Animals We Ate into Extinction | Hacker News Reader

Animals We Ate into Extinction

britannica.com

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Humans likely hunted several species to death after reaching North America, including:

- North American horses (several species)

- North American camels

- Giant Bison

- Tapirs (several North American species)

- Llama's (several North American species)

- Stag Moose

- Gomphotheres (several species, similar to elephants)

Several other species of North American megafauna, such as North American lions and giant beavers likely went extinct due to human activities even though there's no evidence they were hunted directly. e.g. The extinction of most of their prey likely did the lions in.

It's actually quite shocking what humans with rocks, sticks, and empty bellies were able to do. There can be little doubt that the domestication of animals for food has spared countless other species from a similar fate over the last ten thousand years.

Humans did the same thing, causing a mass extinction of around half the large mammals in Australia and many other species when they reached the continent around 40,000 years ago. Not only did we hunt large animals, but we burned the forests regularly, driving more to the brink.

The same thing happened around 1000 years ago when we reached New Zealand and Madagascar.

Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done.

> Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done.

Unless global warming gets sufficiently bad, in which case that will be the worst damage.

> The extinction of most of their prey likely did the lions in

Maybe, but the opposite situation is also possible. You can wipe the preys if you remove the predadors. We had see this in New Zealand for example where Tasman devil has protected decens of species of smaller marsupials, extinct in the continent but not here. This is the same big scale experiment that we are playing currently in Africa. In one or other case the result is the same, almost all european big mammal fauna vanished; and a replace is still missing for the equivalent of european elephant, european rhinos or north american cheetah.

But why has the African megafauna stuck around to this day? African animals have had to deal with humans a lot longer than any other continent.

when all you have is a spear, going after "slow", grazing animals is "easy", but the Charismatic megafauna that survives today is in general, the ones you don't mess with (again, when all you have is a spear). Also, moose, bovine, etc... don't have hunting instincts like the big cats, or weigh 2,000lbs like hippos and rhinos... there isn't as much cover on the African plains as there is in the US to go after the larger, horned animals.

Did humans and Neanderthals have something other than spears when hunting Wooly Mammoths and Sabertooth Cats?

" Biogeographical evidence is also suggestive: the areas of the world where humans evolved currently have more of their Pleistocene megafaunal diversity (the elephants and rhinos of Asia and Africa) compared to other areas such as Australia, the Americas, Madagascar and New Zealand without the earliest humans. A picture arises of the megafauna of Asia and Africa evolving alongside humans, learning to be wary of them, and in other parts of the world the wildlife appearing ecologically naive and easier to hunt."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Hu...

African megafauna has almost entirely disappeared from anywhere but protected reserves.

I have read that this is related to the end of the last ice age. Africa was apparently the continent which was least affected by melting of European and North American ice sheets.

North America and Europe underwent dramatic climate change as several hundred feet tall ice sheets covering large parts of the land mass melted and temperatures rose suddenly which would explain why megafauna went completely extinct in NA/Europe.

Then there is also human factor of hunting these animals for meat and leather but it was probably a combination of factors.

No moa [1] Britannica, really? It's not even on the 'birds that don't fly' on the next page!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa

Came here to say just this, and the Haast Eagle as well...

They died for the glory of the british empire. Civilization and animals everyhwere beware!

Actually it was the Māori not the British.

And australian horned turtles, and Galapagos tortoises, and...

A nice alternative version of this would be 'Animals We Ate into Proliferation'

We can play the home version:

chickens cows pigs

I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop.

I guess there's some geese and ducks.

I would salmon, but does farming of them displace more of the habitat loss we've cost them with damns, mining, oil fields, etc?

I think it depends where you are, regarding the use of sheep.

In Australia and New Zealand, lamb consumption is quite popular. Australian figures from 2016 show 9.5kg of lamb consumed per capita[1]. From the article:

"This means that with underlying population growth, the total volume consumed in Australia is forecast to edge above 240,000 tonnes cwt by 2020, which will account for 46% of Australia’s lamb production."

Which means there's a further 250,000 tonnes exported.

The UK appears to be even higher in absolute numbers. Average purchase per week per person of mutton and lamb was 35 grams, which equates to 1.82kg per annum[2]. With a population of 63 million, that is once again a fairly large consumption of sheep.

[1] https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-news/2016-austr...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-househo...

> I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd lambchop.

