doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Super-predators?

SO, if I'm reading right, man had no hand in this?


We burn enough fossil fuel in Athens to dissolve marble, and people can honestly claim we have no effect?

The idea of a super predator needn't only be tied to food. Sometimes a critter is just inconvenient, and we choose to eradicate them.

On the people side, in less than 100 years we have increased our average size, which requires greater energy to sustain. We have extended our lifespans by about 25 years. Which also increases our consumption.
I'm pretty sure the gene rearrangement necessary to foment that kind of change was caused by man. Whether they be human genes, potato genes, corn genes, or red deer genes.

The passenger pigeon was a victim of market hunting. Sport hunting had nothing to do with its demise. And further, the passenger pigeon was not hunted to extinction. They had a mating and reproductive ritual that required large numbers in a sort of bird orgy. When their numbers fell below the number require to support their mating ritual they simply stopped reproducing. Market hunters hunted the birds on the nesting grounds by setting huge nets capturing very large numbers at a time. The extinction was accelerated by the precipitous decline in habitat. A contemporary biologist has hypothesized that the passenger pigeon was already on a decline due to other factors and that its extinction was only accelerated by human causation and not completely attributable to humans. They went from billions to extinct in a period of forty years. The passenger pigeon was a food staple for many native Americans. They would hunt the bird's nesting grounds, but would do so after the mating adults had left and would hunt only the young of the year. They were afraid hunting the mating adults would cause them to abandon the nesting grounds. There is an attempt to restore the passenger pigeon by extracting DNA from other pigeons and recreating the passenger pigeon DNA. Some biologists theorize the invasive Eurasian Collared Dove has colonized the U.S. so quickly after accidental introduction because they are filling the niche left by the passenger pigeon.

David, Bill Mershon and my grandfather were friends. My dad knew him but he was already pretty old by the '40's.
I always put up the passenger pigeon picture to remind sportsman to err in the direction of caution.
We are dumber than we think.
It never occurred to anyone that passenger pigeons required gigantic hardwood rookeries. And that to sustain their population there needed to be millions of them.

With regards the predator element, I guess it depends on which end of the equation you are on. Spraying insecticide probably has erased some bugs permanently. We'll never know. They didn't make the list of bugs we want. We don't consider that super predation. They didn't have an advocate. (all tongue in cheek of course) But whatever the reason we killed them, we did it, and they are gone.

I'm eating a venison thuringer sandwich today. Wild Salmon tonight.
I used to have apple trees that grew a variety that didn't require spraying. Apples hard as wood. Thick skins. Kept until the following summer. Sheep's Snout I think it was.

One theory is that the Passenger Pigeons were doomed by the Chestnut blight. That's what fed'em and that's where they nested...Geo

That's too simple, Geo. If that were the case, then man must certainly have done something that caused the chestnut blight. We are guilty just by living on this planet. Guilty by association, isn't that what it's called?

SRH

Stan, Don't be so sensitive.
Man is a super predator. We can extinguish just about any life form on the planet that we choose to. And some by accident.
FWIW, I think the blight showed up after they were gone.

You may be right about that Zapper; I wish Steve Bodio would go ahead and get his book written about the subject...Geo

There are super-predators, there are mere-mortals, and then there are the endless numbers of species that rose and fell over the eons. As conditions change on this planet, species continue to rise and fall. As habitats change, animal and human populations within them also change. The pattern seems to be wild, agrarian, suburban, & then urban. With each shift, population densities change (both up and down) and diversity narrows. Hunting only plays an insignificant part in all that, if any.

99% of all creatures that ever existed on the face of the planet are extinct, and man had nothing to do with the great majority of those extinctions. Extinction is part of the deal that nature hands every life form-adapt, or, die.

Best,
Ted

Just a tongue in cheek poke at greenies, veggies and PETA types who want us to believe that we (humans) are the worst thing that ever happened to Earth. Earth was created for us, and placed under our subjection. We are the dominant species because God ordained it to be so. While we may not have done a perfect job of managing everything, we are not in control of it all anyway, God is. And nothing is going to happen to this creation of His that he does not allow. That does not give us free rein to wantonly destroy, but it also does not make us responsible for every weather related event that has happened since we came onto the scene.

SRH