Overpaying to save some endangered species, and barely funding others | Hacker News Reader

Overpaying to save some endangered species, and barely funding others

arstechnica.com

52 pointsshawndumas36 comments

My uncle works with the endangered Desert Tortoise in the Mojave. It's big and it's an indicator species.

There are these conservation contractors who primarily do two kinds of work:

1) Study the tortoise population in an area. They walk grids in the desert locating all the individuals. They take their vitals in situ, tag them and possibly affix a radio transmitter and leave them in place to re-find again at a later date. This gives them of how the individuals and population is doing over time.

2) They find and relocate tortoises prior to large development projects in the desert. They did this for the Ivanpah solar plant on the 15 near the CA/NV border and for the expansion of Fort Irwin's bombing range. The animals they find here are captured and moved to another location they've selected in the area.

The teams he works on are probably 6-10 people who spend several months at a time in the spring and fall when the weather is acceptable living out in the desert doing this work. They make software engineer money doing this.

> They make software engineer money doing this.

You say like that is a bad/surprising thing.

My take-away from the parent post is that some people are extracting monopoly rents from 'conservation' efforts, and this waste is partially responsible for neglect of other endangered species.

...and so you are saying that software engineers should be extracting monopoly rents, but conservationists shouldn't? (I'm not sure I'd agree with either point.)

As the article points out, this is the least of our worries.

Oh, I don't think (any kind of) engineers should be entitled to extract monopoly rents, which is why I am against all (or almost all) occupational licensing.

The concern which the (great-grand-) parent brings up is that a great deal of money is being spent on 'conservation' efforts which may be a poor allocation of limited resources that could be better used (to protect a greater variety of more endagered species).

The only reason I used that turn of phrase was to say something relatable to HN'ers, not to make any judgement call as to whether it was an acceptable amount to be paying for this job or not.

A couple other interesting things to note:

1) The funding for the two conservation projects I mentioned in my initial comment come from the company and military respectively and is required to be a part of the larger development project.

2) (My opinion:) Moving tortoises to a "safer" location does nothing to preserve the environment they were removed from, quite the opposite in fact, it allows it to be "developed" which will lead to the destruction of habitat for other species which weren't moved elsewhere so the overall net effect on preserved area is negative.

3) As an aside, slicing and dicing large tracts of land like the Mojave where animals have huge ranges is going to have a negative effect on the species as they would naturally move Northward as the climate changes but they'll be unable to shift out of their preserved area because it's bordered by development.

> Oh, I don't think (any kind of) engineers should be entitled to extract monopoly rents, which is why I am against all (or almost all) occupational licensing.

Then it doesn't matter how it compares to what software engineers are paid.

>"Then it doesn't matter how it compares to what software engineers are paid."

I never said (or believed) that the relative amount was particularly relevant; I had (correctly) assumed that the comparison had been made to give the HN crowd some idea of the amount those particular workers were paid without divulging exact figures.

I had presumed (correctly) it implied something about how much these people are being paid as if that was part of the problem.

It isn't.

It's the same with diseases.

I meet some guy I was a grad student with he tells me he is working on cures for cancer at his startup and I think he's a Poseur, now if he was working to cure Tourette's syndrome I'd take him seriously.

Joe Biden has a personal reason to advance Nixon's "War on Cancer", but let's see a government or private effort to cure chronic pain -- it is such a tragedy to see people dying left and right from opioid addiction which comes from a lack of safe and effective treatment for non-cancer pain.

You can go after it after the fact with addiction treatment, law enforcement, etc. but it is much better to catch that horse before it leaves the barn.

Chronic pain, fibromyalgia, chronic uticaria, essential tremors.

Every week my great aunt looks for some news about essential tremors. Extremely common, affects walk, hands, throat, sometimes head movements. All there is to treat is deep brain stimulation, or treat the symptoms with stuff like beta blockers. Giant hammers but no looking into the underlying causes. We know so little.

Yeah, I remember reading an article about AIDS being the hip, high-investment disease in Africa, while diarrhea kills way more people.

Cynically, AIDS leaves Africa. Diarrhea doesn't.

It left India for me. Fwiw Vietnam too 10 years later. Some people never learn. (I get what you were getting at tbough)

This is always going to happen given the nature of democracy. For afflictions that have a well-defined demographic (HIV, breast cancer) you get an easily-organized voting bloc, and diffuse costs across a broad population. But when the afflicted are themselves more diverse, it's much more difficult to mount the same activism.

I don't mean to get political, but this is a danger of governmental involvement in health care. Given scarcity of resources, it's necessary to prioritize their allocation. Somebody's got to decide where that funding goes, and this is the kernel of truth that was exaggerated into the "death panel" meme.

