Botswana: Lab tests to solve mystery of hundreds of dead elephants
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://phys.org/news/2015-05-mass-deaths-rare-kazakhstan-an... edit here was the detail. It appears it was the rain that caused the issue and a third of the total population died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_Kazakh...
"Most of Kazakhstan’s water supply has been polluted by industrial and agricultural runoff and, in some places, radioactivity".
This line was extremely sad and discomforting to read. I'm no expert in wildlife but I saw they mentioned in another article about anthrax occurring naturally in the ground in parts of Botswana and has been known to kill wildlife in large numbers but this one rules it out. Hope the true cause of death is not only discovered early but also acted upon to prevent further damage.
This comment is particularly relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708416
There is also the the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[4][5] which fights poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[6] is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed.
[0] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust
[2] https://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/orphans/murit
[3] http://instagram.com/p/sigT3IAUKb
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...
- Half of all Saiga antelopes (120k) died over a month, 2015 [1]
- Recent unexplained dog deaths in Norway, 2019 [2]
- The ongoing white nose syndrome epidemic that's ravaging bat populations in North America [3]
- Gray whales beaching themselves all along US West Coast, 2019 [4]
- Ongoing, mass die-off of about 30% of frog and other amphibian species in the New World caused by a fungus [5]
Not to mention the commonly noted large decline in insect populations and colony collapse disorder in bees.
It seems that the proximate causes for these events are varied, but the sheer pace, magnitude, and number of affected species should hint that this is ultimately caused by downstream impacts of rapid changes in the environment precipitated by climate change.
One factor that I'm betting will eventually be implicated in many animal die-offs are biotoxins created by algae and molds. Many algaes and mold species are capable of creating toxins, but are normally non-toxic. However, under environmental stress and disruption, they can quickly produce a wide variety of nasty toxins. These biotoxins tend to target the nervous system, the immune system, and cell metabolism.
For example, seafood harvesting has been stopped with increasing frequency in Northern California in the last decade due to high domoic acid levels [6]. Many lakes were closed in the Bay Area due to cyanotoxins potentially poisoning dogs and people.
> The way the animals appear to be dying - many dropping on their faces - and sightings of other elephants walking in circles points to something potentially attacking their neurological systems, Dr McCann said.
Top photo on the article looks like a lake undergoing an algal bloom, so potentially elephants are dying from ingested neurotoxins.
Unfortunately for us, harmful algae blooms seem to be increasing in frequency [7] and potentially affecting human health.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saiga_antelope#2015%E2%80%9320...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49627463
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome#Cause
[4] https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/marine-life-distress...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chytridiomycosis
[6] https://caseagrant.ucsd.edu/project/frequently-asked-questio...
[7] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Judith_ONeil/publicatio...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-rabbit-out...
We do so much damage to the world.
Plastic, greenhouse gases, overfishing, etc. to support our way of life.
Lots of other examples...We kill millions of birds with our pets, buildings, and green energy
We need to find a way to reduce our impact on the planet.
A single turbine kills as many birds as a cat per year.
But that really is my point, people brush aside all the small impacts and we damage the environment in many small ways that really add up
As for birds, the Audubon has some information.
“ Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, making it the most threatening form of green energy. And yet, it’s also one of the most rapidly expanding energy industries: more than 49,000 individual wind turbines now exist across 39 states.”
https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe...
Although it's true that everything we do as a species / society has an impact on the environment, I think it's still important to look at things like this with perspective. Unfortunately, even green/renewable energy sources have a negative impact on the environment; wind isn't the only one. Not sure I really disagree, though, just wanted to mention that the wind impact isn't really that (relatively) bad.
[0] https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
To be clear there are 98 reactors in the US, so that would be almost 25,000,000 birds per reactor per year, or 67,000 per day, or 2,800 per hour, or 46 per minute. That's nearly one bird per second. It would probably be hard to hear over all that racket.
I'm all in for nuclear, once we know how to get rid of the waste products.
