The Circle of Life
The Circle of Life
65 comments
-
-
They would overpopulate and exhaust all the resources. Then the last survivors would kill one another for the final scraps while poisoning the land... Have you ever thought about how the wasteland came to be? Let me narrate you a story about their ancient inhabitants... the pale apes.
-
They would overpopulate and exhaust all the resources.
Save your right-wing "overpopulation" bullcrap. Barely anything predates on elephants and rhinos, yet they haven't managed to strip the continent of Africa and "exhaust all the resources."
-
absolutely wild that someone would assume someone's political views based on their understanding of ecosystems-level biology, but on lemmy, somehow, i'm no longer surprised
-
It's exactly what happens, and we have about as good a natural experiment on this as it gets:
https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/when-reindeer-paradise-turned-purgatory-0
tl;dr: a Reindeer herd was setup on an uninhabited Alaskan island as a potential food source during WWII with no natural predators. The war ended before anything came of it, so the herd was left on its own. Within a few decades, they had stripped the island bare of all vegetation the deer could possibly reach, and then they all starved to death.
Also, see predator reintroduction programs, such as how wolves change rivers.
Elephants and rhinos don't breed the same way a lot of other animals do. If they did, evolution would very quickly do what happened in Alaska to those deer. Animals like deer and rabbits breed in great numbers with the evolutionary expectation that predators will keep them in check.
If you think this process is brutal, well, yes, it is. The conservative thing would be to say that this is "natural" and therefore the correct and only way to run human society. This is wrong; we can choose a better path for ourselves while also accepting that nature works this way all the time.
-
Being fair, humans now have no realistic predators and we're stripping the planet bare.....
-
Because their evolutionary defense is literally defense, and not just having enough numbers to overcome predation.
Sure, there are species that exist without predation, but introduce predators (like humans) and oh, would you look at that... extinction!
Life is complex, and doesn't have any one single explanation for how it exists.
-
Save your right-wing “overpopulation” bullcrap
Wild what you guys think of as political. It's just how it sometimes goes in nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Deer
-
Barely anything isn't nothing, they still have predators.
-
-
-
ಠ_ಠ
65 comments
No Simba, if they were all allowed to die naturally, there would be too many of them to share the grass. They would die fighting themselves for food, a miserable existence. Only a truley dumb species would ignore the natural order and allow their own to die of hunger.
There is that aspect though. Unless the Antelope are good at looking out for each other and taking turns, they will mindlessly degreen the entire area.
read a long time ago about how the deer population got out of control in this one forest, and within a few years the place was practically a desert. everything just fuckin died
I've seen an arthritic goat hobbling around in agony.
With nature, you don't generally peacefully breathe out your dying breath, even if there are no predators. You live until life as it is is torturous enough that you no longer live.
There is no alternative to life, and death is compulsory and often painful. We, as humans, are lucky enough to be capable to, at times, make that process quick, and, at times, painless.
Predation is not wrong. The quality of life is what matters - and because of that, death is necessary.
Life offers joy, but can dish out misery just as deeply. If life gives you joy, it lasts as long as it can. If life gives you misery, the depth of it is limited by death.
It's morally better they die fighting us for food, while we right each other for food. Trust me.
No trust needed.
Oh shit are we the deer
I guess deer and antelope are fairly similar now that I think about it. Yes friend. We are the moose