It very much depends on the country. Australia, NZ, South Africa and muslim countries consume significant amounts of sheep meat e.g. 5.5kg per capita in Saudi Arabia, 7.4 in Australia, 3.2 in Iran, …

> goats for milk and the odd lambchop.

Just to avoid confusion, lamb chops come from lambs - sheep. It's probably just a grammar issue, but I figured I'd note this.

Also, goat is delicious. Americans don't eat much goat or sheep, but they are regularly eaten elsewhere.

I always thought that was a "dam". Is it a "damn"?

Basically any supermarket meat then? https://top5ofanything.com/list/535cb238/Most-Common-Types-o... (actually a little surprised to see sheep/duck ahead of pig)

So from that page I did a rough calculation - the following is in billions of tons of the animals alive in 2006:

Chickens 34 Cattle 560 Sheep 70 Ducks 2 Pigs 75 Total 741 (animals)

Humans 420

Looks like there are nearly two measures of livestock weight for every one of humans.

~7.6 billion humans weigh 420 billion tons? That would mean the average human weighs 55 tons! Talk about an epidemic of extreme morbid obesity!

Good spotting, for humans that's Million tons.

It's going to be quite some time until humans weigh 55 tons, but if you interpret the graph like people pitching to investors like to, we'll get there.

pig is a no-go in muslim culture, which constitutes a large part of the world population.

The duck thing seems to be entirely dependent on china consuming more ducks than pigs, which is very surprising for me.

Measured in whole-population calorie throughout, is there a more successful species than cattle? They even managed to breed (in their own passive, patient way) a large group of their bipedal accomplices into greater compatibility/dependence.

I'm picturing several classic movies remade from the cows' perspective. Logan's Run would be the obvious choice, but I could also see a bovine Charlton Heston shouting You've gotta tell 'em! BEEF IS COW! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me… MOOOOOO!!

This was more or less the premise of Chicken Run, which sets The Great Escape in a chicken farm.

> Humans are not always great at self-moderation

Humans are never great at self-moderation.

I was going to post a snarky reply to this, but thought better of it.

Can I commend the writing on this Web site? I know traditional encyclopedias have been over shadowed by Wikipedia, but the standard of writing and information density does not compare to what went before.

10? How about hundreds? (in Australia and Americas alone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals

How about billions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction

The evolution itself is made of extinctions. All current species exist because their ancestors have pushed some of their contemporaries to go extinct. These lists are just those we know about.

We are in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, the extinction event with the highest extinction rate. Killing the animals is part of what we have done to destroy species, there's also habitat destruction.

And if we are smart enough and we melt the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we are next in line after we release enough methane to recreate Permian-Triassic extinction event.

"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." ... then go extinct.

"the extinction event with the highest extinction rate."

Sorry, that is not correct. The K–Pg extinction event wiped out around 75% of all living species, apparently within the span of a couple of years.

The P-Tr extinction event is acknowledged as being the most severe of all. One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds... which is a self-reinforcing phenomenon: as temperature raises, methane release accelerates, reinforcing the temperature raise which reinforces the methane release and so on... That could realistically happen again within our lifetime.

So does anyone know exactly what brought the planet back to normal after the release of all this methane? Why didn't the Earth careen into an unstoppable spiral of planet-wide heating like Venus did?

That is what I was wondering as well. The climate on eart seems to be very britty and very robust at the same time. What stops it from going completely crazy?

Maybe it's a variation of the anthropic principle? Earth is not a Venus simply because we're here to observe it.

We don't (yet) have data about climates on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. It could be that Earth is an extreme outlier in having a stable climate system.

Yes and no - I think it is life that is the stabilising factor. Venus probably never had any. Also it's much closer to the sun.

Much of the Earth's original carbon supply has been sequestered in the form of carbonate rocks. Much of the planet is covered with miles of them. That carbon isn't going anywhere.

While Venus could have an atmosphere capable of supporting life at one time, Venus' hydrogen is believe to have been ejected into space by solar winds due to a lack of a magnetosphere capable of countering them.

"One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds"

You mean "one possible cause among many" (including, ATW, meteor impact, volcanism, sea level change, sea oxygen content change, sea acidity change). That doesn't make it one of THE causes. The word "possible" needs to be in there.

There's no conclusive evidence for any of these.

Who knows - we could see the resurrection of the woolly mammoth - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-mammo...

Eat more mosquitoes.

Ironically, they're saying the exact same thing of us. On their HN, none-the-less.

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