The Fatal Shore, Awash in Plastic | Hacker News Reader

The Fatal Shore, Awash in Plastic

rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com

55 pointsblondie9x12 comments

That's really awful. Glad he's going through he effort to make this public.

Why is it awful? Species that can't tell plastic garbage from food are obviously unfit for Earth in 2015.

To be fair, there's nothing wrong with exctinction, just as there is nothing wrong with "invasive species". These things are as old as the hills. A certain amount of genetic turnover is, as you point out, just the fitness function making its judgements.

The trouble we have is the rate of extinction and invasion. A typical ecology can support a certain rate of species loss... A single species will be replaced by other organisms that can occupy the same niche. They will fill in the gaps and the same level of biodiversity can be maintained.

However these things take time. And if, while the replacement species is adapting to fit the old niche, another several extinctions happens, we start to have problems. Organisms that could've adapted to fill out the niche are themselves under stress. Once you have several key species under stress simultaneously, you run the risk that an entire segment of the food chain... possibly double digit percentages of the metabolic chain, will collapse simultaneously.

With a slow enough rate of extinction, you can just keep filling in the holes, but once you cross a certain threshold, you can trigger a regression to a more primordial state. Like desert. You end up with orders of magnitude less complex of an ecology.

If think we can get by on a planet with an ecology that is an order of magnitude less complex, with an order of magnitude (or two) fewer species, then none of what I'm saying is a problem for you.

I am scared of dramatically decreasing the number of species just because it seems really hard to predict the effects of that. So I'd like to delete the species as slowly as possible to mitigate our risk.

From 2012. Submitter or mods, please update the title

"How do we get to hope from here?"

Starts with you #startswithyou

It really doesn't. My cynicism is capable of inflicting permanent damage on innocent bystanders when not kept quietly in check.

A problem; deserves attention. Yet I can't help but believe the article's title image was fake; that lighter looks clean and unworn. Was the image staged? The photographer is an artist after all. I know he claimed it was all unmodified. I'm just not buying it.

The black plastic head of the lighter looks clearly sunwashed to me, and where it connects to the white plastic tube inside looks pretty yellowed to me.

Looks legitimate to me. There are plenty of similar images on the net: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=seabird+plastic+ingestion&...

I live by the sea and often walk along the beach and often see things like lighters bits of plastic construction materials, garden chairs, all sorts of things and they appear in all sorts of conditions.

You might be right of course but not because the lighter looks clean and unworn. Plenty of things emerge from the sea clean and it might have been there only a few days or even hours.

The dead bird looks very old and weatherworn. I'd expect the stomach contents to be in the same vein. Other stomach contents (a shocking amount in fact) look as expected. So I was just suspicious that it might have been 'curated'.

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