Feral desert donkeys are digging wells, giving water to parched wildlife (2021)
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
"However, there are signs of change. New fields such as compassionate conservation and multispecies justice are expanding conservation’s moral world, and challenging the idea that only native species matter."
We should be kind to all kinds.
And "pests" are pests usually due to human-caused imbalances in ecosystems. Addressing the root of the issue, such as biodiversity loss, would solve a lot.
Homes, human or otherwise, are virtually defined by the absence of undesirable critters. If cows could be rid of flies buzzing about, they would. Increasing biodiversity would most likely also mean increased diversity of pests. Would we not be bothered by mosquitoes, if we had a lighter footstep on the environment? I'm sure cavemen also got bit and stung.
Whenever we restore a wetlands, the area goes from “surprisingly low amounts of mosquitoes most of the time” back to “fuck I can’t go outside”
https://www.opb.org/news/article/restored-marsh-breeds-swarm...
There are ways to somewhat mitigate this through more intelligent wetland design methods, but ultimately no way to even mostly resolve the problem without more intensive control methods, which sometimes end up being pesticides.
You haven't restored biodiversity; you've simply flooded an area. You need to wait for all the animals to return and propagate.
> without more intensive control methods, which sometimes end up being pesticides
Yep, that'd be the opposite of intelligent solution.
The exact opposite is true.
https://www.caryinstitute.org/science/research-projects/biod...
In ecosystems where predators are removed, the population of their prey, in this case, mice, often increases due to a lack of natural control. This process can lead to an increase in the tick population, as ticks often feed on mice. This is especially true for the white-footed mouse, which is a common host for ticks in the eastern and central United States. When the mouse population increases, ticks have a higher chance of obtaining their first blood meal from a mouse, which often carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. (less predators => more mice => more ticks)
https://theconversation.com/as-biodiversity-declines-on-corn...
As biodiversity declines on corn farms, pest problems grow
"We found that communities with stronger networks – that is, more linked species – had fewer pests. Not only this, but network centrality was important; communities with several groups of highly linked species, including insects that prey on others, don’t have the pest problems that loosely linked networks have. Thus, in addition to species diversity, the strength of interactions among species within a community seem to be related to when and where pest outbreaks occur. This research suggests that practices that reduce diversity in cornfields will aggravate pest problems over time."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4646789/
Decisions that reduce insect diversity and decrease the network strength in insect communities result in higher pest abundance.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821039116
Tree diversity regulates forest pest invasion
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97811182318...
Biodiversity offers great potential for managing insect pests. It provides resistance genes and anti-insect compounds; a huge range of predatory and parasitic natural enemies of pests; and community ecology-level effects operating at the local and landscape scales to check pest build-up.
It’s not the opposite that is true but that the net effect is not that negative.
Anecdotally, from my backyard food growing experience, biodiversity increase means more pests, but once more species come in, there comes a balance that exists in nature. Year 1 of my backyard farming, I had plentiful bounty. All my crops did extremely well, and I thought I was some kind of genius that disproved the decades of agricultural progress re:chemicals in farming. Year 2, was my biggest and most ambitious growing season and I could barely get anything out of it. The pests came, from insects to rodents and nothing survived. Year 3 and year 4 were my learning days. I introduced more plants to my garden, native plants, plants that provided food in late summers to next spring for the fauna, more varieties of food crops, etc. I welcomed everything in my garden, including pests. Eventually I hit a balance. Aphids suddenly affecting plants? The wasps are here. Rats and squirrels eating my strawberries? The owls and crows came to rescue. Slug problem? The neighborhood possum took care of it (though I had to put up a fence around some of my veggies for the possum). Overall I think with the constraints of the size of my backyard, I still need some proactive measures of pest control, but most of the time nature takes care of it and makes sure the problem is only temporary.
Absolutely, good point, thank you.
Nobody has a good idea how many species there are currently, let alone how many there were in the past and how many of them went extinct. Estimates for the current species count are from 3 to 100 million[0], which is a range too wide to be useful in this context.
Of the mass extinction events in Earth's history, we may be peeking above the baseline rate[1]; the most severe statement we can make is that vertebrate mammals don't appear to be doing very well in recent times, which stands to reason, considering that Homo sapiens is by far the most competitive vertebrate mammal, doing a good job of crowding others out. But there's a lot of life and biodiversity outside of vertebrate mammals.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160336/
When biodiversity goes down, there are fewer potential biological resources that can be tapped to solve new problems.
You are correct that biodiversity has a natural upwards component from speciation. But the timescale (which you describe as "quickly") is many orders of magnitude slower than the timescale of the downwards component that extinction has. A species that took literally tens of millions of years to speciate and evolve can be wiped out in months.
