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Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

> The important thing, the scientists thought, was to get a few of these insects protected and into a breeding program. That wasn't so easy. The Australian government didn't know if the animals on Ball's Pyramid could or should be moved. There were meetings, studies, two years passed, and finally officials agreed to allow four animals to be retrieved. Just four.

> When the team went back to collect them, it turned out there had been a rock slide on the mountain, and at first they feared that the whole population had been wiped out.

This is why you just do things, bureaucrats be damned. Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

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This is one of the few instances where I disagree with that attitude. The risks involved in relocating ill-studied life forms are, obviously, enormous, and it does need careful and dispassionate consideration. I'd much rather risk a mildly interesting species go bye-bye than risk introducing a major ecological stressor.

On the other hand, I might just be taking this stance because I'm so unfamiliar with biological studies in general, and if I knew more, I'd happily take a more gung-ho attitude towards these things.

Human error almost caused the species to go extinct -- I think it's fair, right, and proper to move to restore them to their prior condition if possible, and the situation was critical on the pyramid. It seems like a pretty docile species based on the articles facts, and they could keep them cordoned in a lab until they found what to do with them.

If the researchers and biologists felt it was the right play (which they did), it seems like a dangerous risk to wait for committees of non-scientists to make a political decision based on it.

> pretty docile species

Like rabbits?

I had the same thought reading the article. There are risks either way; bureaucratic deliberation has costs as well as benefits. In this case, the relevant experts, in balancing those costs against the benefits, would definitely not have dithered for two years before acting.

We've definitely lost something here. As Peter Thiel noted: [1]

  There are ways that the government is working far less well than it used to.
  Just outside my office is the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built under FDR's
  Administration in the 1930s in about three and a half years. They're currently
  building an access highway on one of the tunnels that feeds into the bridge,
  and it will take at least six years to complete.

I wonder what it might take to get that back.

[1] http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187

Galloping Gertie[1] was built in less than two years and lasted three months before collapsing. There is a reason behind most bureaucratic procedures, forgotten though it may be.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)

2 of the ones they moved got sick and died, while the other two got sick and luckily survived. So the case is not clear on whether moving them without a careful plan would have been better (they would need to set up the arrival destination carefully).

The species obviously is not extinct.

They had been on the island and survived for 80 years, though it probably wasn't a picnic..

Imagine if the scientists had tripped a landslide over the habitat? What if the entire population had gone the way of the first two and died within two weeks?

It seems to me that in this case careful consideration probably saved the species rather than risk its survival.

Australia has a long history of making bad decisions involving the local wildlife, which is why they are now super-cautious when it comes to things like this.

I'd assume the island's ecology would already have adapted to these insects though considering they probably previously have existed for a long time on it. It is possible that something other than the rats being introduced has changed in the ecology in the last 80 years, but I think the chance of a disaster is less than 50%.

Begging for forgiveness for having wiped the last remnants of a species off the face of the earth because you thought you would be able to collect and look after them would be a bitch, though.

In this case it might look like bureaucracy was a hindrence, but much of australian bureaurcracy is designed around preventing this thing happening again.

It depends if you have young kids or not - it wouldn't be fair to them to be locked up for n years and not be able to pay the mortgage.

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