The Biology, Agriculture, and Paleontology thread

Sir David's long-beaked echidna has been seen alive for the first time ever.

In which a seabird was caught in a typhoon and forced to fly in circles in its eye until it could finally escape. The unlucky bird, which had been tagged with a GPS tracker, bred just south of Tokyo and was in 2019 caught in Typhoon Faxai as it came up. The bird flew 5 loops in Faxai's eyewall as it passed over Tokyo and only managed to escape after Faxai moved back over the sea.

That was one tough bird.

Climate extremes likely to drive land mammal extinction during next supercontinent assembly, given increased solar output, release of carbon dioxide during the assembly of a supercontinent will result in extreme warming that is inimical to mammal survival.

…there’s a mass extinction (though obvs not to the level of ‘all mammals’) going on now, why are we worrying about 250 million years in the future? That’s as far in the future as we are from the Permian Extinction (right befire the start if the Triassic).

In fairness acknowledging that one is going to occur in the future isn't necessarily being alarmed over it, though admittedly most popular media on the topic does tend to act like that's going to happen now.

I will say regarding the idea of there being a mass extinction going on now, I don't think that's accurate. There's a definitely abnormal rate of extinction and climate change, but even the most mild mass extinction has wiped out 70% of all life on Earth, which probably isn't in the cards.

That was 70% of species over many thousands of years for any given mass extinction, (aside from the meteor incident).

Nothing during the end Permian, (the most devastating one) would have thought it was living through the apocalypse, the ocean acidification and deoxygenation took centuries while still being rapid enough for nearly nothing to adapt, and the deadly environment on land took a similar amount of time to emerge.

We are currently approaching a mass extinction, seeing rates of extinction per year elevated to mass extinction levels. This is what a mass extinction looks like. It moves slowly enough that it's hard to notice just casually.

Edited by Florien on Dec 7th 2023 at 9:52:17 AM

I'd argue that there's a flaw in that reasoning, which is basically that of extrapolation:

For example, if I were to Thanos Snap 5% of all species on Earth, I'd cause an extremely rapid decrease in biodiversity but not a mass extinction.

If we are in a Mass Extinction, we're in those early stages where it's too early to tell. Some examples of things that could happen include:

• The idealistic scenario, human behavior alters in such a way as not to harm the environment, or at least discovers a way to bring back extinct species.

• The worst case scenario, alterations to Earth's ecology result in a massive reduction in human populations and thus human pollution. This would probably happen long before a mass extinction happens.

the second scenario causes a mass extinction by the way, probably the worst since the end-permian. Those changes don't just disappear with a human population crash.

While it is technically possible to argue "well, 50% of things aren't extinct yet" there's a few caveats that really undermine the argument.

A. We don't actually know how much has gone extinct. This is broadly true of the past too, fossils are imperfect and don't preserve many species well. For example, we only have I think two or three individual fossilized squid for all of history, but we know they're very old. However, we don't know how many species were alive yesterday, so naturally there's a lot of guesswork involved in figuring out how many have already died out.

B. It's a very reasonable extrapolation, considering atmospheric data strongly correlates rapid and extensive atmospheric changes with mass extinction, and we have made an atmospheric change at least an order of magnitude faster than pretty much every previous change, and it's a very extensive one too. (Not the most extensive yet, but very extensive already)

C. Evidence suggests a substantial decline in species since the end of the last ice age, we were already seeing a minor extinction. Now here we are, setting up conditions similar to at least three previous events that led to large or mass extinctions at a rate never seen before at any time on the planet.

D. Habitat Fragmentation is devastating, and habitats are fragmenting harder than they (probably) ever have previously, as a necessary consequence of the introduction of the urban and cultivated farmland biomes.

There is every reason to think that we are in or about to be in a mass extinction, and there isn't really a compelling argument that the alarmingly elevated rate of extinction over baseline (we are currently seeing extinction rates somewhere between 100 and 1000 times the baseline rate, trending upwards) is not a mass extinction being underway when the only times we see similar rates of extinction are during other mass extinctions.

Maastricht is asking for the Mosasaurus holotype (the first vertebrate fossil to be properly described) to be returned from Paris.

Dammit France, find your own fossils!

I have been wondering if there’s enough stolen European stuff in European museums that we could arrange a big swap where everyone brings a couple things they stole and leaves with a couple things stolen from them.

The Netherlands has never invaded, occupied, or colonized any European countries, though, so I'm not sure what we would trade. This fossil is literally something France nabbed when Napoleon conquered us.

Back when the Netherlands was the Dutch Republic it controlled modern day Belgium, there might be something from there.

Or you might have a situation similar to the British museum, where a private individual stole something (with the ‘permission’ of an occupying power) and then later transferred it to a museum.

You have it backwards, we didn't control Belgium, rather Belgium simply didn't really exist as a separate cultural entity yet. That happens much later, after the Napoleonic wars. Before that, it was always part of the Netherlands, or Austria, or Spain, or Burgundy, or Francia.

"De Leeuw van Vlaanderen" (The Lion of Flanders) is a very interesting literary work, because it basically invents this cultural identity after the fact to justify Belgian independence in 1830. But it's just that, an invention.

Edited by Redmess on Dec 8th 2023 at 12:56:00 PM

No offence, but you are going to have to back this up. Again, no offence, but this reminds me of a theory pushed by a certain dictator a little too much for my comfort.

I think this conversation needs to move to another thread.

Just read the history of Belgium. And no, Belgium is not Ukraine...

We'll discuss it in the Dutch politics thread (with apologies in advance to the Wallonians, we have to pick a lane).

Edited by Redmess on Dec 9th 2023 at 4:54:33 PM

Film.Blame It On Rio - You can't OD on birth control pills, right? Nothing in there is like... poisonous even in big doses, right? That's Artistic License – Biology / Miss Conception??

Water poisoning is a thing after all.

Birth control pills are hormone-based (basically, they trick the brain into assuming a pregnancy is underway, thus the menstrual cycle stops), and that means excessive dosage will have the same effects as excessive hormonal production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperestrogenism

But that takes years, and stuff. It's not immediate?

If you think you have overdosed on any kind of pills, call your local hospital now.'

And yes, anything can be toxic in high enough doses.

Edited by Redmess on Dec 17th 2023 at 10:41:57 AM

- Just not sure if the linked work should get an Artistic License – Biology entry or not.

According to this article, accidentally taking more than one pill in a day is basically harmless. There have been cases of suicide attempts where people took multiple packs of pills all at ones, but aside from feeling very sick for a day, they all seem to have recovered within a day.

So unless the person in the movie was scarfing down whole packs of them, they shouldn't have died, it seems.

- They didn't die, but they made the attempt. So... Is it downplayed? Or not at all?