing so. An evolutionary dead end, certainly, but undoubtedly an evolutionary dead-end that has occurred more than once in earthly history. Nothing and no one will step in to prevent this from happening (well, at least in my theology).
In that sense, a "successful" parasite is relatively weak, and establishes an equilibrium with one or more host species. As a species, it survives for eons. An "unsuccessful" parasite is strong, virulent, and species specific. As a species, it dies when it takes out the last host.
And the worms ate into his brain.
There's nothing about evolution which inherently prevents a species from ending itself...you just don't encounter self-eliminating species often because of survivor bias.