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Cow Could Soon Be Largest Land Mammal Left Due To Human Activity, Says Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The cow could be left as the biggest land mammal on Earth in a few centuries, according to a new study that examines the extinction of large mammals as humans spread around the world. The spread of hominims -- early humans and related species such as Neanderthals -- from Africa thousands of years ago coincided with the extinction of megafauna such as the mammoth, the sabre-toothed tiger and the glyptodon, an armadillo-like creature the size of a car. "There is a very clear pattern of size-biased extinction that follows the migration of hominims out of Africa," the study's lead author, Felisa Smith, of the University of New Mexico, said of the study published in the journal Science on Thursday. Humans apparently targeted big species for meat, while smaller creatures such as rodents escaped, according the report, which examined trends over 125,000 years. In North America, for instance, the mean body mass of land-based mammals has shrunk to 7.6kg (17lb) from 98kg after humans arrived. If the trend continues "the largest mammal on Earth in a few hundred years may well be a domestic cow at about 900kg", the researchers wrote. That would mean the loss of elephants, giraffes and hippos. In March, the world's last male northern white rhino died in Kenya.
Are moose endangered or something?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Being tasty or useful to humans.
Most mass extinction events end up with fewer large animals surviving, including those long before people arrived. See Lilliput effect. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_effect) The point of the article in the summary is that people are driving this extinction event, but I'd be cautious about making that correlation too casually. We're also living in the only time in biological history when one species was trying to preserve the others.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Take species that are alive right now, and re-introduce tem in areas where animals similar to those species became extint.
This is not unprecedented. In the pleistocene, there were horses in America, those became extint, and later re-introduced, with little or no effect in the ecosystem
Same with the Hippos in colombia (imported by no other than Pablo Escobar Gaviria, of "Narco" fame). Here, the efect on the ecosystem is low, but since the animals are very territorial, the populalition has a relationship with them of "Awe and respect"
In Venezuela there used to be an animal called Mixotoxodon Larensis, similar (but not related to) rhinos and hippos. It went all the way from brazil to Texas (the toxodon originated in patagonia, but our variation traveled more). We could re-introduce rhinos in venezuela and Brazil. Rhinos eat grass, like cows, so no biggie for the ecosystem, and are not a huge problem for humans (unlike Hippos hicha are VERY territorial).
In Venezuela we used to have a thinguie called the mastodons (other parts of america had them too, they came from the north), similar to elephants, so we may as well adopt elephants, either african, assian or both. Again, vegetarians, big, no biggie for the environmet.
Also, we used to have gavialoids (there are crocodiles, aligators, and gavials), but they became extinct, so may as well get gavials and "fake gavials" (which, funny enough, turned out to be true gavials ;-) ) which are on the brink to extintion, and re-deploy. Since they eat only fish, are no danger to humans, and could deploy in places with "bad" fish (think piranha or electric eels).
I think a similar case could be made about the other continents.
The opportunities are plentyfull, is just the disposition.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Being tasty or useful to humans.
Which is exactly why this study has the wrong conclusion. Thanks to all those tasty cows helping to cause an obesity epidemic in a few centuries, the largest land mammal will be humans, not cows.
Even better, in 400 years, extrapolation shows that the larges land mammal will have negative mass.
Negative mass is great news: not only can we use such animals for large scale balloon powered flight (in place of expensive helium or dangerous hydrogen), when such negative masses are properly arranged they can create wormholes, allowing for instantaneous interstellar travel!
We nearly made bison extunct, but these days we are farming them, and bison burgers do taste good...
Sorry, but, "... hominims..." is wrong.
However, "hominin" (or at a stretch "hominid") would be correct. See the diagram at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and see the original article that uses "hominin" liberally: http://science.sciencemag.org/...
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
Having a bunch of entitled jackoffs running around Africa gunning down and mutilating big game doesn't help the situation.
Actually, it does help. Big game hunters pay high fees that are used for habitat conservation. They also create jobs for local people that then see wildlife as an economic benefit, rather than just seeing them as crop/livestock destroying pests.
Wildlife in Africa would be much better off if there were more Western big game hunters.
Horses can be much bigger than cattle.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Aren't water buffalo larger than cows? I rather think that they are, and they are clearly not on their way out.
That said, the "red list" is clearly an underestimate of the threatened animal species. It's more a list of "those in imminent danger this decade". It's really hard to figure out which species are in more distant danger of extinction. This partially depends on how the climate changes, and what unexpected events this causes. Someone above mentioned moose. They don't currently seem to be in danger, but they depend on a certain ecology, IIRC, they are browsers rather than grazers, so they need trees and shrubs they can eat, etc. If a warming climate dries out the territory where they're living and turns it into a grassland, they'll need to migrate, and often it turns out that new migration routes are blocked. That's not likely a "this decade" kind of danger, but it's an "if this goes on..." kind of danger.
A lot of animals would do a lot better if people and fences didn't block their path to a better territory. But unlike most animals, people are even territorial about other species passing through their territory. (There are, of course, good reasons, but that doesn't change the problem.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You might want to tell that to the white rhinoceros. There are three left in the world today because baby-dick failsons like Eric and Don Jr went around blasting them to hell,
We're talking about guys whose "sport" requires that something die. They're sociopaths. There are better ways of managing wildlife than trophy hunting.
I'm no fan of hunting but there's a big difference between it and poaching.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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"It's more likely to be two bucks a pound less than regular stuff, eventually and you probably won't be able to tell the difference either in terms of nutrition, taste or texture."
Meat changes texture as it gets used. Chuck and tenderloin wind up being very different. Unless you've got a machine working that vat full of meat stuff, it's never going to have the taste and texture of the real thing.
I guess these researchers just plumb forgot that buffalo are still raised as domestic animals in much of the country. There's a ranch not a few miles from me that does, and a few local small-town eateries have "bison burgers" on the menu - expensive, but literally a nice change of taste on occasion.
I hate it when scientists do this - massage facts for better PR impact (the link between cows and human domestication for human use is much stronger than with bison.) Those worthies among us who worship "The Science" with pseudoreligious zeal take exception to those who can't reconcile that faith with the less-than-saintly deviations scientists make into PR.
Somewhere along the line, scientists figured out that if journalists could twist their papers into moronic headlines and get away with it, then they could write the headlines into their conclusions and do the same. What a shitshow.
I'm doing my part. I'm eating as many of the damn things as I can!
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.