The ‘devil bird’ lands in New York, with more likely to come
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
People have been noticing changes in bird distributions for a long time. Cattle Egrets have spread with agricultural development and are now common in Australia, a continent they were previously not found on.
Things moving north with climate change is just the next step really.
Including, unfortunately, tick and mosquito borne disease. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-lyme-and-other-tick...
I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum) isn't a thing, but they're getting closer and closer to my area.
From that Wikipedia link:
> The bite of the lone star tick can cause a person to develop alpha-gal meat allergy, a delayed response to nonprimate mammalian meat and meat products.
Non-primate mammalian.
Plot twist: cannibalistic cultures as adaptations to living in areas highly permeated by organisms spreading alpha-gal meat allergy.
Presumably it would also be quite unpleasant to be allergic to your own muscles.
According to the UN livestock is the cause of 14% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
And beef is by far the worst out of them: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0477/production/...
I don't eat much meat myself, but I'm not fully vegetarian or vegan either. I try to balance it more (though mostly because of animal welfare reason, not climate change).
Sounds like climate change is taking care of itself
Yes, it's true. Not every species goes on, though, and those that do don't necessarily enjoy the process.
That doesn’t make sense, in fact, it’s way more likely for diseases to become less deadly over time. Killing humans or making them very weak is bad for its survival.
Ticks aren't born with Lyme disease, they get it from an animal and then transfer it to another animal. Not all animals are competent hosts for Borrelia Burgdorferi (the bacteria that causes Lyme disease). If a tick bites an infected deer and then bites you, you're unlikely to be infected (although if you do, then both you and the deer will suffer for it).
Mice however, are competent hosts for B. Bergdorferi. If a tick bites an infected mouse and later bites you, you are likely to become infected.
Neither ticks nor mice experience significant negative affects from being infected (I'm told that bats are this way with COVID). Although it must at least be an energy drain on the mouse (or the bat), whose metabolism supports the manufacture of high concentrations of the pathogen.
So look at it from the perspective of the pathogen. You have a limited complexity budget. You can't hack every single immune system, you have to be choosy. (Bacteria get their diversity from horizonal gene transfer, so data about which adaptations are effective in the current environment is sort of gossiped around.) You're going to take the path of least resistance, and that path is determined not by your eventual target, but by all of the paths not taken--by the degree to which the other hosts put up a fight.
Then look at it from the perspective of all of the potential host immune systems. There's an incentive to not being in last place--then you'll be chosen for specialization against--but there's also no need to overallocate resources to this fight. It's like a multiparty prisoner's dilemma except the optimal solution is that we all defect against one of us.
So there's this tension where B. Bergdorferi is looking to specialize re: hosts and each host genome has to "decide" how to handle it. (of course it's not a decision, it's evolution, but it's convoluted to talk about collaboration in terms of deleterious coincidences and selective pressures).
For reasons unknown, B. Bergdorferi's ancestor's genome "chose" to specialize with the mouse. The effect of this "choice" is that it is more concentrated in areas where mice don't have many predators, and less common in places where they are well-hunted. The impact of human settlement is uneven: It bothers the raptors more than it bothers the mice. So we have this situation where Lyme-disease-causing bacteria is concentrating in tick guts specifically where humans upset the preditor/prey balances around the mouse. And recall that this outcome, where it's the mouse and not some other tick-victim that ends up being the competent host, it's the result of tension between the genomes of all the things that ticks bite.
So I ask: is it mere coincidence that it ended up being the mouse that B. Bergdorferi specialized against? Or have the forest dweller genomes "collaborated" to achieve this outcome.
I don't think it's that wild to assume collaboration. Sure, they didn't sit down and discuss it, but given that human-driven habitat loss is a significant driver of extinction, I think there would be a selective pressure towards collaborative outcomes that keep humans out of the forest and away from ones that make the forest more inviting to humans. Perhaps there were cases where the B. Bergdorferi ancestor specialized in other ways, but we don't know about them because instead of forests there are parking lots in those places.
