Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual | Hacker News Reader

Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

readwriteweb.com

29 pointsshawndumas24 comments

They are up to 5,000+ dead blackbirds now in that one town.

I find that highly disturbing. If it was 5,000 across the USA, it would be worrisome and sad but somehow in one place (and then more in another place) gets the "alarming" label for me.

Don't forget all the fish-kills and how they now think the mass bee extinction is from seemingly EPA approved pesticides.

I listened to an explanation of this earlier (I will see if I can find documentation) -- the blackbirds travel in extremely large flocks and follow a leader very tightly (much closer in proximity to each other than most birds). The birds travel at night and can be disoriented by things such as fireworks, lightning, or other flashing lights. If the leading bird is disoriented, it could cause the bird to fly directly into the ground, a building, or any other large bird-killing object. This leads to an almost lemming-like mass suicide of the flock.

I also believe that it has been documented to have happened fairly regularly. The numbers I heard today were 16 times in the past 30 years there has been a mass death of over 1000 birds.

Found this regarding mass animal deaths -- http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/mortality_events/ongoing.jsp

5,000 birds across the country? That's about one for every area the size of Rhode Island. Blackbirds are the most abundant kind of bird on this continent. A few thousand here or there is literally not going to make any difference. This is not nearly on the same scale as the bee crisis.

Edit: Even if there are only 10 million blackbirds living at any given time (I'm sure there are more), and they have a lifespan of 5 years, that's a turnover of 5,400 on an average day.

Considering a flock of blackbirds can consist of several million birds, 5000 aren't actually that many. Numbers like that are only relevant in context.

The deaths aren't worthy of concern and investigation only if they're linked.

They're worthy of concern and investigation in each instance because history has shown they tend to happen for one of two reasons: severe weather shock or human activity.

Thus we need to carefully consider and investigate each occurrence, lest we ignore the metaphoric canary in the coalmine on the grounds that 'canaries die all the time'.

Truly the news cycle has latched onto an easy-to-sell trend and narrative. But their behavior, and the laughable connections they imply, don't speak to whether or not any given mass animal death truly is a non-issue.

The canary in the coal mine is only useful because there's only one plausible explanation for it keeling over. If they died all the time for no good reason they'd be useless. It might be really cool if we could extract signal against a noisy background but there's mathematical limits on our ability to do that even in theory, and we're generally better off looking at the less noisy signals.

Plus chasing noise turns out to be really dangerous. 5% of the time or so, random processes will correlate with something else you look at with 95% confidence. Your suggestion is not a good idea at all, it's a recipe for spurious connections and wildly disproportionate responses, no matter how good it feels to a human brain.

Except that when it comes to mass animal deaths, the rate of it being caused by human activity isn't anywhere near as low as noise. And mass die offs simply don't happen "all the time". Canaries die of non-gas-related causes far more often than entire flocks of birds and schools of fish die within feet and seconds of one another.

Essentially, if a mass die off doesn't correlate with a particularly sudden weather event, or known human activity (fireworks displays) it's safe to assume it is us, from something we (tautologically) didn't know was happening or didn't expect to cause these problems.

And at that point, it's just straight-up good science to investigate the remaining cases to better understand our environment and how our activity is affecting it.

The more complete historical data is here: http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/publications/quarterly_reports/inde...

the NWHC has quarterly reports on wildlife mortality dating back to 1995 online (and they claim to have records back to 1975 in databases).

The google map linked in the article[1] contains many entries that don't quite fit the oddness of some of the die-offs people are talking about. For example, [2] refers to 150 tons of tilapia that died because of being farmed too densely. [3] refers to fish that died when a small city lake froze over with a bunch of decaying leaves trapped under the ice releasing methane. And others.

[1]: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=20... [2]: http://business.asiaone.com/Business/News/Story/A1Story20101... [3]: http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/201...

If mass die offs are so commonplace, why haven't tin foilers started tracking and pointing them out before (as they have with "chemtrails")?

Because you can only conspiracy-theory about what you've noticed. They don't actually notice anything new, or at least not very much new, the essence of conspiracy theories is to weave existing readily-visible facts and a healthy dollop of made up fantasy into some new theory. From what I can see they hardly ever do anything like a real investigation and even when they do there's a lot of the aforementioned fantasy in it. Like, someone writes a book in which they claim to have spent a lot of time investigating UFO issues but it's still mostly just regurgitated theories and a few allusions to trying to get more info but mostly not. Info mostly just circulates and gets endlessly chewed on, very little new info gets added into the morass by the actual conspiracy theorists from what I can see, with a handful of exceptions.

Why is this article on ReadWriteWeb, an online zine for web-design?

Come to think of it, how would one classify RWW? "All the news that's currently popular"?

ReadWriteWeb are linkbait whores. I'm totally serious. I stopped taking them seriously a long time ago.

They are perhaps quite common, but I think they are unusual and should be investigated to see if they pose a risk to humans or other species.

How can it be common and unusual at the same time?

investigate? yes. panic? no.

Who's panicking? I've only seen reports of alarm.

maybe not you and me but lots of people:

  Technology to blame for animal die-off panic [1].

  Mass Animal Deaths Leading To End Times Panic [2].

  Dead Bird Panic [3].

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[1]: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40961721/ns/us_news-environment/

[2]: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1974746/mass_animal_dea...

[3]: http://metabunk.org/content/137-Dead-Bird-Panic-How-Media-Fo...

Yeesh, the media really likes to stir stuff up. Those articles read like self-fulfilling prophecies.

Direct link to the map the article is based on: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=20...

Mass death hasn't been particularly uncommon throughout human history, either, but it's probably not something to aspire to.

Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual ... especially in the middle of winter, when food is hardest to find.

I love the wording here: "not unusual". So what does it make it? Usual?

I can see it now: the moon spirals off into the sun, and some "expert" is going to say that it's "not unusual".

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