Yes, suddenly introducing a new species can be disruptive, but it can also not be disruptive.
Insects can travel accross oceans under certain favorable wind conditions. I live in an island nation, New Zealand, and insects from Australia show up every so often after getting blown here. They usually don't establish themselves as the conditions are not right for them to thrive.
Similarly I don't think there is anything to offend with presumption, or at least anything that cares.
Deforestation and farming practices (incl. pesticides/herbicides, pollution) are the main drivers of biodiversity loss.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...
The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050
Two recent studies underscore the danger the meat production system poses for biodiversity.
Sure! Do you have a proposal to make agriculture more eco-friendly without impacting quantity, quality and cost of the food produced?
> The key is reducing meat consumption
No! If you really want to achieve something, rather than just talking ecology, the key is not to try and force change on the general population.
Sure.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449
How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w
Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
> If you really want to achieve something, rather than just talking ecology, the key is not to try and force change on the general population
The change is absolutely needed.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
One study estimates it would take just over 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone’s consumption patterns were similar to the average American.
We don't have those extra Earths, and won't anytime soon.
> the key is not to try and force change on the general population
Sure, solve the biggest problem we've ever faced, but don't change a thing.
Not by any means do we understand enough about ecosystems to justify the hubris to declare any animal as a net negative effect to the environment.
In western Europe, hunters argue they need to cull deer, for example, to keep the forest in balance. That is only true because a) they make an effort to feed the animals during the winter, helping more to survive than otherwise would, and b) because natural predators have been eradicated in the previous centuries.
Don’t ever trust someone that attempts to justify culling a species for the greater good.
I'd argue that it's also a problem of biodiversity (at least in the U.S., don't know about New Zealand). If we hadn't eradicated almost all wolves, coyotes, foxes, birds of prey, weasels, and I don't know what else, nature would have solved the problem already.
Now that is hubris, what the hell do we know about long term net positives? Selfish warm feelings, while watching the reality of introduced extinction take place in a matter of mere decades. Pardon me.
Non-native introductions usually have the issue of such a sudden population explosion that the prey cannot adjust in a timely fashion and get killed very quickly, very suddenly.
I grew up in Virginia so here's one specific example: https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/deer/deer-management-progr...
With deer, the problem is often not an excessive population but rather their tendency to stay in one place, destroying young shoots and plantings and hindering the growth of the plants we care about.
In contrast, with predators they cannot stay in one place for long enough, allowing most plants to outgrow their vulnerable size and survive.
Also removing native species and sending the balance out of whack is different to removing a non native species that has sent the balance out of whack.
This isn’t quite accurate, though. Between removing the fence and getting fence construction inclinations, a lot of time has passed, and in the meantime, nature did lots of stuff we hardly understand.
Assuming otherwise is just repeating the same mistake again. Feral donkeys might be part of a new ecosystem now.
And we can be fairly sure about some things.
Rats in new Zealand, rabbits in Australia, cane toads in Australia, etc, etc.
Further it takes time to remove these populations, so you can observe what happens when they're removed from a local area.
Are you suggesting Genocide? /s
> However, there are signs of change. New fields such as compassionate conservation and multispecies justice are expanding conservation’s moral world, and challenging the idea that only native species matter.
I never heard anyone make the argument that "only native species matter", that sounds like a framing. The issue with feral species is that in many cases they drive out native species and have a destructive impact on the ecology in a way that is hard to mitigate. I hope that these compassionate conservationists are also big picture conservationists who evaluate the system as a whole.
Definitely possible, but not sure on likelihood - the water table in the arid parts of Australia is going to be pretty deep. TFA cited 4m deep holes made by modern wombats - but the holes they dig tend to be narrow, as their burrows are defensive - so the claim made:
> In Australia, for example, a pair of common wombats were recently documented digging a 4m-deep well, which was used by numerous species, such as wallabies, emus, goannas and various birds, during a severe drought.
... is hard to reconcile.
A 4 metre deep standing water table would mean most deep-rooted trees, and many tougher smaller plants (eg comfrey, vetiver, maybe grasses like lucerne/alfalfa) would sustain through drought, and that's clearly not the case.
I'm sure there's some benefit to native wildlife to have these introduced animals dig and expose water, but I'm sure the damage they cause outweighs it.
Kangaroos dig wells. The arguments made here that somehow with a very long bow you could justify some benefits from these non-native species but they have to pretend that those benefits don't already exist from native species to do this.
