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Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

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Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#61

Post by jheriko »

marcosdumay wrote: post #57
jheriko wrote: post #46

i'm in two minds about this. on the one hand, this is evolution in action, the habitat for this animal was decreased by the presence of a successful predator. on the other, rats have no sympathy from me, and we have plenty of them around, so why not wipe them out to allow insects to flourish? somehow killing a bunch of rats to allow a failed species to reclaim its territory seems wrong. so i lean towards letting this…

Killing the rats is also evolution in action. In fact, anything that happen to the island, done by people or not, good or not is evolution in action.

+1, good point

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#62

Post by ufo »

jschwartzi wrote: post #59
ufo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insects also have complex genomes. The egg fertility most likely has to do with other issues (differences between the natural habitat and captivity, maybe there is a natural tendency for not all eggs to be fertile, etc)

I wonder if the infertile eggs are a sort of decoy? Those eggs look like they might be large enough to make an attractive meal for a bird.

Nature is complicated. Not everything needs to have an adaptionist explanation.

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#63

Post by glesica »

jheriko wrote: post #60
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are special though. How many species can simply alter an environment so that it can live somewhere that would otherwise be uninhabitable by it? Now seeing that we're already altering our environment however we want, why not alter it back? Especially if you consider humans to be playing by the same rules. In that light, who cares about the rats? We out competed them, we'll alter things in ways that please us.

some of the very first and most basic life, algae, completely transformed the atmosphere of the entire planet and continue to have the dominant effect on it, in ways that dwarf the human impact on it in recent times, we do not consider them special for the scale of their effect... but yes, you are right about altering it back. this is why our altruism and the 'feeling' argument has more merit than logically it should…

But the algae didn't intend to alter it. That's the difference. We don't respond to environmental pressure, we just apply equal and opposite pressure (for the most part, obviously everything has a cost). It's like a psychology experiment. If one of the subjects figures out the parameters of the experiment the experiment is ruined because that individual will likely mess up the whole system by acting intelligently instead of naturally.

We are the only ones that significantly alter our environment. If there was a continuum of intelligence, with a fairly smooth and not-to-concave curve, I would be inclined to agree with you. But there isn't, it's a bunch of animals that have no appreciable ability to alter their environments purposefully, and then us. Therefore anything we do falls in the "contaminated experiment" category.

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#64

Post by Retric »

mapt wrote: post #14
bpodgursky wrote: post #2

What I don't fully understand is, usually when scientists try to preserve rare species, there is a critical mass under which there isn't enough genetic diversity to preserve the species (I've seen ~30 quoted for some rare mammals). But in this case, just two individuals were able to start a viable population. Why are these insects different? I can only think of a couple reasons... - since these insects have a r-selec…

IANARB, but- Minimum viable genetic diversity is not a particularly well-established or even objectively knowable metric. I think the relevant number is often vastly overstated, or at least stated without mentioning the strong and arbitrary assumptions that need to be made in determining it. Wikipedia says: "The cheetah has unusually low genetic variability. This is accompanied by a very low sperm count, motility, an…

It also relates to new mutations. An insect with 1,000 offspring might lose 95% of them and still be viable, but most birds or mammals would quickly go extinct if 95% of their offspring where non viable.

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#65

Post by jheriko »

glesica wrote: post #63
jheriko wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some of the very first and most basic life, algae, completely transformed the atmosphere of the entire planet and continue to have the dominant effect on it, in ways that dwarf the human impact on it in recent times, we do not consider them special for the scale of their effect... but yes, you are right about altering it back. this is why our altruism and the 'feeling' argument has more merit than logically it should…

But the algae didn't intend to alter it. That's the difference. We don't respond to environmental pressure, we just apply equal and opposite pressure (for the most part, obviously everything has a cost). It's like a psychology experiment. If one of the subjects figures out the parameters of the experiment the experiment is ruined because that individual will likely mess up the whole system by acting intelligently ins…

define intent and intelligence?

i'm yet to see evidence of free will, i'm not convinced i am not just a machine doing its thing like everything else is... also, this feels like a religious argument from both sides.

