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Scientists Create a "Worth Saving" Index For Endangered Animals
If you're one of the last hairy-nosed-wombats left in Australia things got a little worse for you today. Thanks to a new mathematical tool created by researchers from James Cook University and the University of Adelaide, the wombat has been classified as not worth saving. Co-author of the safe index Professor Corey Bradshaw says he doesn't think people should give up on saving extremely endangered animals but adds, "...if you take a strictly empirical view, things that are well below in numbering in the hundreds - white-footed rock rats, certain types of hare wallabies, a lot of the smaller mammals that have been really nailed by the feral predators like cats, and foxes - in some cases it is probably not worthwhile putting a lot of effort because there's just no chance."
I know it's not very politically-correct to say it, but I don't think we should be trying to save every species. The prevailing assumption today seems to be that mankind is causing every extinction on the planet and, as such, we should be working to save every species and variety of endangered animal. Even ignoring that fact that mankind is part of nature too, extinction is a natural process that was taking place long before we existed. It seems to me that a world where species DON'T go extinct (thanks to our efforts) would disrupt the natural processes of evolution. Our guilt complex could create a very unnatural world.
And for the record, I think Pandas are cute. But they're not exactly a hearty lot.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I think there is a lot of motivation for certain groups to get as many species as possible onto the not worth saving lists to minimize government enviormental policy/spending.
That's what they said about the Jews.
Can I propose the arbuscular mychorrhizal fungi for protection? Not sure what it is, but it was the first thing to pop up when I typed 'endangered microorganism' in Google.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/cx815t3578004x20/
-- New business idea: endangered species marketing strategy consultant
So now we're considering passive eugenics for wild species. How is that any more acceptable that eugenics applied to humans?
If we don't take care of nature, one day nature won't be there to take care of us.
Professor Corey Bradshaw was assassinated by PETA agents for daring to imply that any animal was less important than any human. Their press release states that any other scientists that dare to put the survival of the hated human race above the that of the least important member of the animal kingdom would be similarly put to death.
Look at how much money is spent on the Great Panda, a species that has no habitat to be returned to even if we could somehow boost it's population up to sustainable levels. If you really want to save as many endangered species as possible you would spend the money elsewhere. The same is true for many species; their habitats are gone, their food source evaporated, the populations well below the number required to prevent genetic drift, but we spend millions of dollars on them. That money could be better spent on animals that haven't yet slid past the point of no return.
Well don't come crying to me should an omnipotent and rather irritable alien probe travel billions of light years just to talk to the pandas.
Humanity unable to stop survival of the fittest. Mother nature wins this round, but humanity still hopeful that they will be able to control the planets temperature.
The best way forward is to preserve habitats, not species. Then you don't have to choose for induvidual species...
All habitats are not equal anyway (just listen to any nature documentary about a coral reef). We don't have trouble saying some are more pretty/valuable than others.
Surely the best thing to do in this case is to try and obtain and store sufficient genetic material from the surviving members of the doomed species that we can resurrect them at a later date should we have the wish/resources to do so.
The prevailing assumption today seems to be that mankind is causing every extinction on the planet and, as such, we should be working to save every species and variety of endangered animal
If we had the attitude of Mr. Cook in the U.S., it would save loads of tax dollars and businesses wouldn't have to move or cancel expansion plans nearly as often. It's like programs that help save lives. If one costs $10,000 per life saved, and another costs $500,000 per life saved, clearly we should forgo the latter and concentrate on the former. Unfortunately, people are too sympathetic for logic to take over.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
I never really thought of it that way. You may bring up an interesting dichotomy: My general impression is that most most animal preservation activists tend to be evolutionists, even though evolutionists should believe that extinction is a natural part of the evolutionary cycle. On the other hand, religionists tend to believe that we should do our best to preserve every creature the deity created, but my impression is they tend to have more lax environmental policy.
I'm not suggesting causal relationships between evolutionists and preservationist or religionists and lax environmental policy, just that they seem to be somewhat correlated--by geography if nothing else.
who named this thing "hairy-nosed wombat".
It's like naming your kid "Gaylord" and being surprised he grows up to be a male nurse.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
At one point, the Smallpox variola virus was almost completely wiped out, surviving only in a few laboratories around the world.
