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Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

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Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#51

Post by liability »

baroffoos wrote: post #25
LennyWhiteJr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you find out that all the world's cash crops are essentially genetic clones of each other. We're literally one superbug away from global famine.

I doubt its that dire. There are a lot of things currently that can destroy crops but they are mostly prevented from spreading by border controls on things like fruit not being able to cross over.

You're correct. Rice and corn are almost tied as staple crops. Wheat, potatoes and bananas trail those two relatively closely. There may be little genetic diversity inside any particular staple food, but there are nevertheless several unrelated staple foods that feed the world.

If blight were to wipe out one or two, things would get bad but I'm confident we'd pull through as a species.

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#52

Post by ci5er »

baroffoos wrote: post #27
jcampbell1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The veterinary science in the corporate meat/dairy business is better at disease management than the CDC. Vaccines are developed in a matter of weeks. Quarantining animals and employees is completely enforced. Culling is possible. I wouldn’t be scared. A lot of smart people are going to make sure you have real ice cream. Do you worry that some disease is going to kill off all the elite marathon runners? Not much gene…

Pretty much. The one tool that is available to farmers is the fact that they can just kill huge amounts of animals to wipe out an illness quickly.

That tool is available at policy-level to other species too; they just don't like to talk about it.

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#53

Post by dbcurtis »

gumby wrote: post #9
daveslash wrote: post #7

What really caught me off-guard in the I didn't see that coming sort of way was that someone named their Bull " Round Oak Rag Apple Elevation " -- that strikes me as an oddly long and specific name. Everything else is, perhaps, bothersome, but not terribly " surprise! ".

Could be a path, e.g. Round Oak > Rag > Apple > Elevation. That would make sense if the earlier sites had themselves been of high value: then the name would itself be a kind advertisement. Or you could think of it as constructing an IPv6 address by embedding the MAC in the low order bits.

I am a little fuzzy on it since it has been a long time since I thought about it, but my father-in-law was a Holstein-Friesian breeder. If I recall correctly the Holstein breed association requires pedigrees to start the farm name. Then you usually include the name of a prominent ancestor in the blood-line, and a name to distinguish the individual. So if you are in the know, you can tell a lot about an animal from the name.

My father-in-law used to get hours of joy from poring over semen catalogs. You know those really intense baseball fans that dig through page after page of player statistics, and quote them from memory to anyone who will listen? Translate that to dairy animals, and that was my father-in-law. The catalogs were full of tables of production records of each bull's progeny. He had two semen storage freezers for his speculative acquisitions. (Basically, insulated tanks cooled by liquid nitrogen. The milk hauler carried liquid N so that he could top off the farmers' semen storage as he pumped their milk into the truck.)

In the old days, you were paid by the total production with a butter-fat premium for richer milk. Then at some point they reduced the butter-fat premium but added a new premium for protein content. That caused a major reshuffling of the value of many bulls.

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#54

Post by topmonk »

slimed wrote: post #46
LennyWhiteJr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you find out that all the world's cash crops are essentially genetic clones of each other. We're literally one superbug away from global famine.

Yes, biodiversity in major crops is a serious problem. Global famine? Give me a break. That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale. Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down th…

> But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?

Simply, copies.

If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly.

Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first couple, the superbug would likely start to tailer itself to genes that many plant species share, making the next jumps even easier.

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#55

Post by [deleted] »

topmonk wrote: post #54
slimed wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, biodiversity in major crops is a serious problem. Global famine? Give me a break. That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale. Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down th…

> But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road? Simply, copies. If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly. Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first coup…

[deleted]

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#57

Post by jessriedel »

anewguy9000 wrote: post #56

as you go back in time, the tree of ancestors shrinks, so ultimately all cows in the world are descended from 2 cows, are they not?

Yes, although that doesn't tell us much about whether this population has sufficient genetic diversity. https://xkcd.com/1545/

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#58

Post by johnhenry »

anewguy9000 wrote: post #56

as you go back in time, the tree of ancestors shrinks, so ultimately all cows in the world are descended from 2 cows, are they not?

Yes, but that's not the main issue -- it's that thousands (millions?) of other bulls who were around during the 50's and 60's didn't get to contribute to the gene pool leading to low genetic diversity. If there was some hidden defect in the Y chromosome that happen to affect both of them, that defect would not be in most bulls in existence.

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#59

Post by DuskStar »

topmonk wrote: post #54
slimed wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, biodiversity in major crops is a serious problem. Global famine? Give me a break. That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale. Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down th…

> But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road? Simply, copies. If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly. Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first coup…

I suppose I should be sitting up in terror for the superbug that comes after us from ants, then? After all ants outmass humans worldwide by a decent margin...

Thing is, I'm pretty sure that ants and humans are only a few times further apart than potatoes and corn are. (Monocots and Dicots split ~140-150 Myr ago [0], Arthropoda and Chordata about ~1000 Myr ago [1]) (I initially thought the Monocots/Dicots split was further back... looks like a closer comparison would be to marsupials, diverging ~170 Myr ago)

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15114421

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10097391

Re: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls

#60

Post by toasterlovin »

topmonk wrote: post #54
slimed wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, biodiversity in major crops is a serious problem. Global famine? Give me a break. That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale. Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down th…

> But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road? Simply, copies. If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly. Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first coup…

FWIW, if this were likely, it probably would have already happened. That's the paradox of superbugs.
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