Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon? | Hacker News Reader

Can We Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon?

nybooks.com

63 pointsHooke41 comments

The problem with the Passenger Pigeon is that it was very common everywhere, and its behavior came to rely on this fact. An individual will leave its flock and just assume it can find a new flock. Once the population level dropped below a critical threshold, it was doomed.

The Rusty Blackbird has much the same problem, and the fear is that it may have now dropped below its threshold.

Well, their propensity to flock together and strategy of predator satiation made them extremely vulnerable to commercial hunting. It also looks like they suffered from the hunting equivalent of "panic logging": as the population collapsed, the commercial hunters reliant on them struggled to be the last hunter standing, rather than find another line of business before they went extinct. http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger-...

The same thing nearly happened to the bison; there were less than 300 individuals left in 1900, mostly preserved as private property by a few individuals who wanted to save them from extinction. The Yosemite herd was an exception, 23 individuals than managed to hide out in Yellowstone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#Resurgence_of_th...

> The problem with the Passenger Pigeon is that it was very common everywhere, and its behavior came to rely on this fact. An individual will leave its flock and just assume it can find a new flock. Once the population level dropped below a critical threshold, it was doomed.

An interesting thought exercise is to presume this is written about the Homo Sapiens at some point in the distant future by a neutral 3rd party observer.

I saw Ben Novak talk at the Interval last year.

He mentioned that a few animals have been resurrected in a slightly different way already. Eg. the Red Factor Canary was resurrected by breeding a Domestic Canary and a Red Siskin. Apparently the offspring had enough geno/phenotypic resemblance to the original Red Factor Canary that this newly created lineage was given that original name.

In George Church's book Regenesis, he recounts the interesting story of resurrecting the Pyrenean Ibex by somatic cell nuclear transfer and surrogate pregnancy in a closely related species. The source article is a great read [0].

The animal that resulted died of lung complications shortly after birth, but apparently veterinarians indicated that these complications were totally within the norm of ibex ontogeny, and probably not a failing of the underlying cell biology.

So, for just a few minutes, an extinct species was brought back to life.

[0] -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19167744

The only species to go extinct twice.

In Spain, obviously. After years of "I will not permit to add new blood with hybrids with wild goat, because is a unique trophy that nobody will have except us".

Even today the idea of add new blood to the remaining (and very inbreed) populations of wild goats is often mission imposible blocked by hunter's lobbies.

I'll leave this here.

https://flypigeon.co

There's no way this is real, right?

AFAIR this was a satirical application to YC.

It is perfectly real and also a joke. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

The article is not about carrier pigeons, but about the passenger pigeon. This is a North American species of pigeon famous for the huge size of its flocks, large enough to darken the skies on a sunny day. It was commercially overhunted to extinction by the early 20th century, a famous example of extinction.

Thanks for pointing out. I shared the link more in the interest of general pigeon discussion.

As someone who volunteers for a pigeon and dove rescue organization, this is terrifying. But, also as someone in tech and loves pigeons, this is kinda cool

Pigeons as an API?

Good ol' RFC 1149. I heard that some companies would use it as a bozo detector when accepting bids for network hardware. You'd list it as one of the protocols you expect the switches to be able to handle and look more carefully at anyone who said "yeah we support all of that" because they weren't your pal, buddy.

One vendor on one of these bids (maybe Cisco? I can't recall) answered back that while they don't currently support carrier pigeon they are considering it for a future feature enhancement.

I propose that we leave a dead flying pest alone and instead focus on how we can reduce the population of the current pigeon infestation in all cities.

Can we not resurrect this absurd topic? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we can harvest in terms of reducing our damage to existing species.

Perhaps it's overdiscussed here, but there are lots of important environmental lessons that are worth reflecting on.

I like the idea that we can really mess things up and then use technology to "undo" the damage. Pay it forward if you will. Maybe it could increase the technological velocity of the human race just enough to get us out of this mess.

More like, the loss is so enormous and consequential that even massive technological efforts cannot reverse it.

I'm all for chestnut restoration and the Buffalo Commons and bringing back woolly mammoths and Carolina parakeets and passenger pigeons, but these are heroic efforts that are a drop in the bucket.

We'll all have Carolina parakeets in cages and locally sourced Buffalo rugs while we terraform mars.

Can we let nature run it's course and let species that go extinct go extinct like they always have for billions of years?

There is some merit to that argument, but the rate of extinction is very high, and whole ecologies could be destroyed, which could create problems even for humanity itself.

Lots of species have gone extinct due to the meddling of human beings, which is something many might not consider to be nature running its course.

Are you implying humans are artificial?

Semantic games can be played in either direction. Are you implying humans trying to preserve ecosystem are artificial?

We're a part of nature like everything else in the universe. We happen to be a sudden, violent shock to this planet's ecosystem. It happens. We can try to diminish our impact on the future, but we should let those organisms who couldn't adapt to our toxicity rest in peace.

> We're a part of nature like everything else in the universe.

So, then, whatever we choose to do—whether it is protecting species, ignoring them, or exterminating them—is, equally, letting nature run its course.

How could it be otherwise?

While reading your comment, I envisioned the Singularity arriving, and as we watch without any pain whatsoever in horror as our bodies are disassembled atom by atom along with the rest of the planet to feed the building of its computronium Dyson Sphere (for its not a monster, pfft), the AGI explaining, "I happen to be a sudden, violent shock to this solar system's ecosystem..." ;)

According to the principle behind Chesterton's Fence, it isn't safe to allow any species to go extinct before we can understand its role in the ecosystem.

Knowing that, we could selectively breed and engineer new species to fill the critical niches of species as they go extinct, so that the long-term viability of our own species and our allied species are never threatened.

The trick is understanding the point of certain threatened species as they are on the brink of extinction. It's hard to know if that species ever had an essential function if it isn't doing it any more.

Since it's been gone so long, Chesterton's Fence must also be applied to the question of understanding what the passenger pigeon's new role would be in today's ecosystem.

Of course we can. But we have a self-preservation instinct.

Are you aware that we hunted the passenger pigeon to extinction?

Natural != good for humans. We evolved and are well suited for the current ecosystem. Whether you view human-caused mass extinction as natural or not, it probably won't be great for us. So it makes sense to try to preserve existing species/environments and develop techniques for rolling back the clock when needed.

No need, carrier-capable pigeons still exist. My family here in China keeps pigeons and they are known to fly at least 1000km or so to return to their roost. Beats using insecure devices with nominal encryption! No passports needed to cross borders, either.

So, you didn't actually read the article?

The "Passenger Pigeon" is a specific breed, and not just a generic term for a pigeon that will carry messages.

Understandable perspective. Actually I did, I just felt the clickbait title and reality outside of what-if-science was more interesting.

You not knowing what a word means doesn't take it clickbait

Thanks for your amazing contribution to the discussion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com