Now, thanks to the efforts of some people who were able to free some of those remaining captive virus, it may someday be possible to reintroduce them into the wild, allowing them to once again freely complete in nature.
Won't that be nice? Another endangered species brought back from the brink of extinction.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
its WRONG to say it.
if you have a problem, you fix it. its as simple as that. when you go into calculations of 'worth' as if your biosphere was a business venture, the 'not worth' you have 'not saved' comes bites you in the ass due to chain reactions in biosphere.
i see that as an ill that capitalist mindset brought to our civilization - we are seeing everything from a window of 'cost/benefit'. not surprisingly, just like how economies come crashing down due to extreme adherence to these cost/benefit perspectives.there are too many variables that even the most foresighted analyst, the most complex computer forecasting cannot see and prepare for. ecosystems are no different - they are objects that are formed by inherently interrelated infinite number of elements.
there are areas in life where you should leave nothing to chance. the ecosystem you live in, is one of them.
Read radical news here
+1 Please somebody kill all pandas. Spend the money to save the species that don't need to be sedated and raped so that they might have a chance of maybe giving birth to a little retarded copy of themselves without dying.
I'm sure the original pandas were a really wonderful species(well not so sure), but by the time we started caring about them they had devolved into what they are now.
"Slashdotter creates 'worth saving' index for endangered habitats."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
> Everything else is just moral masturbation.
Perhaps, but some of us think morality should influence policy decisions, our decisions, or the decisions of institutions that study endangered animals.
Nobody I've ever met--and nobody I would ever trust--advocates for absolute amorality. Open-mindedness, yes. Largely scientific decision-making processes, sure. But at the end of the day, one should not discount the morality of acts simply because they don't contribute to your own survival. If someone rapes a friend of mine, or even a total stranger, I don't think that's okay just because it doesn't influence my day. Even if their rationalization was "I need to make sure my evolutionary branch of humanity continues and I can't get a date, ergo this is justified by survival and rules against it are just morality."
I do agree with a slight modification of your statement--that the most important question in the endangered species question from a resource allocation perspective is how important the creature is to the ecosystem on which humanity depends. But I don't think morality should not be a factor in policy choices. For example, even on slashdot, where rationality and science are on occasion revered, people seem to care at least a little about whether mankind is responsible for the potential demise of a creature in determining whether we have an obligation to save it.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
This is basically triage for endangered species. As hard as it is, you don't want to waste your time on someone with a likely irreparable mortal wound when you have five others that might be saved if they are given priority.
If scientists knew a little bit about human nature they'd realize that now there will be entire groups of people who will start trying to save the animals at the bottom of that list.
Did they get this idea from cracked.com?
Dark Reflection
What do they mean by empirical, other than this ratio they speak or and this 5000 animal number? I was under the impression that all animals had their place in the ecosystem and that if one species goes extinct, it will have an impact on other species. Or am I wrong?
And I suppose the efforts to save the American Bison were wasted since they were down to a few hundred in number at one point.... oh wait, now they have used up all the room we have given them and cattle ranchers are complaining their are too many.
Get a web developer
It's fairly well known that populations that have been drastically reduced are harder - if not impossible - to save, but picking a number as a cut-off point for "let's not even bother trying" is worrisome. The Mauritius Kestral is one example of how using such a metric would have led us astray: At it's lowest point, there were fewer than ten individuals left. The entire species should (by Bradshaw's logic) have been toast, but biologists stepped in and saved it. Today, there are several hundred birds, and the species is rebounding nicely.
Certain facts about the birds natural history may have helped make that possible (having a historically small and isolated population, or even just not being a mammal, for example) because it reduced the vulnerability to inbreeeding depression. Maybe Bradshaw's metric does in fact take some of these factors into account as well as is possible given current understanding of them; I can't tell from the article. Regardless, the fact that species that "should" have gone extinct sometimes don't suggests we should pause before giving up on them entirely. It's an entire species at stake. Would we refuse treatment to a cancer patient because their chance of survival was only, say, 20%? Of course not. Any doctor would fight to get their patient into the percentage that survive, rather than giving up because success was uncertain. Deciding how to allocate resources to save species is a difficult problem, but any simple cut-off, especially one based on population numbers, is likely to get it wrong part of the time.