In this way, I expect that zoonotic diseases are a sort of immune system against habitat loss.
Hypotheses are no good if not falsifiable, so here's the prediction: novel zoonotic diseases will spring up in places where human-caused habitat loss proceeds in novel ways. If we change how we live such that we don't create a safe haven for mice but do create one for some other creature, then the ecosystems that we're destroying will collaborate in new ways to cause that creature to be a threat to us.
I'm not sure where to look in history for examples of this, otherwise I'd be writing a paper about it, but I hope you can see how it would plausibly be applied to COVID as well.
> Killing humans or making them very weak is bad for its survival.
That B. Bergdorferi harms humans is good for the survival of the deer and the owls and the snakes and the bears which share a habitat with ticks. It is the collective adaptations in their immune systems which determine that mice are competent hosts, which is what causes B. Bergdorferi to come in contact with humans at an increased frequency. So no, killing humans is not bad for the organisms that matter in this case. I'm sure they would be quite happy to be rid of us.
“Diseases from animals have evolutionary pressure to hurt humans because hurting humans is better for the survival of its preferred host.”
That does make sense to me, but I think it doesn’t track with how slow evolution works.
According to Yale, Lyme disease has likely been around in North America since 60,000 years ago: https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/ancient-history-of-ly...
Natives were not very destructive to forests and I don’t think very destructive to mice.
Mass deforestation to the level of evolutionary pressure would have come when Europeans first settled. Meaning Lyme disease would have had to specialize after that, which I would assume is unlikely.
Maybe the diseases do specialize to harm humans, but it feels like the period where diseases can effectively stop humans and humans were doing mass deforestation is too short. Lyme disease is problematic, but it hasn’t stopped anyone from chopping down trees.
You could argue it has the opposite effect. We drain swamps because of malaria, destroying its habitat.
My theory is that some ecosystems have a niche for pathogens that remain at low concentrations in healthy circumstances, but that become amplified in cases where the ecosystem is taking damage.
The article you linked describes such an amplification:
> “The Lyme disease bacterium has long been endemic,” she said. “But the deforestation and subsequent suburbanization of much of New England and the Midwest created conditions for deer ticks—and the Lyme disease bacterium—to thrive.”...
> Ticks expanded into suburbanized landscapes—full of animals like white-footed mice and robins, excellent hosts for B. burgdorferi
It may not have been humans that posed the initial differential threat to everything-but-the-mice-and-robins. But something did, and that created the pressure to arm mice and robins with invader-discouraging pathogens, and that pressure made B Burgdorferi what it is today.
The increased pathogen concentration is an immune response. The stimulus is a reduction of predators (which are known to be more sensitive to habitat disruption) and the response is that the prey, left unchecked, amplify the pathogen and infect the invaders.
The ecosystems all those species thrive or at least survive in though? Those don’t do intention. Ecosystems are a collection of species and are about as harmonious as a poison jar over time, but the jar itself has no intentions, it’s just a jar.
Cells use organelles to maintain homeostasis in the presence of threatening stimuli, and organs use cells, and organisms use organs... I see no reason to assume that ecosystems don't use organisms in the same way.
If something is emergent, that is by definition not with intent. My intent and your intent and everybody else’s intent creates both strong and weak interactions which percolate through society, recognizable through other phenomena which we measure such as economy, births, deaths, elections or whatever sum up into a society which is recognizable as a describable body but which is emergent and without an intent of its own but rather multiple sometimes overlapping and sometimes clashing intents. Ecosystems are like that: full of creatures with intentions of their own, but without any sort of intent. It cannot use anything without a body (a tree, a bee, a fox, a bacterial culture, a virus) taking action, therefore it cannot weaponize anything.
