Nature's 'Brita Filter' Is Dying and Nobody Knows Why (2019)
wuwm.com
wuwm.com
This is just one of the myriad ways that we have impacted the world without realizing and just like software bugs, where there is one there are more. Even if we overcome global warming, there is this lingring sense that this century will be the last where nature has any resemblance to the pre-sapiens world.
It's like realizing this childhood world wasn't that way just because you have changed from a child to an adult, but because the world has changed.
I'm starting to become worried over what my daughter might experience in that regard. Things that were normal for me or that she might encounter that will be gone instead. Like, will fireflies still be around for her as an adult? What about walking around with piles of snow higher than you everywhere? Will she ever see a natural unlit clear night sky? It's difficult to convey what that many stars looks like, or seeing the milky way stretched across it.
More to the point of the article, I remember freshwater bivalves walking upstream across stream beds. They aren't mussels, but still — I haven't seen any in the last several years where I used to.
If you're outside Canada (North America?) it can be difficult to get an ebook version; I can help with that... ;-)
(Note: with the author's agreement!)
My take, the baby-boomers consciously severed our ties to the past as their children we have now lost all connections to the natural world. We get what we deserve which is utter destruction of the climate and mental suffering and disease until the day we die.
this is a throwaway comment in here but it describes a really cool adaptation of some bivalves which is that their mantle looks like a fishing lure -- it sticks out of the shell and mimics a prey species. When the predator comes to strike, the mussell injects its eggs, which mature in the predator's gills.
> At first, biologists investigating the cause of the freshwater mussel die-off suspected human activity — contamination or pollution. Rivers and streams in the coal seam-striped southern Appalachian Mountains have a long history of environmental degradation. But pollution tends to be indiscriminate, and not every species is being affected.
If American English isn’t your first language, please understand the emphasis in my phrasing of “one has to think...”
"Has to think" is not a common construction, if you're trying to communicate something across the lines of "can't help but think".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
> "And it's been like that week after week after week [every fall] since September 2016."
A spill that happened in 2008 and cleaned up by 2015 would be an odd cause for that; you'd expect it to happen sooner.
I think it's thanks for asking but that doesn't seem to make sense?
"Nobody Knows Why".
There isn't going to be some single silver bullet explaining everything further than that, it is an ecosystem collapse.
Humans impact everything in small ways, these in turn impact everything else in its network.
Sometimes positively but more usually negatively via various strains.
It's not always pollution, sometimes it's disease, sometimes it's habitat sometimes it's climate, sometimes food chain, sometimes it's noise pollution, sometimes it's even more complicated than that for example you might knock out a predator but then create more disease or remove an ecological pressure that kept a species behaviour in line with its environment.
Some human-caused issues are fixable. As a rough example that is somewhat similar to a mussel die-off in a river, Washington was able to bring local salmon numbers back up on a river by fixing culverts blocking stream flow and blowing up dams.