It's called triage.
You've got limited resources, you want those resources to go toward a worthwhile project. You don't want to waste money saving a species you have no chance of saving.
Just like you don't waste time saving the person who's already dead when you have living people you can save around.
A few more things I would like to add to the "Not Worth Saving" list - Politicians - Lawyers - Religious extremists - Lindsay Lohan - Radio DJ's who spend a lot of time focusing on Michael Jackson/Tiger Woods/Charlie Sheen/etc - Reality Television "stars" - Hugo Chavez - The RIAA/MPAA/etc - The guy who changed the spelling to "Syfy" - The guy who added wrestling to SciFi's lineup (may be the same guy as above) - People who use IE6 - Steve Ballmer - SCO - People that bother to read the featured article Please note that about half the people listed above will eventually cause their own extinction anyway...
a species that has no habitat to be returned to even if we could somehow boost it's population up to sustainable levels.
And the reason for the loss of habitat? Man. We are the ones who created the reason pandas don't have enough room, or food, to survive.
A similar story goes for the Snow Leopard, Siberian Tiger, Indian Tiger, and a whole host of other animals. We are the ones destroying their habitat or killing them (for body parts to be used in superstitious rituals, not for food) at a rate faster than they can reproduce.
While one can argue nature is taking its course, I will refer you to the infamous quote from The Matrix:
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet, you are a plague, and we... are the cure.
I don't necessarily agree with the final few words, but the rest are accurate.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Look if all you want is to preserve the numbers of species, hit your local gene splicing lab. Take all the little critters that reproduce well, splice in some extra bits, hack out some bits so the modified version can't mate with the non-modified and voila you can keep the species numbers up. Imagine seventy six different phosphorescent rat species! 36 different colors of cockroaches! 50+ species of carp-like critters with producing different enzymes and eating different aquatic flora!
Waste of money, brains and time...
It's an acronym I use at work now and again, I can't see why it can't be applied to it's namesake.
Cows, chickens, pigs, lobsters, etc. I'll bet there would be a lot more hairy-nosed wombats in the ecosystem if I could have one for breakfast.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I glance-read that as scientologists... and was only mildly surprised.
I hope the seminal work of Karl Pilkington is getting the attention it deserves in this field.
And since we know every possible effect the existence (or extinction) of an animal has to the ecosystem, we can sensibly make that list in the first place.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
One of the things to consider is the cost benefit as a whole. But the problem is, what is the true benefit of saving anything. The benefit can be quantified if you turn endangered animals into food and products.
While PETA may not like it, the reason there is an abundance of Bison/buffalo is because of its valuable as food. We would likely see a sharp decline in bovine if McDonald's only sold chicken and if leather went completely out of style. It has been proposed to do the same for Tigers, Pandas, and even Whales.
The idea is, you license ranchers to raise these animals as stock. The idea is simple. Give the ranchers a financial incentive to expand the population of endangered animals, and they will do so out of a desire for profit. They will also actively fight to maintain the necessary habitat for them. It's win-win, and who doesn't want a whale skin hubcaps? I know Dennis Leary does.
I8-D
In the scheme of "worth saving" where do humans fit in? You know since we cause all the problems.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
California Condor, Buffalo, etc. Scientists, letting their "faith" get in the way of good science.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
I know what you mean.
Though I haven't taken to your particular example of legitimizing rape, I have been tempted to believe some other offensive things in the process of treating morality as an emotion to be passed over in favor of "logical self-interest", which may or may not coincide with common moral conceptions. (However, I am still quite willing to consider a different moral angle on moral issues such as environmental protection.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Not worth saving.
Yes
It is true, extinction is a natural thing and some species would go extinct without human interference. The thing is human influence is now so thorough, effecting every environment on Earth it is hard to imagine that any species would be in the same situation today, for better or worse if humans hadn't developed technology or perhaps never existed at all.