> Ass holes in Australia
Which then results in sad scenarios where, say, a local forest is left alone and starts to recover, and starts to show signs of ecological succession[0], which is then stopped by these conservation societies. Because that usually implies new species of trees and shrubs that weren't in the version of nature they remember, and are therefore deemed "invasive".
Nature conservation is full of good intentions hampered by a lack of ecological understanding.
Strange to see how different Britain is from the USA, maybe because the USA is slightly bigger. Around here there's any number of conservation/wildlife preserves and they literally buy land, maybe put a trail through it and a dinky dirt parking lot at the trailhead, and then just leave it alone.
As in literally don't do anything.
What the article I linked is talking about would be called a "farm preservation society" around here, and some do exist, but it's rare.
Not bringing that up as an "America bad" comment, just pointing out that the way people in either country look at "their" land is different.
We simultaneously engage in publically funded programs to feed them during the winter, and programs to control the population in the summer.
Conflicting interest groups want differnt things. Environmentalists want to protect native habitiat and animals, while horse enthsiasts can't stand to let them suffer the hardships of a wild life.
Terrible is not an objective measure either. Oxygen and asteroids destroyed most life on earth but neither was terrible, they just were. The only reason people think we’re doing terrible things is because we’ve convinced ourselves we aren’t a natural part of the biosphere that adapted to what we’re doing now.
It'll be interesting to see what effect it has on the whole food supply chain, as we're pretty dependent on the idea of polymers "keeping out" the things that normally eat our food before we'd get the chance to.
Maybe we'll go back to only eating crazy fermented and spicy things.
Related, great Stanislaw Lem novel about the "Great Decomposition" of paper.
It feels to me like the mistake is abusing plastics, which are some of the longest living, most resilient materials, for disposable products. Bacteria that eats polymers might clean up our mess, but it will also destroy one of the key foundations of modern industry, and I don't think the world will just sit back and become pre-industrial again - we'll be back with something worse.
Plus, I guess I'm imagining the polymerphages would probably be more interested in soft plastics – grocery bags, styrofoam. The kind of stuff that already disintegrates pretty easily.
When you go back to books from the 60s, they make bold statements about hard plastics would be everlasting materials, immune to rotting, rusting or shattering - and for the most part, they were right! But for some bizarre reason people chose this 'everlasting' material to make disposable items, and once they realised that it was cheaper than materials that actually do degrade the cat was out of the (polyethylene) bag.
I'm hoping that we can rapidly phase out our use of disposable polymers before these polymerphages start chomping through our indestructible wondermaterials like butter. We can keep the hard plastics for truly long-lived things like car bumpers... and try to stop automotive manufactures from making those disposable, too!
Here's an idea to accelerate this:
"Require by law standard glass bottle designs for all drinks of a certain class, like four or five types of wine bottle and likewise for soft drinks and spirits. Ensure that those designs are public domain. Delegate responsibility of defining the standards to an international organisation like ISO to encourage international adoption. The only losers would be a handful of companies with 'distinctive' or 'iconic' branded bottles (and realistically, people aren't going to stop buying Pepsi because it's in the wrong shape bottle), but the winners would be all manner of industrial bottle-washing and reuse firms, bottle-handling machinery makers and of course consumers getting lower prices. End result: widespread reuse of glass bottles, replacing one-use plastic bottles."
What do you think? I think it's pretty uncontroversial, which is the only thing that seems likely to be passed within a premier's term and thus survive the path to the statute books in liberal democracies!
IMO, we should tax plastics manufacturers in proportion to the product of their biodegradability half-life and known toxicity. Alas, a pipe dream.
Is this even remotely likely given how much control we have over our environment? It surely wouldn't be any other predatory animal, we wouldn't let it come to that. Microbes, viruses, bacteria something like that maybe but those aren't "feeding" on humans in the common sense of the word.
The bacteria on the other hand, reproduce rapidly relative to the nice plants and birds and critters you're thinking of. They will be fine.
Better than a horse in every way.
My son and I are watching YouTube videos about donkeys right now. Lovable creatures. If you start and incubator that also has Donkeys please look me up.
What does moose milk taste like? Are there potential for different varieties?
Like fat and salt. Same as plant based cheese ;)
Adult humans don't need milk of other species.
Not you mother, not your milk.
> is the only thing preventing this just the ick/cultural factors
Cruelty? Environmental impacts? Health concerns? Antibiotic and hormone use? Food inefficiency?
For example, camels have evolved to coexist with the plants that briefly flourish in the desert after rains. Goats just consume everything and will die in a second season.
I guess not all ass holes are bad…
Hehehehehe (snorts)
Unnecessarily childish