It's never been about reactor safety, we have a storage problem, that hasn't been solved yet. Without that we're just slithering into the next "waste product that we don't know how to get rid of" cycle.
Also even if we had solved it, it's too late to go nuclear now. The next 20 years will be crucial when it comes to stopping climate change. We simply don't have the time to waste 7.5 years on building new reactors. What we need to do is ramp up the production of existing tech to the max. It's much easier to scale the current renewable production capacity horizontally than scale vertically with nuclear.
Storage is still an imaginary pile of what-if “issues” while the world fucking burns. The scale of the issue of nuclear waste storage orders of magnitude smaller than climate change. Yet we still talk about it while burning nat gas and goal.
I'm surprised given this project was abandoned by the Obama administration, Trump hasn't reversed it on principle.
It kills a lot of birds in fact, even if some species manage to survive somehow
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/07/chernobyl-hits-birds...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22321986/
This does not change the fact that wind energy would benefit of a redesign
Nuclear is still one of them, and the previous claim than nuclear doesn't kill any birds is still false.
In any case, a flood is safer for birds than radioactivity. Most of them can fly and will lay a second clutch of eggs. All ends in hours or days, not in 1000 years so, what is the point here? This is not a dichotomy.
Yeah we are ruining the planet, but the "wind turbines kill birds" thing is FUD spread by the fossil lobby.
The alternative to wind turbines is more climate change which kills an insane amount of birds in comparison.
The design might be the best from a effeciency perspective, but it's very ugly, doesn't "adapt" to the sorrounding environment and from what I've gather quite hard to service.
We must be able to do something better.
Highways kill way more birds than turbines.
Lived near one, was dead silent.
Stop spreading fud.
Having less kids would be a more easy fast way if you want to combat climate change for one.
All big problems - pollution, deforestation, climate change are caused by having too many people on this planet.
Probably the answer is "both" anyway, but even if we divided the number of humans by 2, our impact on the ecosystem would still be crazy high (assuming the impact decreases linearly, which is probably not the case)
Each person in US needs a home. Heat, water, electricity and waste disposal for that home. A phone, likely a vehicle. Fresh food - a lot.
QoL levels are rising worldwide, so eventually each human on earth will demand all of these things.
You can’t consume significantly less (not 10x less). To achieve that you would need to became a caveman again.
The farmer in Bangladesh isn't the problem.
https://www.worldanimalfoundation.com/advocate/wild-earth/pa...
We kill hundreds of millions of animals with our cats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadkill
Lions kill to eat.
Think about human life before current medical care. A million different things trying to kill you. No different for an animal.
Humans kill an elephant every 15 minutes. That’s about 100 a day.
At any rate, maybe you should look into our impact on the environment.
Most people have no idea, so we continue to do the damage.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/03/african-...
Human trade spreads pathogens/diseases at a tremendous rate compared to natural diffusion. There's quite a long list of diseases in non-humans spread through human trade.
Human activity might also make animals more susceptible to disease in general through a weakening of overall health through pollution and environmental disruption. This effect is hard to quantify but has the potential to be quite large.
We are concerned about 300 because humans kill tens of thousands a year and we are driving them towards extinction.
If something goes wrong with the elephant population in Botswana, the acceleration will increase
You spuriously quote a few random cases of sudden death and claim it has been on the uptick but lack the holistic data of the past few hundred years to determine whether that's a true statement or not.
The beached whale could be caused by shifts in Earth's geomagnetic field, which whales use to navigate: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/weakening-earths-magnetic-field-co...
Diseases are caused by random mutations of bacterial, fungal and viral sources, and have occurred since the beginning of life itself.
> A reanalysis published in 2017 suggested that, in 1989–2016, there had been a "seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82%, in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study". The decline was "apparent regardless of habitat type" and could not be explained by "changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics". The authors suggested that not only butterflies, moths and wild bees appear to be in decline, as previous studies indicated, but "the flying insect community as a whole"
That's not a small, random decline - 70-80% of insect mass has disappeared over a single generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations#...
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6489/417.full?ijk...