Or put another way, you can go into the Jungle, and you might die, and some lazy mofo might say you died from the Jungle but what actually killed you would be a crocodile, a jaguar, some kind of infection from an identifiable bacteria or virus even if left unidentified, maybe your inability to metabolize due to protein starvation, or something else, but the Jungle itself will not be the thing that killed you.
> Ecosystems are a collection of species and are about as harmonious as a poison jar over time, but the jar itself has no intentions, it’s just a jar.
Then:
> Ecosystems are by definition too complex to have anything cognizable as intent.
Which is it, are they too complex, or too simple?
I do think that "cognizable" is the right word though. It's not about complexity. Whether a phenomenon is emergent, or the result of intention, depends on how we're thinking about it. It's a rhetorical choice, stylistic, not a matter of fact. It has to do with how you're telling the story, with whether its a character or the environment that does the thing.
I can see that you have different preferences over how to style conversations about ecosystems, and that's fine, but do you think there will ever be evidence that sorts this out for us, or are we just fighting over words?
> Which is it, are they too complex, or too simple?
Poison jars are not simple. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the basic idea is that you place a collection of venomous insects and animals within a jar together and they essentially kill each other; the theory being that the poison from all of them would be concentrated in the survivor which would then be fed upon by larvae of which the last surviving larvae would hold the more complex poison.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but to break it down: the jar in this analogy is Earth, and everything living on it is competitive in a way which results in a complex but violent system of interactions. The jar could also be a given ecosystem smaller than Earth. The poison is is the result of the struggle. It’s an old Chinese idea, if you want to look it up look up “Gu” with “poison jar” in your search terms. The actual use of the poisons aren’t any more interesting to me than rhino horns or Astrology but the form of production itself is interesting, but I digress.
This complex system of interactions is basically life as we know it, and while it is not always clear to us how an interaction causes a significant impact on us either specifically or generally, we do know that occasionally something seemingly unrelated to us does. Earth is a closed system full of biomass quite literally the world over.
> Whether a phenomenon is emergent, or the result of intention, depends on how we're thinking about it. It's a rhetorical choice, stylistic, not a matter of fact. It has to do with how you're telling the story, with whether its a character or the environment that does the thing.
These are mutually exclusive. Emergent phenomenon can be caused by the complex interactions of intentional acts, but the phenomenon themselves have no intent. It’s not merely a rhetorical choice, because ecosystems tell no stories, we can only ascribe stories to them. Or put another way, I’m anti-ing your entire conception that an ecosystem of any sort at all would take any kind of action against an individual species within it because that would require an ecosystem to have some form of intent. Even if you didn’t mean it literally, it is a turn of phrase which encourages in others to see something in the natural world that simply isn’t there.
That you can get bit by a tick that causes a beef allergy is interesting and the tick, the cause of the allergy and what exactly happens that is beneficial to the tick are interesting questions; but the only intent here is the tick taking a bite out of its food because it was hungry and it does what ticks do. Unfortunately this also causes a beef allergy in some people but that is neither here nor there from the perspective of the tick or the environment from which it came.
I'm not sure I like the metaphor because everything in the jar is doomed, there are no opportunities for the alternatives to arise that the jar must choose between and no circumstances where that choice then affects the survival of the jar.
Because I recognize that many are uncomfortable with the idea that things without brains might make choices, I was trying to speak in a way that let "choice" be a stand in for a scenario where selective pressures on some group of species cause an adaptation in some other species which benefits the survival of the initial group. "Intent" being added by the storyteller (me) to help with the explanation, but without importing any claims about cognition.
I was avoiding taking a stance about whether the ecosystem makes a choice in the more traditional sense, with cognition in the mix, because I don't have any evidence of that, and I probably never will.
But you're taking a stronger position. You're saying that it absolutely does not have the capacity for intention. That strikes me as unknowable, how can you be sure? Presumably this:
> because ecosystems tell no stories, we can only ascribe stories to them
My dog tells no stores, but I think it's reasonable to talk about her intentions. When I'm playing a game against an adversarial AI and it attacks or defends, it's reasonable to talk about its intentions.
