buck rewild

I was reading up on the internet about rewilding and found out that there are two kinds of rewilding proposals.

the lesser of the two is to simply re-input animals and species that were native to a habitat, for instance wolves who were hutned to near extinction and now live in wildlife preserves, but not the wild.

The other kind of rewilding is more radical (hooray) and that is to put megafauna (large animals) in habitats similar to their native habitats. For instance, they want to put African elephants and lions in the great plains. Sounds good to me, mostly because i live nowhere near there!

In a related article, i read about how much bears are necessary in teh ecosystems where they live and hunt salmon. Apparently they eat about 1/10 th of the salmon they catch, and when they do eat, they only eat the most fatty portions (gotta hibernate). So what happens is that they deposit lots of nutrients from the water onto the land. Other animals such as small rats, birds and so on then eat the remains, and then you have the insects and fungi that decompose the body, all contributing to the biomass of that particular area.

Countering the pleiosteine argument is when hunters brought the red fox to the australian outback for hunting. Apparently it got loose and is mauling the 'natural' habitat of the outback. So the counter-argument says that we don't know what kind of consequences a non-native animal would have on a habitat. But that's kinda foolish, because the red fox isn't a predatory nor a large animal, and all the pleiostine advocates are talking about putting in large predatory animals . . . so there.

So in this example what you see is that large animals have dis-proportionally large affect on their environment.

organic molecules and big mamals

I was at a training yesterday and there was a SciAm subscription. During my breaks i happened to read it. i picked that one up because it had an article about the nucleotide that might have created life. the article was basically saying that RNA and DNA are higher up on the evolutioanry chart than many think. They argued that there were mor simpler molecules with carbon in them that were probably the precursors of life. It was also interesting because they outlined some broad conditions in which life would have to had occurred. One was that it would have to have happened in some small space where different chemical transactions and transformations turned the same set of chemicals back into themselves (a-b-c-d-a-b-c-e) or branch in different ways (a-b-c-d-e-b-d-e) etc [hard to draw in lines:]. i got a little bored of the article after i realized that i had intuitively known this a bit, or it was a re-hash of what i learned in a great book called microcosmos that i read a few years ago.

the other article i think was a bit more exicting though.
This article talked about repopulating the planet with large predatory animals. Elephants exert a disproportional amount of influence in their ecosystem because when they knock down trees, all sorts of organisms collect around the felled trees and create local ecosystems. It isn't a matter of size though, otters eat three times their body-weight in kelp, thereby regulating thier ecosystem not through mass but quantities consumed.

So, the argument was that before humans took over the planet in the las 50,000 years there was an abundance of large mamals that regulated the environments of all the different continents. So, the arguemt goes that re-introducing these large mamals would then create a massive beneficial effect on ecosystems that are seemingly in balance, but really out of whack. For instance, deer overpopulation.

I liked it for two reasons. The lesser reason is that they mentioned that fake Safari's get about 7 times the visitorship than national parks, and people go to see the big animals, not the flowers. Therefore, there would be more people going to national forests and parks to see the actually native (or closely related) big animals in their own habitat.

The greater reason is that this isn't just conservation, it's radical conservation. Before now, i haven't seen may articles or thoughts about re-creating the balanced ecosystem, most of the stuff that i've read was about stopping pollution and preventing ecological degradation. So now these 'conservationists' are going on the aggressive, which i applaud. Now there are proposals about how to actually re-balance the ecosystem first, and have humans cope with it instead of how to move humans somewhere and have the ecosystem follow its lead.

[the article was called Restoring America's Big Wild Animals]

google search word: rewilding

Superhero to consult: Captain Planet!

Al Gore is a whimp, James Lovelock says Gaia is Dying,

While sailing on the Chesapeake (or however you spell it . . .and Kareem peep the 'metis' reference) i was listening to a radio program from canada, my gramps loves short-wave. There was an interview with James Lovelock, the person who came out with the "gaia" theory that the earth was an organism and it was getting sick.

If you remember back to the mid 90's there was a theory that if humanity stopped polluting, then the earth could reset its metabolism and heal itself in 75-100 years. In the interview he said that it's too late. He said the problem was that politicians are listening to green lobbies who advocate sustainable development, but neither of them are knowledgeable about the science that says the earth isn't healthy and is in fact dying.

He went on to say that the politicians should stop worrying about green development and start thinking about the massive migrations that are going to happen around the world due to the change in climate. For instance he said about 100 million Indians will need a place to stay when Bangladesh goes under when the ice caps melt. Got an extra room for Sandip?

So there you have it. Gaia is dying, from the horses mouth.

But the good news is that i'm going to save a lot of money on car insurance by switching to Geico.