Private organizations can feel the pinch from activists too.

I think also some groups are better or worse at marketing and/or lucky vs unlucky. For instance, diabetes is a diverse condition and the American Diabetes Association is right up there with the Breast Cancer Industrial Complex. We even see medical clinics in our area that are working pretty hard to figure out how to treat medicare patients with that condition both properly and effectively even though it has taken a long time.

So far as politics goes, chronic pain is connected strongly with disability and pushing it back could get a lot of people off disability and back in the workforce again.

I don't know if the study's author has a link to her compiled data but I was curious to see if the data was easily available officially...and it turns out there's a convenient (convenient, if you know how to scrape and parse PDF tables) list here:

http://www.fws.gov/Endangered/esa-library/index.html

Pricenomics, everything is bullshit book had this problem described, where cute-species get the love and not so cute ones even though more endangered and vital to eco system, do not get love and subsequent funding. That is why WWF has a Panda, cute animal vs. some smelly weird looking frog.

The technical term is charismatic megafauna.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna

But whales get a lot of support, and whales are not very cute. They have tiny eyes compared to their head, and eye:head ratio is probably the most important factor for determining cuteness. And humpback whales, one of the most popular species, have ugly tubercles on their skin which you'd probably mistake for a disease if you didn't know better. There must be more to popularity than just cuteness.

I think you could shorthand cuteness to what it causes, which is joy. And whales cause joy when you watch them because of their unique size (large) and temperament. So whales get love where poisonous frogs with giant eyes might not.

And frogs are still on the charismatic end of the spectrum, compared to mites and insects.

Whales:

* Sing songs to each other

* Are graceful, gentle giants

* Most are herbivores so don't kill other cute stuff

* Are famously intelligent

* Raise their young, live in groups, and communicate socially

They may not be cute, but they have a lot of appealing characteristics and few unappealing ones.

The bumps are a little funny looking, but they just make whales look like giant pickles to me.

Probably the most charismatic of the whales, of Free Willy and Seaworld fame, the Orca, is kind of an asshole and kills sharks and seals for fun, stunning and tossing them back and forth like a hacky-sack[2].

[1] http://www.tvthrong.co.uk/2009/10/nature-shock-series-premie...

[2] https://youtu.be/TuUFjvBnu9g?t=70

Yeah, orcas are bastards. But they look like cuddly sea pandas!

I do agree.

But I'd like to point out that there are very few animals with bigger eye/head ratio than spiders.

I think most spiders are not usually considered cute, but I've heard many people call jumping spiders cute. eg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_spider#/media/File:Jum...

Part of it is just visibility. You can't miss a whale if you're near one. If you live on the coasts you would probably miss them if they were gone, in the sense that you'd tell your grandkids about them.

But an endangered species of butterfly that, to non-entomologists, is indistinguishable from more common species is really going to be difficult to get people excited about.

It takes constant fighting to prompt saving a single species. Take a look at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrocercus for instance. They are endangered by husbandry and mineral mining which both have deep pockets. Most of the population isn't an issue. The Sage-grouse had a PBS special made out of it even. I think that makes a big difference to make a detailed documentary of the life cycle of endangered species.

Spreading the money out evenly would doom them all I bet.

> Spreading the money out evenly would doom them all I bet.

People can answer that question with science. (And no one argued for spreading the money out equally. The argument is for a cleverer more effective use.)

There must be many groups like this these days. There's one large lab I know [1] where they use a pile of statistics, modelling and optimisation to investigate these types of problems. Maybe check out the publications of the group leader [2].

[1] http://www.possinghamlab.org/

[2] https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=lSYOB3cAAAAJ&hl...

I had a similar viewpoint about indian government funding the tiger reserves to preserve the last few knowns tigers - but I was told by a range officer (people who work at forest) that this preserving tiger plays into the hands of the Food Chain and there by preserving the eco-system as a whole.. Hence, I dont think its fair to say you are funding only endangered species but you are funding for the eco-system..

I always think of panda's when talking/reading about endangered species. They likely receive an incredible amount of funding and effort to save the species. I wonder if the goal is to save the national symbol rather than to save the species.

A useful phrase to know if you want to read up on this topic: "charismatic megafauna." It is well-discussed in the literature.

Interesting, summed up nicely in this line from the wiki page "By directing public attention to the diminishing numbers of giant panda due to habitat loss, for example, conservation groups can raise support for the protection of the panda and for the entire ecosystem of which it is a part." With the last few words being key.

Thanks for letting me know about that topic.

I thought this was going to be about COBOL. :)

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