Sure, extinction is an important part of evolution but so is genetic diversity. The planet is losing that diversity very quickly due to human influence. If we could stop every extinction (of course we cannot) then it would be good if we did so at least until we can learn to live cleaner and not be the cause of so many extinctions. Then we could let nature take it's course again.
Of course this is all academic b/c there is no way we could just suddenly halt all extinctions. It sounds like what the researchers are proposing is a form of triage. Divert resources from the lost causes so we can have better success with the rest. That might not be such a bad idea.
ALL species are worth saving from extinction, because every species represents a blueprint of a successful configuration of DNA that resulted in life.
It's not JUST their living existence that is important (and it IS important, simply because life itself is a worthwhile thing in this great big universe of mostly particles and energy and void), but their existence also represents KNOWLEDGE. Knowledge of a combination of DNA, making up a particular species with various different traits that lives (or lived) in a particular environment and survive (survived) on particular nutrients.
All life is important, and all knowledge is important. Losing any of it may be inevitable in the long run, but we should do everything we can to preserve as much as we can for as long as we can. We can't change the past, but rolling over and accepting any future extinctions is a victory for ignorance.
As far as I'm concerned, people that are OK with any species dying out (especially for the sake of 'convenience' or 'profit') are worse than the medieval church and the book burning Nazi's. Books at least can be replaced if we re-discover basic, universal knowledge, but a valid DNA 'blueprint' may never be seen again.
Also, we aren't gaining new species as fast as we're losing them these days. So I guess you people are just going to keep checking species off the list ("oh well they were about gone anyway. can't be helped. too bad. hey wanna grab a beer?") until we're down to just humans eh?
So we should just give up an trying to save ethical politicians because they are far too few in number to survive anyway? Perhaps we could base the decision on whether or not to save them based on other factors, like "cuteness" or "taste". In that case, we should just go ahead and let the giant condor die off -- they're ugly and nobody wants to eat them.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Also, we aren't gaining new species as fast as we're losing them these days.
A few more Chernobyls and Fukashimas should solve that problem!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The population of whooping cranes got as low as 20. With lots of effort and publicity, 45 years later there are now about 400. If we followed the judgement of this joker, there'd be no whoopers now. Professor Corey Bradshaw? HAH! More like Professor Irwin Corey.
Yes, some economic judgement has to be applied to saving species, but the crucial thing is to use good judgement.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
wait for it...wait for it....
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No, not really. A cow would actually have the digestive tract that can break down cellulose walls and extract a lot more nutrient from that bamboo. A panda is more like an overgrown carnivore, with a carnivore digestive tract, which eats bamboo, and shits most of it undigested.
It gets extremely little protein or energy per pound eaten, and in fact ridiculously so. It has to spend most of its day eating, and avoid moving too much or too fast, or it will literally starve to death. It can't even walk up more than very gentle slopes, because it just doesn't have the energy budget for that. Chasing prey or running away from a predator is right out.
Even the low reproduction rate may well have to do with just not having the energy or protein to produce or feed larger litters. It has nothing to do with some clever design that protects the environment (there isn't any conceivable evolutionary pressure that takes that into account), but simply with the fact that it's so piss-poor at feeding itself, that it just can't do more than a cub in a blue moon.
Truth is, it's not very fit, in the survival of the fittest sense, and it doesn't have an isolated niche like the animals in Australia had. I mean, it is isolated by mountains and deserts, which posed a barrier to other species coming in, but it's not nearly as insurmountable as thousands of miles of ocean are. In the wild, it would be only a matter of time before some predator evolves or manages to get over the mountains to fill the niche of feeding on all those juicy pandas, or some bigger herbivore comes to out-compete them.
It's also a very new species, at evolution scales. The earliest thing even remotely recognizable as a panda lived some three million years ago (though the intermediate links evolving in that direction are, obviously, older.) By way of comparison, our split between us and chimps is 6 million years ago.
It's too early to say it would be such a viable species without us.
And either way, it was a piss-poor species which existed there just by virtue of being isolated from either predators or prey or competing species. It's a carnivore who had to start eating bamboo just for lack of prey, never got any good at it, and survived in that niche only for lack of competition. In a sense, it was already living in a natural zoo, and it would become extinct within decades of those barriers around it failing in any way.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No need to try to save everything but if we know something is going to die off we should at least try to save it's DNA so we can clone it later if we need it for something or just want to study it.
