Max: Things I Shouldn't Find Amusing
20 endangered rabbits released; 14 promptly eaten
Most of a group of 20 endangered rabbits that were reintroduced to the wild with great fanfare last month have been killed by predators, state officials said.
Only four of the rabbits released on March 13 remained at the Sagebrush Flat Wildlife Area as of Tuesday, said David Hays, pygmy rabbit coordinator for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Most of a group of 20 endangered rabbits that were reintroduced to the wild with great fanfare last month have been killed by predators, state officials said.
Only four of the rabbits released on March 13 remained at the Sagebrush Flat Wildlife Area as of Tuesday, said David Hays, pygmy rabbit coordinator for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
posted by Max Dobberstein at 4/13/2007 01:48:00 PM
6 Comments:
I don't know how to react to this kind of thing.
I mean, extinction happens all the time. Mother Nature, or Mom as I like to call her, tries all kinds of stuff. Sometimes Mom's stuff works, sometimes it doesn't work and sometimes it works so well it might as well not have worked. For example, imagine a predator that is such an efficient killing machine that it eats all of it's possible food sources. This is a very good predator - until it dies of starvation.
Maybe the pygmy rabbit is an evolutionary dead end. Maybe introducing 20 of them was optimistic! Maybe they should have introduced a hundred and 20 might have survived.
I watched a show once on a flower in Hawaii that scientists were pollenating by hand. They were doing this because the natural pollenator, most likely a bee or a moth, had vanished. No one was even sure if there ever was a bee or a moth, but they were pretty sure that white men finding the island had something to do with the flower's problems.
All of that was bad enough, but to pollenate this thing, scientists had to go rock climbing! They had to climb down cliff faces and swing from flower to flower with a Q-tip! I think maybe Mom has selected this plant to fail - it will certainly fail the moment funding runs out.
And while we lose several species due to pollution, over fishing, deforestation, etc. - others thrive. On a different show, they were talking about the Maine lobster. They said that the waters in Maine are so over fished and polluted that very few things can survive. But, hardy lobsters, who have had most of their natural predators removed by our pollution and fishing, are in paradise! Their numbers are increasing. Overfishing them would be tough to do.
I'm torn between the lesson of futility and the loss of our beautiful planet. Had Mom picked out condors and spotted owls to croak? Should we spend the money to revive speicies that have already passed? If you think I'm kidding, look up the work that's going on to bring back the wooly mammoth - an animal that had very little to do with our polution.
I guess time will tell, but somewhere, the gods are laughing.
The thing is, we are a part of that chain of life. Maybe the critters were "supposed" to die off. But we can't be so cavalier. Right now there is a massive die off of bees. If bees go extinct, so will a lot of plants that we like to eat, as well as plants our meat critters like to eat. What I'm saying is, it could hurt, y'know.
We might be able to save the bees or we could build a better pollenator. We haven't been able to save the water ways and bodies from our "progress" - but we have built great filters!
Drink up!
I had actually heard about this before the release, this is hear in Washington state, there aern't 120 of these rabbits left to release. there are something around 60 left in the wild. Not that I'm saying its not ironic. It's just that I heard about this before the fact, these are our states most endangered animal.
As a bit of an aside, humans have quite an influence on this planet, even if trying to save these rabbits is futile its certainly not ignoble, and its nice to see some effort here and there to make things better around here, cause planet-wise I haven't got a plan B.
And, see, that's one of the problems I have with how we are doing things. We could use a Plan B for a planet. Stephen Hawking, one of the smartest men ever, seems to think we need a Plan B - I agree with the smart guy.
Here we have a rabbit species that isn't particularly successful. Mother Nature has lots of evolutionary dead ends. I see all kinds of rabbits around this part of the world. When I lived on the East Side, the lawns around Microsoft were just covered with black and white cute fuzzies. We would talk about the "Redmond Rabbits" and the "Bellevue Bunnies" recently we've seen "Renton Rabbits" and "Kent Big Hares". My point is that rabbits are usually a pretty successful beast - yet these poor things are dying out.
So, we are spending millions of dollars to try to save these little buggers. Noble it may be. But smart it's not - these guys are probably going to die out. Those millions of dollars could have gone toward finding a way to set up human colonies around the solar system. I'm sure the money spent on this program wouldn't have solved that issue, but it would have helped us find a Planet Plan B a lot better than trying to save these walking Coyote snacks!
But the bunnies are so cute and fuzzy! :(
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