Link to interview mentioned: https://youtu.be/cP0D2_jhqPU
> Compared to the time the grandfather post took to research, process, and write
Yes, but the only data in the post is what is found online. So while that can be used to draw attention to an issue, you can not use it to describe a trend, or say that things are getting worse.
The scale is increasing for certain species but not all:
> We show that the magnitude of MMEs has been intensifying for birds, fishes, and marine invertebrates; invariant for mammals; and decreasing for reptiles and amphibians.
The causes are still largely unknown but there are some patterns:
> Regardless, the increase in MMEs appears to be associated with a rise in disease emergence, biotoxicity, and events produced by multiple interacting stressors, yet temporal trends in MME causes varied among taxa and may be associated with increased detectability.
Either way it's a worrying sign that environmental factors will always play a role. Even if it is mostly just widespread diseases we previously didn't have the capability to detect, or simply no one was looking (as the abstract mentions about detectability) - additional environmental stresses could amplify what was otherwise pretty normal.
In regards to the Elephants in Botswana this wouldn't yet meet their definition of MMEs (90% die off), or a good chunk of the other linked examples provided by OP. Additionally rates for mammals remain unchanged.
Let's talk about cancel culture. The PhD Susan Crockford, one of the world's renown experts on polar bears, was fired from her position at the University of Victoria for going against the narrative that polar bear populations are collapsing. The reality is they are thriving:
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/20/susan-crockfo...
Either we care about truth or everything we're doing is for naught. It is very easy to fool yourself, even if you're an expert on a subject. The scientific method demands skepticism and careful control of variables to determine the cause of something.
So, we should debate arguments on merit, and leave it at that. If elephants are dying suddenly in large groups, it's unlikely that climate is the cause. Temperatures change more in a day than they do from year to year. It is highly likely that disease is a culprit if there is no evidence of physical impalement.
I'm well aware of the overhunting of elephants, and that's always something to be mindful of, but this does not look to be the case here. Deadly outbreaks will still occur in nature as a natural part of life and there is not always something we can do about it.
Precipitated by...huh? That's not a falsifiable statement, and so is not a valid argument. I could replace "downstream impacts ...climate change" in your statement with "5G deployment" or "vaccines" or "black people" and your argument would be no different.
Where's the evidence that these deaths are caused by environmental change, or indeed are linked and have a common cause?
Note that I'm not denying your claim; I'm merely pointing out that without referencing any evidence, it's as good as no claim at all.
Poster might not be correct overall, but the thesis is clear and at least remotely plausible.
However, these rare and unique megafauna are so valuable (imo), that the potential damage they could cause ecosystems we introduce them to may be outweighed by their increased resilience. The death of all wild elephant populations would be a massive blow to biology, animal psychology, and natural beauty; I wonder if we should think more about prioritizing their survival over other ecological considerations.
I'm absolutely not an expert in this area at all, just thoughts of a layman.
I will not name it. We have enough environmental crimes yet.
They subsequently auctioned off permits to hunt elephants. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51413420
There are other things which point to something other than poaching.
"It is only elephants that are dying and nothing else," Dr McCann said. "If it was cyanide used by poachers, you would expect to see other deaths." Dr McCann has also tentatively ruled out natural anthrax poisoning, which killed at least 100 elephants in Botswana last year.
But they have been unable to rule out either poisoning or disease. The way the animals appear to be dying - many dropping on their faces - and sightings of other elephants walking in circles points to something potentially attacking their neurological systems, Dr McCann said.
- TFA
I would imagine that hunters (who have already been issued permits to kill 60 elephants so far, see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-botswana-elephants/botswa... ) would take some part of the elephant as a trophy, so it probably isn't a result of the legal hunting permits.
Just to be pedantic and a bit conspiratorial, poaching is defined as the illegal hunting of an animal. Since lifting a ban on hunting elephants is definitely controversial, I would imagine it's in Botswana's government's interests to be specific in their wording. They've only "ruled out poaching as a reason," they haven't ruled out that these elephants were killed by people.
If the problem was permitted hunting... it wouldn't be a mystery.