We are the storytellers, we get to decide which part of our stories are the setting (emergent phenomena) and which parts are the characters (intentional action).
They're mutually exclusive for any given story. But you can always tell a different story where the white blood cell is no longer an emergent phenomenon of the immune system but is instead a defender of the realm. As long as the stories are helping you make falsifiable predictions at the end of the day you're still going science.
> Even if you didn’t mean it literally, it is a turn of phrase which encourages in others to see something in the natural world that simply isn’t there.
As mentioned, I was avoiding taking a stance about it because panpsychism is out of scope here, but I did mean it literally.
Science can't even establish an objective understanding of human intention. Some would say all phenomena are emergent phenomena and the notion that intention is a delusion. I'm not one of those people, but that's where stasis among cognitive neuroscientists is.
We're nowhere near where we'd need to be to assert that a complex system does not have whatever it is that we do, we can't even be sure that we have it.
That's why I want to defend my habit of treating things like ecosystems as if they have intentions, we can't know objectively either way, so it's fair game for creative explanation. It's also more fun.
> alpha-gal is also found in cat dander and in the drug cetuximab
See also https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/products.html -- alpha-gal allergies can sometimes interfere with which vaccines you're able to take.
For the record, there’s surprisingly many bird species. 10,000 bird species vs only 5,400 mammal species, 4,650 lizard species, 250 marsupial species.
Granted there’s 33,000 species of fish and over 900,000 species of insect. But those are way harder to observe.
I guess an interesting question is why are there so few mammalian and lizard species? Only 28 per country.
> The word anhinga comes from a'ñinga in the Brazilian Tupi language and means "devil bird" or "snake bird".[2] The origin of the name is apparent when swimming: only the neck appears above water so the bird looks like a snake ready to strike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhinga#/media/File:Anhingadry...
I assume Anhingas are the same, but cormorants are less buoyant than most waterfowl because they need to dive deep from the water's surface. When they're just floating, you don't see much of their back and they look like a tiny periscope sticking out of the water.
That's a sight the vast majority of people will never see.
I was vaguely aware of the term devil bird for Anhingas, but I can't help but assume that they used it in the title to make people think it was some kind of dangerous invasive that was imported. There are standard common names for North American birds. It's not like fish where there's a number of common names depending on the region. If you're writing an article about a bird species and you happen to use the scary-sounding non-standard name for it, I'm going to assume it's intentional to scare people.
Anyway, Anhingas are pretty common further south on the coast and occupy more or less the same niche as cormorants. Fishermen don't like them, but they don't like a lot of birds that eat fish.
Edit: Subject-verb agreement. Forgot how to grammar there. Probably missed something else too.
I know Anhingas as sacred Water Birds of the Native American Church [1].
Just about every moving body of water or lake will have several of them on the shoreline stretching their wings to dry.
I always wondered what the new bird was, and now I know.
Now off to install Ebird.
So a total of 1.1° C (2° F) since 1880. Could it be something else? Food supply and deforestation? The temperature shift does not seem to be significant enough. I am assuming when Prospect Park gets a foot of snow, they will head South?
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
However, for things like animal migration - and generally the more immediate threats of climate change, such as increasingly destructive weather events, ecosystems dying out, crops failing, wet bulb temperature hitting levels that make some countries uninhabitable in the summer - tracking the high and low points matters much more. E.g. the average may even go down, but if this is because cold point drops and high point goes up, ever for a small part of the year, we can kiss farming in the region goodbye.
[0] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-gla...
So, sun spots send out some particles. In addition there are cosmic rays from far outside our solar system. When cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere, they cause the water vapor to form little water droplets which form clouds which have a net cooling effect. Sun spots, though, interfere with the cosmic rays and, thus, have a net warming effect. So, for the next ~3 years we will be getting some net warming from the increased rate of sun spots from the peak of the sun spot cycle.
They shall be thakful that no Bird of prey [1] has landed.