71–80 of 177 posts
Clickable wiki page for those that want to an image of the insect: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis/
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This is one of the few instances where I disagree with that attitude. The risks involved in relocating ill-studied life forms are, obviously, enormous, and it does need careful and dispassionate consideration. I'd much rather risk a mildly interesting species go bye-bye than risk introducing a major ecological stressor. On the other hand, I might just be taking this stance because I'm so unfamiliar with biological st…
Human error almost caused the species to go extinct -- I think it's fair, right, and proper to move to restore them to their prior condition if possible, and the situation was critical on the pyramid. It seems like a pretty docile species based on the articles facts, and they could keep them cordoned in a lab until they found what to do with them. If the researchers and biologists felt it was the right play (which th…
This seems to me like a case of empathy gone awry. All that work and effort to bring back a species of insects? There is no balance to preserve; they've been gone for almost a century. Those resources could be spent preserving human life.
Also, consider this, we are not messing with any balances or natural orders. We are in fact fixing a problem that we caused when we brought the black rats over in the first place.
Also both people and black rats are overpopulating this planet.
This seems to me like a case of empathy gone awry. All that work and effort to bring back a species of insects? There is no balance to preserve; they've been gone for almost a century. Those resources could be spent preserving human life.
What resources? Are you suggesting we should force entomologists to attend medical school or whatever you're on about instead? Are you sure social programs of that sort wouldn't decrease the quality of human life anyway? Have you given any of this any thought? Do you give anything any thought, or do you just drift through life as a collection of anthropomorphized knee-jerk reactions?
This is a fascinating story, but I must ask - does this belong on hacker news? Please, I ask with no intended malice.
From the guidelines: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pict…
This is a fascinating story, but I must ask - does this belong on hacker news? Please, I ask with no intended malice.
From the guidelines: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pict…
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Playing the devil's advocate here but I believe humans do not need preserving. With 7 billion individuals and counting, it seems we're doing just fine. Regardless of how poor the living conditions are for many of us. For this particular species of insect however, having the last 24 remaining individuals of the entire species (presumably) be dependent on a single small shrubbery makes me think the effort put into this…
Humans are dying at a rate of 1.8 per second, and every human death is a tragedy of greater magnitude than the extinction of an insect species.
Also I'm going to drop back to an argument I hold near and dear. Lots of people are terrible, they hurt other people for their own gain. We start wars just because someone doesn't believe the same things as ourselves. We go out of our way to put others down with words just because we think that since words can't hurt then it must be okay to say whatever. All in all it's rather sad that a human being which is supposed to be superior to all other forms of life doesn't have the empathy to want to fix a problem we made for these animals in the first place. Call me crazy but as a human I'd like to leave things in a better state then they were in when I got here.
That's an awesome story! Initially I didn't like the genetic bottleneck created by just having one pair (i.e. that they should go back and get more now that they know how to care for them, perhaps as a swap) - but then I realized the original source on the island was probably a single individual, so they are all probably virtually clones anyway. Once they have enough they should sell some - tons of people would be de…
Now, marketing them as pets to residents of Lord Howe Island might be a good way to get them to accept repopulation...