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Empty Landscape Looms, If Large Herbivores Continue to Die Out
From the BBC comes this depressing excerpt: Populations of some of the world's largest wild animals are dwindling, raising the threat of an "empty landscape", say scientists.
About 60% of giant herbivores - plant-eaters - including rhinos, elephants and gorillas, are at risk of extinction, according to research. Analysis of 74 herbivore species, published in Science Advances, blamed poaching and habitat loss.
A previous study of large carnivores showed similar declines.
Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University, led the research looking at herbivores weighing over 100kg, from the reindeer up to the African elephant.
"This is the first time anyone has analysed all of these species as a whole," he said.
"The process of declining animals is causing an empty landscape in the forest, savannah, grasslands and desert." Here's the study, published in Science Advances, on which the BBC article is based.
Whenever I hear prophecies of doom like this from any outlet I wait about 5-7 years before I even think about adopting it as something to look into with any seriousness, by then if there is still a hue and cry about the same thing there's the possibility it isn't total BS.
This has been going on for tens of thousands of years, so while it matters, it isn't news.
Large size makes animals evolutionarily fragile and is often a dead end.
They say, during the K-T event, no land animal larger than a cat survived.
https://xkcd.com/1338/
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Credible citation needed. This claims otherwise:
The basis of this argument is that the sun must be causing global warming and in fact, warming throughout the solar system. There are several flaws in this line of thought. Firstly, the characterisation that the whole solar system is warming is erroneous. Around 6 planets or moons out of the more than 100 bodies in the solar system have been observed to be warming. On the other hand, Uranus is cooling (Young 2001).
Secondly, the theory that a brightening sun is causing global warming falls apart when you consider the sun has shown little to no trend since the 1950s. A variety of independent measurements of solar activity including satellite data, sunspot numbers, UV levels and solar magnetograms all paint a consistent picture. Over the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been moving in opposite directions.
In 1900 there were only 20 white rhinos left; in 2010, there were 20,000.
So what happened? we privatized them.
In fact take any animal that can be bought: chickens, horses, cows, etc..., and none of them are in any danger of extinction.
Why this works? Well, suppose I owned those 20 white rhinos. Simple supply and demand would make them worth a fortune. I would have a very strong incentive to try to get 21, so I would make everything I could to make them reproduce. Eventually I would have enough rhinos that I will start selling some for profit and continue reproducing them. The people that buy them would also have a strong incentive to reproduce them. As supply continues to increase, the value of an individual rhino will fall. At that point, the animal is safe from extinction, and it may become more profitable to sell them to hunters for example.
Simple market forces would make us breed them when there are too little, and hunt them when there are two many, keeping a sustainable population.