Scientists Create a "Worth Saving" Index For Endangered Animals 259
If you're one of the last hairy-nosed-wombats left in Australia things got a little worse for you today. Thanks to a new mathematical tool created by researchers from James Cook University and the University of Adelaide, the wombat has been classified as not worth saving. Co-author of the safe index Professor Corey Bradshaw says he doesn't think people should give up on saving extremely endangered animals but adds, "...if you take a strictly empirical view, things that are well below in numbering in the hundreds - white-footed rock rats, certain types of hare wallabies, a lot of the smaller mammals that have been really nailed by the feral predators like cats, and foxes - in some cases it is probably not worthwhile putting a lot of effort because there's just no chance."
Re:Well, you can't save 'em all (Score:5, Interesting)
Pandas are the perfect example of something not worth saving. There are many that suppose that pandas were on their way out as a species without our interference just because of the extreme inefficiency of their bodies. It takes an extreme amount of energy to process the bamboo it eats, not to mention the birth problems it faces with low birth rates and high infant mortality. The only reason we have rallied behind pandas is because they're cute, and maybe there is some benefit to having a cute staple animal we've saved as a rallying cry for conservation, but I'd like to think there were easier options out there.
Predicted future news: (Score:3, Interesting)
Professor Corey Bradshaw was assassinated by PETA agents for daring to imply that any animal was less important than any human. Their press release states that any other scientists that dare to put the survival of the hated human race above the that of the least important member of the animal kingdom would be similarly put to death.
Its not politically correct to say it. (Score:3, Interesting)
if you have a problem, you fix it. its as simple as that. when you go into calculations of 'worth' as if your biosphere was a business venture, the 'not worth' you have 'not saved' comes bites you in the ass due to chain reactions in biosphere.
i see that as an ill that capitalist mindset brought to our civilization - we are seeing everything from a window of 'cost/benefit'. not surprisingly, just like how economies come crashing down due to extreme adherence to these cost/benefit perspectives.there are too many variables that even the most foresighted analyst, the most complex computer forecasting cannot see and prepare for. ecosystems are no different - they are objects that are formed by inherently interrelated infinite number of elements.
there are areas in life where you should leave nothing to chance. the ecosystem you live in, is one of them.
No, not really (Score:4, Interesting)
No, not really. A cow would actually have the digestive tract that can break down cellulose walls and extract a lot more nutrient from that bamboo. A panda is more like an overgrown carnivore, with a carnivore digestive tract, which eats bamboo, and shits most of it undigested.
It gets extremely little protein or energy per pound eaten, and in fact ridiculously so. It has to spend most of its day eating, and avoid moving too much or too fast, or it will literally starve to death. It can't even walk up more than very gentle slopes, because it just doesn't have the energy budget for that. Chasing prey or running away from a predator is right out.
Even the low reproduction rate may well have to do with just not having the energy or protein to produce or feed larger litters. It has nothing to do with some clever design that protects the environment (there isn't any conceivable evolutionary pressure that takes that into account), but simply with the fact that it's so piss-poor at feeding itself, that it just can't do more than a cub in a blue moon.
Truth is, it's not very fit, in the survival of the fittest sense, and it doesn't have an isolated niche like the animals in Australia had. I mean, it is isolated by mountains and deserts, which posed a barrier to other species coming in, but it's not nearly as insurmountable as thousands of miles of ocean are. In the wild, it would be only a matter of time before some predator evolves or manages to get over the mountains to fill the niche of feeding on all those juicy pandas, or some bigger herbivore comes to out-compete them.
It's also a very new species, at evolution scales. The earliest thing even remotely recognizable as a panda lived some three million years ago (though the intermediate links evolving in that direction are, obviously, older.) By way of comparison, our split between us and chimps is 6 million years ago.
It's too early to say it would be such a viable species without us.
And either way, it was a piss-poor species which existed there just by virtue of being isolated from either predators or prey or competing species. It's a carnivore who had to start eating bamboo just for lack of prey, never got any good at it, and survived in that niche only for lack of competition. In a sense, it was already living in a natural zoo, and it would become extinct within decades of those barriers around it failing in any way.