To Save Endangered Species, Should We Bring Them into Our Cities? | Hacker News Reader

To Save Endangered Species, Should We Bring Them into Our Cities?

smithsonianmag.com

37 pointscgoecknerwald62 comments

I’ve advertised this before: one viable option is to have “sanctuaries”, large areas where humans are strictly forbidden to enter. The case of Chernobyl shows that wild life recovers from humans pretty quickly once they’re gone.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-...

But is the "recovery rate" in Chernobyl significantly better than normal conservation sites?

My point is, why "strictly forbidden to enter" if conservation areas are successful enough?

That’s a very good question. I don’t know the answer. My experience is though that some rules have to be very strict, because the freedom will be invaded step by step. First just a small road, then maybe a visitor center, then some tour rides etc.

> My point is, why "strictly forbidden to enter" if conservation areas are successful enough?

Why allow humans in at all? We have plenty of room, and no need.

One reason may be that for most people to care about conservation they need an opportunity to see or experience what they're conserving. It's the reason most conservation funding in the US comes from hunters.[0][1]

0: (PDF) https://www.fishwildlife.org/application/files/3615/1853/869... (page 9)

1: https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/593001800/decline-in-hunters-...

One option is to change our cities to be less hostile to the creatures that used to live there.

Why should we save endangered species from going extinct?

Why shouldn't we kill all the weakest lifeforms on the planet? What could possibly go wrong?

"It's obvious that killing all the weakest lifeforms on this planet would cause bad things to happen"

I made what you were stating clearer. Why would not saving endangered species lead to all the weakest lifeforms on the planet going extinct? Is it the fate of all of those lifeforms to go extinct without human intervention?

The vast majority of endangered species are endangered because of human activities.

Yep.

Specifically, just to hit this point home, the impact of humans is an extinction event comparable to the Cambrian–Ordovician extinction event, or the impact that killed off the dinosaurs. Who(or what)ever exists billions of years from now will be able to view the immensity of our impact assuming they still have the tools we have today.

To place things in perspective, all wildlife that isn’t domesticated (livestock) or adapted to live in polluted cities (e.g. rats, dogs, pigeons) are now in danger of extinction due to humans. Even insects.

It’s only a matter of time before we kill off what remains and you have to wonder, if we made earth so inhospitable to life, for how long can we survive ourselves?

"It's obvious that we know jack-shit about what could possibly go wrong and environmental dependencies -- so better not go extinguishing lifeforms since we've evolved our means of extinction beyond what natural nature cycles allow".

That's a much better formulation.

It doesn't have to be "obvious that killing all the weakest lifeforms on this planet would cause bad things to happen" not to do it.

It just has to be possible and uncertain.

Multiple reasons, one of which is that once a species is gone there is no way to get it back. Also, consider reasons that people want to save historical structures, or preserve old / rare works of art. Or why someone would pay money to a vet to save their pet.

If you saw a fire spreading and was threatening someone's house, would you call the fire department, or otherwise attempt to stop it? Why or why not? Do you back up the data on your computer? Do you wonder why anyone takes pictures in order to preserve a moment in time, and would be upset if all their family photos got destroyed?

Would storing genomes be enough, similar to backing up data until it is needed?

Only if you assume that being reared by older animals of the same species doesn't matter.

> Would storing genomes be enough, similar to backing up data until it is needed?

I don't think so, because many of the endangered animals are representative of entire ecosystems. Consider orang-utans and the forests they inhabit (many of which are being destroyed to collect palm-oil). If the animals have gone, it is even harder to make people want to preserve their environments in the face of relentless commercial pressure. Some endangered animals also help shape the ecosystems, e.g. when they are apex predators.

Once the animals are gone, recreating their communities is significantly harder. As stated elsewhere, most animals are better raised by their own species rather than humans outside the cage. For primates (e.g. woolly monkeys) individuals that have been raised in isolation in captivity also don't make good parents when they do eventually breed, sometimes abandoning viable young.

Protecting endangered species isn’t just about protecting a specific set of DNA, as per the article about reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone.

if that's the only reason we could just digitize the animals and archive them somewhere waiting for holographic display to enter consumer markets.

the real issue tho is that those species are part of a larger ecosystem, we're currently having large issue in Europe for having eradicated most boars' natural predators.

If we spoke to someone 1000 years ago and told them in the future we've eradicated bears and wolves, they'd think the boar problem would pale in insignificance to the triumph of removing bears and wolves.

I'm not saying extinction is a good thing, but contextually it sounds weird to talk about us suffering from large issues from eradicating those predators.

heck, around here our grandpas did a large fest out of killing the last wolf around their village.

When big predators are wiped, medium sized predators explode, big herbivores explode taking all plants and soil and finally many types of diseases will take the place targetting humans.

