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TIL There are 30,000 free roaming bison but there are 500,000 total including privately owned and commercial herds.
Also, like, it wasn’t just a “decision to stop” it was the end of a coincidence of factors. The mid century climatic conditions that led to several years of poor grass growth, with the combined hunting efforts of European American settlers on rail roads supported by the army’s policies against the Great Plains Indians, south eastern Indians displaced in to the great planes, and Great Plains Indians intensifying hunting via sophisticated methods they’d developed using horseback and fire arms, all driven by a demand for buffalo hides for use in industrial machinery. The end of the bad climatic conditions and the collapse of the hide trade due to development of other industrial materials is what stoped the over hunting.
With the pressures of hunting decreased and a historic climatic event over, the population was able to rebound somewhat, but, due to the encroachment of farms and ranching never really recover. Also the genetic bottleneck of the population probably hasn’t helped things but that’s not super well studied.
semi-serious question: i think almost every species extinct in recent history can be brought back to live with genetic engineering?
Not really.
First of all, because we would need the DNA of those animals. Sure, you can cobble some shit together, to make an animal that looks like that extinct species, but it would not actually be that extinct species.
Another issue is the biome/niche that species lived in. They either went extinct because of changes to their environment, or, they went extinct, and that caused changes in their environment. So if you want to bring the species back, you also need to make sure they have a suitable environment to survive in.
You also can’t just bring back one. A population needs generic diversity to adapt and survive. So to de-extinct a species, you need to bring back like 25 generically varied examples. Much more work than just creating a single specimen.
Behavior matters for a species as well. If orcas went extinct in the wild, and we bought them back with a breeding program in zoos and aquarium and just released those solitary orcas into the wild, do you think they would act like orcas? Would they hunt with the same techniques? I think the pack mentality would be gone, their “language” would be gone, and I don’t think they would survive.
The reality is, extinction is a permanent thing. We may possibly have the ability to bring a species “back” but there will be permanent, population-altering irreversible effects from going extinct in the first place.
As a biologist, can confirm.
In theory, and ignoring a wide variety of yet unsolved problems, sure!
Because they finally caged the velociraptor in the middle image?
Look at the gunbarrel around it. That’s the velociraptor equivalent of James Bond. You can’t put it in a cage.
30,000 is roughly 1/3 of 60,000,000.
VERY roughly. Lol
Logarithmically scaled image. I’ll leave the determination of the base of the Log as an exercise for the viewer.
I would show my proof, but I don’t have enough space in this margin
well, we know bison in the middle are worth approximately 75 each…
OBVIOUSLY!!
It’s only off by roughly 20,000,000
yeah this graphic is terrible
Yeah, we need 799613 more bison images to justify the graphic.
I think it gets the point across even if it’s off by orders of magnitude.
I get that, but I personally think 60,000,000 tiny buffalo would be more impactful. Can someone do a quick edit in Photoshop?
There’s not even 60,000,000 pixels in that image.
The decision to stop was required, but a ton of work was done to help the population rebound. What kind of misguided message is this trying to send?
It’s trying to tell people who think it’s too much work to bother that it’s not. I do it all the time, like when I have to wash the dishes and I tell myself “I’ll just wash one dish” because I know if I do that I’ll be a lot more motivated to continue, but if I keep looking at the whole problem before I start, I’ll be too overwhelmed to do anything at all.
Sure, the bison population is 0.05% of what it once was. And now that we’re not actively attempting to extinct them, everything is hunky dory and no more work is needed.
I don’t know how else to interpret this. It sounds like the Bison Society would rather be a society dedicated to literal anything else. The Kick the Can Down the Road Society, perhaps.
Each of the bison shapes in the 60mil example are actually clusters of bison so small you can’t see them with the naked eye.
Each bison image is worth 75 bison according to the middle section.
Jokes on you, I wear glasses and still can’t see them
Jokes on you, I have no eyes and I can’t even read what you said.
The jokes on you, the post you couldn’t read contains the winning lottery numbers.
Jokes on you, those winning lottery numbers were for the hunger games. Here’s your bow and arrow
Joke’s on you, my eyes are the only part of me that isn’t naked right now.
Log scale?
graph designer “i don’t like math” scale
I don’t think this is to scale.
I agree. Bison are much larger than that.
300 is a hell of a bottleneck
Apparently there is a certain amount of inbreeding with cattle, but several large herds without any interbreeding with cattle are closely managed to prevent inbreeding.
Thank goodness for the Bronx Zoo and the WCS.
I thought this was about vaccines until I read the bottom.