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#66

Post by NamTaf »

grondilu wrote: post #25

I'm all for preserving endangered species and all, but frankly these insects scare the hell out of me and if I was anywhere close to one of them I may run away, screaming like a little girl. I believe I'm not very exceptional a person thus I suspect they'll have difficulties convincing people to have this species reintroduced on any inhabited island.

You're not Australian, so you're not naturally immune to the fear of creepy crawly insects.

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#67

Post by bjterry »

pyre wrote: post #58
ars wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree, all little humans learn how to make that piercing scream often attributed to little girls. You apparently don't actually know any little boys and girls because their screams sound nothing alike. Boys do manage a nice scream, but it doesn't sound the same, especially past the age of 3. > Little boys will likely do it less as they begin to be socialized and thus wedged into gender roles Again with this no…

> Next you'll tell me people aren't born knowing what gender they are, but rather it's "socialized" into them. That just depends on what you mean by gender. There are many things around gender that are social constructs. For example, pink being a "feminine" colour. Do you believe that DNA encodes females to prefer pink[1]? [1] http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297159948/girls-are-taught-to-...

Completely aside from the current politically charged discussion, I recently read an interesting paper by Psychologist Marcio Del Giudice which claims that "pink for boys, blue for girls" is a scientific urban legend. He uses the Google Ngram Viewer of historical books and finds that the relevant terms for that theory never appear in the corpus, while the relation that is currently the societal norm appears back into the late 1800s (the beginning of the corpus).[1]

Of course, the article you reference doesn't claim that there was a reversal as many others do, but that the colors were simply not as gendered in the past, which seems almost certainly true.

1: http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_r...

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

jusben1369 wrote: post #26
grondilu wrote: post #25

I'm all for preserving endangered species and all, but frankly these insects scare the hell out of me and if I was anywhere close to one of them I may run away, screaming like a little girl. I believe I'm not very exceptional a person thus I suspect they'll have difficulties convincing people to have this species reintroduced on any inhabited island.

'screaming like a small child" perhaps is better.

I wonder of that's actually the origin of the "like a girl" idiom. "Girl" didn't used to be gender-specific, after all.

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#69

Post by baddox »

dragonwriter wrote: post #68
jusben1369 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'screaming like a small child" perhaps is better.

I wonder of that's actually the origin of the "like a girl" idiom. "Girl" didn't used to be gender-specific, after all.

It probably comes from females generally having higher pitched voices.

Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)

#70

Post by PhasmaFelis »

philcrump wrote: post #10
bpodgursky wrote: post #2

What I don't fully understand is, usually when scientists try to preserve rare species, there is a critical mass under which there isn't enough genetic diversity to preserve the species (I've seen ~30 quoted for some rare mammals). But in this case, just two individuals were able to start a viable population. Why are these insects different? I can only think of a couple reasons... - since these insects have a r-selec…

From the subtley linked 'Husbandry Manual': http://www.aszk.org.au/docs/lhisi.pdf Section 3.2 (p8) The population at Melbourne Zoo, being descended from a single pair, appeared to experience increasing symptoms of inbreeding over two generations until four adult males were introduced, descended from a second pair held at Insektus in Sydney, and their genes began to have an influence. After new males were introduced,…

That was still pretty interesting, I think. The Melbourne Zoo population ballooned after the four new males arrived: " the population at Melbourne Zoo, which hovered around 20 individuals at any time during the first three years of captive management, rose to 600 within 12 months of the males’ genes taking effect." Even though the four males were all descended from a single (different) pair. That means they got a stable breeding population out of only two breeding pairs! I really wouldn't have thought introducing a single extra pair of ancestors would have fixed everything so dramatically.
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