41–50 of 54 posts
My favorite OSX version and my favorite animal. It's an incredibly agile animal. The animals are taking their toll from the insatible greediness of wild capitalism.
When all you have is a hammer...
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When a population is isolated or bottlenecked, there reaches an event horizon where inbreeding causes too manty defects for the population to survive even if one were to curb outside predation/killing. The article points several times to the increasing isolation of the populations and the threats that giving them protected status would require development to take isolation of population in care when developing.
That still just sounds like regular extinction to me. "Event horizon" or some other "cliff" type of nomenclature is fair too in light of the inbreeding effect of very small populations. But "extinction vortex" sounds like they wanted to pick a scary sounding word for hype. For "vortex" to actually be fitting I'd expect some kind of circular process: perhaps a feedback loop, wherein some process is causing extinction…
That is indeed what it means. Per Wikipedia: "[The extinction vortex model] shows the events that ultimately lead small populations to become increasingly more vulnerable as they spiral toward extinction."
What the hell is an extinction vortex? The article refuses to define it, despite scare-quoting the term itself.. >“Individual lions face horrible deaths from car collisions or rat poison, while their populations become increasingly isolated and inbred in ever-shrinking islands of habitat hemmed by freeways and sprawl.” Is this it? It doesn't really fit the name that well..
Related headline: Journalist uses 'dubious tactics' in headline to 'clickfarm' population. I'm truly tired of this media tactic to create/hijack curiosity (IE "wtf is a 'polar vortex'") and/or scare quotes to generate page views.
> In addition, large-scale residential and commercial development could be prohibited or limited in mountain lion habitats within a region covering roughly a third of the state. It seems like something has to give. In particular, we can't have reasonable housing prices, a healthy mountain lion habitat and increased immigration and population (especially in California). Those three things are directly at odds with eac…
We can “easily” have all three things you’ve suggested there, but a huge swathe of the public seems to want their personal neck of the Bay Area to be as it was in 1973.
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But how is "threatened by extinction" an "extinction vortex"?
When a population is isolated or bottlenecked, there reaches an event horizon where inbreeding causes too manty defects for the population to survive even if one were to curb outside predation/killing. The article points several times to the increasing isolation of the populations and the threats that giving them protected status would require development to take isolation of population in care when developing.
The article fails to directly define the term, and the indirect definitions do not point to anything that might constitute a “vortex”:
>The article points several times to the increasing isolation of the populations and the threats that giving them protected status would require development to take isolation of population in care when developing.
Which only implies the vortex, or feedback loop, if you already know the term and meaning, but the article does not expect you to know it..!
Isolation alone hardly reads as an evolutionary feedback loop... unless you already know that isolation creates an evolutionary feedback loop
> In addition, large-scale residential and commercial development could be prohibited or limited in mountain lion habitats within a region covering roughly a third of the state. It seems like something has to give. In particular, we can't have reasonable housing prices, a healthy mountain lion habitat and increased immigration and population (especially in California). Those three things are directly at odds with eac…
> Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact human habitats.
> The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact. These structures have been largely hypothetical, as no arcology, even one envisioned by Soleri himself, has yet been built.
Emphasis added. We know what to do, the question is how do we motivate enough people to do it.
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In California, of all places!
California is full of the worst kinds of "crony capitalism" (that is, regulatory capture, a feature and not a bug of capitalism unfortunately), what do you mean?
Can any Californian say something about the relative frequency of the various names for this species? I'd never heard the term "mountain lion" until recently (I think I first encountered it in a story by Annie Proulx) though I've known the word "puma" since the 1970s. Apparently they're also known as "cougar" or "catamount". I probably came across the term "cougar" some time this century, and the term "catamount" a f…
I live in LA and grew up in Florida. Mountain lion is almost exclusively said out here. Back in Florida, it seemed like a mix between cougar and mountain lion, with some people saying puma. I think I've only heard an Appalachian Mountain hipster use the term catamount in conversation. I think there's a college sports team whose nickname is the catamounts.
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I live in CA near Santa Cruz and we have had mountain lions in our backyard. I've seen them close up and was not scared for the reasons you mentioned, it wanted to be seen. I had a slightly scarier incident where I was hissed at from thick bushes by a mountain lion that I couldn't see, but I left and the lion did not follow. It's extremely common in our area for lions to attack and kill small dogs and livestock. For…
>Bears used to be common in the area too, but were hunted to extinction hundreds of years ago and the ecosystem adapted and survived. I think we have different definitions of survived... The bears certain didn't, and that to me is an extraordinarily terrible environmental impact.
I think there's this notion of taking any predator or apex animal out of an ecosystem can cause it to collapse. But early humans hunted many animals to extinctions, at least regionally, and those ecosystems may have changed, but I don't know of any that became inhospitable or void of life as a result.
I'm sure there was some environmental impact of hunting bears to extinction in Central CA, I'm just not aware of it and haven't heard of anyone proposing that we reintroduce them.