Maybe "let's ask someone from a thousand years ago" isn't the best way to manage an ecosystem. Hell, ask someone in the 1950s if smoking is dangerous and you'll see the faults in the approach.

My response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309857

If you spoke to someone 1000 years ago, they would also believe the earth is flat, diseases are caused by humors and bloodletting could cure the cold, and that it was ok to burn heretics at the stake. You might have heard but we have progressed a little in the last 1000 years, maybe taking their advice about science based decisions isn't a good plan?

I think you're waving away my point. I was trying to say that people 1000 years ago disliked bears and wolves because people would die. Roads weren't safe. The problems with boars pale in significance to the problems bears and wolves caused. OP said "we're currently having large issue in Europe for having eradicated most boars' natural predators" - but these issues aren't larger than the problems that boars' natural predators caused, which would've been obvious to anyone who lived at a time when they still existed.

I’m not waving away your point, I’m saying your point isn’t a good one to consider in the context of the discussion about eco-systems. The problems with boars in NO way pales to the problems that bears and wolves cause. In an unbalanced eco-system boars (or deer or elk) cause massive problems to the whole system, eating certain plants to local extinction, destroying crops, boars themselves are extremely dangerous to people, large populations carry and mutate diseases that easily transfer to both human and livestock populations, etc... Simply put people 1000 years ago didn’t understand science or the larger world around them in th way we do. They weren’t stupid and they lived in the natural world the most of us don’t now but that knowledge only goes so far. Making modern eco-systems decisions based on the “wisdom” of 1000 years ago is a horrible idea and the issues that removing boars natural predators cause are in fact much MUCH larger than co-existing with those predators.

watch Star Trek IV (serious)

"to hunt a species to extinction is not logical"

Basic decency when their extinction is caused by us?

Because if we don't care we'll soon find us in serious trouble when the environmental chores that they bring will suddently stop.

Here is one famous case study: https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...

The thing is that an ecosystem is a complex biological machine. When we go pulling out tiny sprockets from the machine, things break in ways we can’t predict and often don’t expect.

I am far less concerned about an asteroid hitting Earth and ending life as we know it, than I am about farmers eradicating insect “pests” leading to the collapse of life as we know it.

How much can we predict?

Well we can predict that adding insecticides to our crops will cause insects to die.

Which doesn’t explain why people are acting surprised that genetically modifying crops to produce insecticides will kill insects.

Well I'm all for that. The most dangerous thing for all life in my city are cars. Dead magpies, raccoons, and squirrels are a common sight in the city. Roadkill deer are more common outside the city or on the high speed roads. Also, deer that are injured in low speed collisions are dangerous when threatened... by somebody just happening to be walking by.

George Carlin on saving the planet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeSMPESpxdA

I agree with the part about people who worry about everything. But the bit Carlin misses is that what's troubling is the increase in the rate of extinctions[0]. Of course species go extinct on a regular basis, but when so many are going extinct in such a short space of time, it creates issues like a reduction in biodiversity, which in turn leads to a higher risk of a disease outbreak in a dominant species being catastrophic for an ecosystem. I agree with Carlin about most things, but like Bill Hick's blind spot about smoking, I think he's wrong here.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/science/conservation-ecology/Calc...

Well, the non-city people don't want endangered species. Reintroducing wolf packs has ruined elk hunting, made pets unsafe, made kids unsafe, and caused problems for livestock.

Since city people tend to love wolves, it looks like we have a win-win solution here. I have a feeling though, that city people will have a change of heart upon walking into a subway restroom and suddenly facing a wolf pack.

We should farm and eat endangered species to save them. That's the only way of incorporating endangered species into our economic system. We can export wolf meat to the Chinese. Imagine a chain of restaurants selling endangered meat because of the ecological benefits of eating organic AAA grass-fed endangered meat and maybe it's even low in saturated fat as a bonus.

Lets suppose that our endangered species is a screw. Just a normal screw. The cheapest one. We could mass produce screws, coate it with gold and put them under a glass bell in our main hall. This would assure that everybody knows what kind of screws we had in the past, but they are just curious useless pieces of metal at that state.

The real problem is that this screw was doing something in a bigger machine, and if we remove random pieces in a machine there is a fair possibility that the entire system will crash until we return all the pieces again in its correct place.

But ecosystems aren't your common kind of machine. They are alive flexible machines and they will try to regenerate aiming for the next lower point of equilibrium available, much like a rock falling a few meters from a mountainside. Having lost a part of its "potential energy", the machine will start producing different things. Typically fewer and of lesser value, often noxious or defective products: They could start producing fireforests, dust storms and thorns por example instead water, fruit and wood. Ecosystems don't care.

