What's the Biggest Animal Gathering Ever? | Hacker News Reader

What's the Biggest Animal Gathering Ever?

npr.org

52 pointsrfreytag25 comments

This was amazing:

> A single locust swarm was once [in 1875] estimated to weigh 27 million tons, including (drum roll, please) ... 12 trillion insects.

And then:

> Shockingly, 28 years after Albert saw that flock, Rocky Mountain locusts disappeared. Something wiped them out, totally. The last time humans saw a wild Rocky Mountain locust was in 1902.

Wikipedia[1] says:

> The cause of their extinction was probably the plowing and irrigation by settlers that disrupted the natural life cycle of the insects in the very small areas where they lived in between swarms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust

When I think of animals that went extinct in human history, I imagine animals that were already marginal, weren't well-suited to the environment, and died off slowly over a very long period.

The passenger pigeon example really caught me off guard: "The species went from being one of the most abundant birds in the world during the 19th century to extinction early in the 20th century"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

>Large flocks and communal breeding made the species highly vulnerable to hunting.[28] As the flocks dwindled in size, populations decreased below the threshold necessary to propagate the species.[81][82] Naturalist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote that its extinction "illustrates a very important principle of conservation biology: it is not always necessary to kill the last pair of a species to force it to extinction."

The most important statement on its extinction.

I'm pretty sure that swarm was very over-estimated. People had a habit of doing such things back then.

Most people do not understand the scale difference from 100,000 to 1,000,000 much less billion. To hear 13 trillion may have been the largest animal gathering… mind boggling.

One locust swarm was estimated to have covered ~200,000sq miles. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust)

Wow. Interesting that the Rocky Mountain locust proceeded to go extinct 30 years later. It boggles the mind that a species of 12 trillion could go extinct so quickly.

I didn't know about the Rocky Mountain locust - my favorite example was always the passenger pigeon, which by some accounts flew in such enormous flocks the sun was blocked out for days by dense flocks moving through and dung fell "like snow".

A trillion anything is staggering 13 trillion is not something I can comprehend!

when i was in school in san diego, a giant migrating flock of butterflies flew through one day... the entire city was engulfed in butterflies for an entire day (not exaggerating). it was awesome, and sad at the same time as many of them died en route.

here's an article... apparently it's "millions and millions"

http://www.kcet.org/news/the_back_forty/wildlife/painted-lad...

it is technically called a Kaleidoscope of Butterflies (sometimes Swarm) -- pretty cool name huh?!

that's cool. i knew 'flock' didn't sound right...

This is very interesting and quite frankly awesome but I was hoping to see some breathtaking pictures and not cartoons - the kind you see on National Graphic.

When I was stationed in D.C. in 2003/2004 we had a swarm of cicadas that year that was remarkable. People on the subway literally had them crawling on their backs. The roads and sidewalks were paved in their corpses. I lived on the 9th floor of an apartment and the sound even at that level was very loud.

When I was a kid in KY there was a cicadas swarm. I remember walking down the street and there being piles of the exoskeletons. It was quite surreal.

Curious to see what the largest Human gathering was/is?

Most likely the Kumbh Mela in India last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbh_Mela

I wonder why they called it the largest peaceful gathering of people [1]. Are there even bigger wartime gatherings?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_peaceful_gather...

Presumably to not include prisoners and such? Jasenovac had more than half a million and it would seem reasonable to separate that from voluntary meetings.

If that wikipedia article is accurate (80 million people at a single gathering) no battle comes close. Operation Barbarossa (i.e. the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in WWII) involved as many as 6.7 million troops, but it took place along a 1800 mile front and over the course of nearly six months.

It makes sense that you wouldn't get nearly the same density in warfare, especially modern(ish) warfare, as you do in a peaceful gathering.

The modern equivalent of the passenger pigeon is the the red billed quelea which can form flocks that take 5 hours to fly past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_quelea

One of the happiest 1 hour of my life this week was watching these Swarms documented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Pr2tIPkuw

I'm a bit perplexed about how the ecosystem could even support most of these. Or maybe that explains the extinctions. The locusts, the herrings and the passenger pigeons should have all read Malthus.

Locusts are simply grasshoppers who bumped up against Malthus. Literally.

http://www.asknature.org/strategy/33ba1618fc358f29f0be63a19e...

The grasshopper population grows until they start physically bumping into each other. Then they turn into locusts. The swarm moves because the front of the swarm is eating all of the plants, which leaves nothing for the locusts at the rear of the swarm.

i.e. the ones at the rear of the swarm start eating the ones in front of them. Who move in order to stay alive.

It's likely we're mostly to blame.

Apparently Rocky Mountain locusts laid their eggs in a relatively small area of land when they weren't swarming that we plowed up, destroying all the egg cases. From the wikipedia link elsewhere in this thread, it's claimed that hundreds of cases were destroyed per square inch of land by farming.

In the case of passenger pigeon, I've seen evidence that they did have booms and busts historically, but we slaughtered them for food, feed, and fun in truly staggering numbers [1] There was a massive passenger-pigeon-harvesting industry that was interested in harvesting as many birds as possible until there weren't any left.

[1] As many as a billion birds were killed by hunters in a single 50 day hunt near one Michigan town. http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120318/METRO/203180301

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