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...because I know some harry-nosed wombats who would prefer it if we weren't.
-S
Is that somewhere in the universe the human race is on such a list as well.
I hate to say this, but for species that have no chance of being saved, I can't justify the costs. Personally, I'd like to try and save all species for the biodiversity, but if there truly are species that just can't last... sorry. If they can be saved, but it costs a lot, save them. This is facetious, but remember Star Trek 4? Never know when the ding-wing 5-toed sloth-bat may be important in the future.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
This doesn't sound like a horrible idea to me but I do have to say that it's a good thing this list wasn't around ~100,000 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Really.
You agree that mammals have some sort of "Instinct" that lets it develop a natural equilibrium with it's surrounding environment?
There is no such instinct. At best it can be loosely translated to "Starving to death" or being killed by it's environment in some way because the animal is competing for limited resources.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
start with things we can find tissue for:
the great auk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Auk
the dodo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo
the baiji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiji
the woolly mammoth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth
the irish elk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Elk
etc.
it's doubtful, but i'd love to see a stellar's sea cow too someday:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar's_Sea_Cow
basically, a 30 foot arctic manatee. killed by europeans in a quarter century. sad
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I read most of the responses and good points are made here and there, but I gotta be honest my gut reaction to this whole idea is not good! And follows along the lines of ...
An index to evaluate the worth of saving/reviving for endangered species ?!?!?! While perhaps not politically correct to say so, I am betting Hitler and fans would have LOVED this idea! How about we turn the tables and apply it to each and every single human being on every corner of the planet - not this group or that and see how this idea flies!!! Perhaps "in the name of goodness and the almighty dollar" that would be an index that could save the world and all endangered species, alike!!! When will we learn, it is our thinking that puts us down as somehow "superior" to make such "value" judgements....not this is NOT the same as discernment. Not to mention such thinking is seriously crippled in the deepest of insight to the bazillion of invisible factors that happen throughout every level of living organisms and making this world balanced and continue to go 'round!
unless correcting some kind of impact we've had on an environment, why not let nature take its course?
the very process of creating the index drops humans to 0.
I think reading that article ruined my WE...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
That's what I read on first instance. I know I'm tired and it's Friday!
Dennis Leary: My fluffy little dog.. He's so cute- There's the problem. We only want to save the cute animals, don't we? Yeah. Why don't we just have animal auditions. Line 'em up one by one and interview them individually.
Dennis: What are you?
Otter: I'm an otter.
Dennis: And what do you do?
Otter: I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands.
Dennis: You're free to go. And what are you?
Cow: I'm a cow.
Denis: Get in the fucking truck, ok pal!
Cow: But I'm an animal.
Dennis: You're a baseball glove! Get on that truck!
Cow: I'm an animal, I have rights!
Dennis: (pointing at leather jacket) Yeah, here's yer fucking cousin, get on the fucking truck, pal!
No one ever thinks of the poor endangered malaria mosquito! Once this majestic predator roamed the plains by the tens of billions, but due to human encroachment and habitat destruction, they're now down to a few herds of only a few billions each! If we don't do something before it's too late, their primary prey may suffer a huge population explosion and subsequent starvation! We must act now to save the endangered malaria mosquito!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm sure someone else said this already; but, got DNA?
People pave paradise, cut down native ecosystems and replace with farming and livestock, carve wilderness regions into isolated populations with roads and development, introduce alien species, and it's "settled facts" (according to the latest report from the National Academies of science and engineering) have caused the recent observed global warming. What the fuck else do you think is causing species to go extinct at a rate that strongly suggests we're living at the brink of the sixth great extinction event?
=S
What are you on about? "People" aren't remotely in danger of extinction, but 18,351 species are on the IUCN's Red list of threatened species. Most because of habitat loss, i.e. human activity.
=S
As the human presence grows, and alters conditions, those organisms that fail to adapt will perish. I mean really, we have, at times, made it impossible for humans to survive. What chance do other life forms have once we inhabit their territory? How many of us actually spend time
considering how our actions might affect our fellow creatures?