Even worse, at this point there aren't more slots that could fit again our screw. The machine has mutated and will spit its former spare-parts. Can't be reversed unless you burn huge lots of money and invest thousands of years on it. If you find that the new situation is bad for you (as often is), you are screwed for the rest of your life, and also your sons and grandsons.

that would help to prevent the animals from going extinct but it wouldn't replace the ecological effect that the wild animals had. Having a wolf farm (to the extent you could even domesticate them) would not help with the deer population explosion from lack of wolves.

> made kids unsafe,

That's what anti-wolf people say here in Norway even though there isn't a single report of a wolf attack on a human in Europe in centuries and that there are only 30 wolves in the whole of Norway.

So do you have any objective evidence?

Not wolves per se and not Europe, but when I lived on a remote military base in California, coyotes were known to kill pets and we were told there had been three attacks on children in the previous 5 years, so don't let kids go outside alone after dark. This was probably in a safety briefing given to my ex who was in the army.

They didn't attack adults who were walking alone at night, but they would attack smaller creatures, such as pets and kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack has a wealth of information on the topic. It seems likely that the attacks are due to animals becoming habituated to being in close proximity with humans and is probably exacerbated by being fed.

Yeah a lot of people are clueless about coyotes. I have some land in the desert and one of my neighbors actually feeds the damn things, it's insanity. He Also tried to claim that coyotes don't carry rabies. Needless to say he does not have internet access.

They're the biggest coyotes I've ever seen and they're not fearful of humans.

The sure-fire solution to the problem of intrusive coyotes is a bit ironic. They're extremely difficult to cull anywhere because they normally roam very far. When they move into an urban area a cull isn't much of an option anyhow.

The solution that nature provides to coyotes, and many intrusive species, would be (ahem) to introduce wolves. Coyotes get some pretty mixed signals about whether an area is worth the risk when people try to drive them away but nevertheless keep livestock or trash nearby. The presence of wolves is unambiguous.

>coyotes were known to kill pets

So the problem is that wild animals, doing what they do, might kill animals held in captivity for the entertainment of humans? And thus, wild animals need to be eradicated from the area?

You know, I don't have any idea whatsoever what your point is. I'm wondering if you replied to the wrong comment because I'm just completely lost here.

Just quoted the wrong comment. Reply is the same (edited).

Ah.

You are inferring a position. Your inference is in error. My comment was not intended to support a conclusion. It was merely intended to answer the question concerning is there evidence that children are actually in any danger. There is.

That was my entire agenda: To answer that question. Period.

Coyotes != wolves

Exactly, there are dozens of attacks of bulldogs on people and pets daily in Europe, a lot of them a deadly. We're somehow not banning bulldogs.

Actually, some breeds of dog are banned in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/control-dog-public/banned-dogs

And in some European countries anything bigger than a small dog is supposed to be muzzled in public.

> made kids unsafe

Thanks god we have babysitter ticks now.

You are hugely exaggerating the impact of wolves on anyone but farmers (there’s likely legit discussion to be had here) and elk hunters (who cares?).

Most states in the US already compensate farmers for wolf and grizzly bear predation.

Hunter's elk success rate has slowly but surely trended upwards consistently over the last 20 years in most states. Here is an example from Montana, I haven't looked up data from other states yes but according to what I have read it's a similar trend.

https://github.com/jaegerpicker/MontantaElkHunterSuccessRate...

Also you should care about Elk Hunters if you care about conservation at all in the US and Canada. Virtually all conservation of North American species comes from hunter based organizations and 90% of all money for conservation comes from hunting and/or fishing organizations. In fact the national park system was started by hunters as was the Sierra Club. Without their support wildlife conservation in North America and Africa would collapse quickly.

> Virtually all conservation of North American species comes from hunter based organizations and 90% of all money for conservation comes from hunting and/or fishing organizations.

What does funding conservation actually look like? Blowing up coal plants? I’d imagine conservation would mostly look like preventing humans from entering the area at all.

A lot of it is things like national parks, estuaries, and forests. Hunters tend to be huge proponents for conservation since they like to hunt.

Most people are tremendously bad at supporting tax dollars going towards the total prevention of their entry, and people taking hikes and camping is very healthy.

I understand it's a nice idea to have human free zones, but it doesn't seem particularly realisitic to me, and small amounts of foot track don't seem troubling to me either.

All those big game hunters that kill lions kill the old ones and pay big bucks to do it. That money goes towards conservation.

Edit: but also, what a weird imagination. Conservation as acts of domestic terrorism. I guess that's what the imagination's good for!

That’s not conservation; that’s a large zoo.

I know this is most likely a troll but in the oft chance you are being legit with this comment: The idea that humans can’t or shouldn’t be part of the wider wild world is insane. We are nothing truly special, We are just really smart monkey’s. We absolutely can preserve and interact with the natural world. I’d rather say that’s is the only point worth working to save it.

I don’t disagree. Still, that’s not what I would recognize as conservation.

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