Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

Question: Did another animal take the role of the vultures?

Nature is very efficient. If there opportunity, it seems like some animals might evolve to fill that role.

Evolution takes long time.

But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people. And their excrements are highly toxic, and kill plants (unlike vultures).

Nature is not always efficient.

>But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people.

I think the other issue here is that those wild dogs are highly protected by law, even when they do spread rabies and attack and kill people.

Nature is reasonably efficient for the goals of nature, but the goals of humanity do not often align with Nature's.

Wouldn't the spread of rabies and other diseases actually be a demonstration of nature being efficient?

>>Nature is not always efficient.

that all depends on what you're optimizing for

For an animal to evolve to fill this niche, the niche would have to convey some advantage that favours their survival and reproduction (i.e. natural selection). Aside from the fact that this isn’t actually a terribly efficient process and is subject to lots of random effects, the niche in its current form as influenced by human activity is clearly not conveying a survival benefit, or the vultures wouldn’t have declined. A member of another bird species deciding to take to scavenging trash heaps whilst happening to have a mutation that protects it from diclofenac (which is toxic to lesser degrees in other non-vulture birds) is not impossible, but unlikely, and could very well be a process that occurs at a timescale that is incompatible with the rate of continued change by humans.

Other (especially non-avian) scavengers could have better reactions to the cattle drug that the article blames for poisioning the vultures and thus thrive when their competition is gone.

Striped Hyaenas would be the other choice, but the relationship with humans is more complicated

> Nature is very efficient.

This is a meme and it is unfounded. In most cases, nature is good enough.

efficient at what? what's the measure, utility function, what are nature's KPIs? :)

utilizing energy gradients? maybe, but there's plenty of that on Mars yet it's barren. so probably certain ecosystems can be more or less efficient at this, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com