#and eradicate invasive species

[nururu]

I'm literally a mountain man. like my childhood dream come true.

[carbonated-fenwater]

Mostly screaming into the void with this one but I'm almost to the end of earning my Bachelor's and I've got something to say.

It is not edgy or subversive to redirect your hatred onto animals that you deem morally impure or to try and yassify misunderstood creatures.

"Sea otters assault their females to death and drown their pups" they are still a cornerstone species worth protecting and whole ecosystems are suffering for the loss of them.

"Sharks are just ocean puppies and big sweeties." No they're not, they are apex predators and you have to treat them with respect. Saying they're not capable of aggression or completely misunderstood is still spreading misinformation, you cannot generalize a group of animals like this.

"Dolphins are super smart and actually capable of understanding that some of their behaviors are evil" I am actually going to break into your house and steal your shoes if you say this to me.

"Charismatic megafauna are useless and overrated and taking away from underappreciated species that Really need our help" wrong again dipshit. Animals like pandas, elephants, whales, and others that I'm sure you're tired of seeing plastered everywhere are important to get the general public involved. It's called PR (and while I wish it wasn't necessary and that people would care regardless I digress) and what conservation work IS done based around them is advantageous to other threatened species that share their habitat.

As someone going into the field of ecological conservation and marine biology, I have met one too many people who think it's okay to say a certain animal doesn't deserve to be protected because it makes them feel yucky or just because they think it doesn't deserve it. I shouldn't have to tell you why that is SO not okay. The underappreciated and overrated can both exist, you don't need to proselytize people into hating dolphins just so sharks can get their dues.

You're also allowed to just dislike an animal! But if you sensationalize their behaviors that are morally incorrect by human standards, then I am begging you to reevaluate yourself, get more educated on the subject, and talk to a real ecologist.

No creature on this planet deserves to be eradicated just because you are personally offended by their natural behaviors or deem them unfit to take up space.

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

Daily fish fact #516

Common carp!

The species is classified as invasive in many areas, but it is a vulnerable species in its natural range! Common carp domestication has very long roots, hence why its range has become so large.

[towelpng]

i’m a lettuce girlie yknow what i mean. me and the other lettuce girlies enjoy our topping and dressing flavored lettuce for the first half of the salad, and spend the second half of the salad trying to re balance the ruined topping economy only to end up with straight dressed toppings at the end of it.

[armandism]

i dont usually agree with wild caught animals as pets but i do think its okay and even good to just snatch up pigeons and give them a home

[wandering-wolf23]

Look, I don't care how invasive or "bad" a species is, but if you start talking about how you detest that species and want to kill all of them, I'm going to give you the side eye and avoid you.

Plants and animals aren't inherently evil and they aren't malicious. They just are. Maybe they're in the wrong place, but they are acting according to their natural instincts. They're not being evil or mean or invasive on purpose. Chances are, people put them in a place they're not supposed to be.

Talk about managing them, yes. But don't talk about wanting to kill them with fire or how you'd like to take a gun and shoot them all so they suffer before they die. That's really fucked up.

[unpopularvetopinions]

The most important thing to remember about "ethical vegetarians" and "ecological vegans" is that you don't have to pay attention to anything they say about ecology or ethics.

A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore

[whats-in-a-sentence]

This is evident from their recent limited approval for use in Northern Territory and Queensland in attempts to eradicate the imported red fire ant (figure 18.6), which was discovered in Brisbane in early 2001 and subsequently in Victoria and other places including Auckland.

"Chemistry" 2e - Blackman, A., Bottle, S., Schmid, S., Mocerino, M., Wille, U.

[cursedauxiliary]

in an environmental sociology class and its nuts to me how little ppl understand like... basic things of nature... I'm talking like how nature that does not follow property lines or borders

[dendrochronologies]

an under-represented aspect of siblinghood is knowing that 5:20am isn't too early to argue over plant identification

[catsconflictscopicsandchamomile]

yknow I was gonna post a long incoherent rant here, but I'll just say that as someone who's worked outdoors and had to filter my own water, under the supervision of trained/lifelong professionals, as someone who almost majored in this stuff, as someone who currently works closely with the MOST "radical" of water rights activists (not on this issue, we just run in the same circles), and as someone with a basic understanding of the water cycle and the ability to look outside and observe reality

I call mega super huge BS on this post. either its outright lying, or (way more likely) lying by omission by using real scientific facts with 0 context.

how "dangerous" are these chemicals and what exactly do they do? has this been proven to affect wildlife in any way? are these chemicals present in drinking/tap water right now? "a study" seems like a reliable source, but that isnt always the case, especially re: "studies" used in headline news. I'm not in the statistics field, is there anyone who is who could tell us more about the "study" linked in the first article?

there are lots of things that are scary in the world, and many if not most of them ARE caused by human evil. before ppl reading this post spiral, think about what context is missing.

and, HUGE red flag for me: why is the first reblog someone feeling outraged and saying they need to protest and that they feel powerless/dont know what to do.... and the second reblog is OP, with a comic of a person being handed a gun.

and why does that message keep repeating throughout the thread.

I'm not anti-science. I'm DEFINITELY not "anti-leftist" or "anti-anarchist". I work regularly in radical leftist spaces irl and know people who are on domestic terrorist watchlists for their activism in Land Back and water rights movements. These spaces are the most hopeful, freeing, and welcoming places, and yes, anger IS present there, rage IS present there.

but what neither the "facts" as presented in this post, or the reactions encouraged here, are present in those spaces. so. yeah

hard side-eye

ALT

[wachinyeya]

Tiny Indian Ocean Island Shows How Quickly Seabirds Recover When Invasive Predators Are Removed https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/tiny-indian-ocean-island-shows-how-quickly-seabirds-recover-when-invasive-predators-are-removed/

18 years after rats were eradicated, Tromelin Island off the coast of Madagascar is a thriving colony of seabirds once again.

The same story happened over and over during the age of exploration: Europeans brought rats or rabbits on board their ships and dumped them on delicate, pristine island ecosystems.

Hundreds of islands became desolate wastelands this way, damage that has for the most part been reversed, as GNN has reported, in one of the greatest conservation stories ever told.

Now, this small teardrop of sand, rock, and palm trees in the southern Indian Ocean, is the most recent example of conservationists being able to completely rewild a landscape back to a period before European contact.

Spanning just 1 square kilometer, Tromelin Island is now home to thousands of breeding pairs of 7 seabird species like the masked and red-footed boobies.

By 2013, these two species had doubled in number from the precarious, rat oppressed lows of just a handful in 2004. In the subsequent 9 years, white terns, brown noddies, sooty terns, wedge-tailed shearwaters, and lesser noddies all came back on their own initiative.

Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, told Hakkai Magazine how, in some cases, restoring seabird populations can be a tricky thing based on the particular species’ nesting habits.

On other islands where Le Corre has worked, they’ve had to install robotic bird calls and life-size replicas to convince the birds the island is a safe place to nest again. But Tromelin Island needed no such help, since these terns, noddies, and boobies are much more dispersed in their nesting patterns.

“In terms of conservation, it’s a wonderful success,” Le Corre says.

[todaysbird]

why do you keep reposting invasive species like house sparrows and starlings? I love your blog, but am getting exhausted with always seeing invasives. You should already know that they don't belong here and need to be eradicated. They aren't "cute", they're vermin. I guess declining native species means nothing to you?

i mean you could ask the same of any blog that posts about domestic cats. do they not care about native species because they like cats? invasive birds also have native ranges…not everyone is US based and they didn’t spawn in as invasives, we created the problem. im not ‘pro’ invasive species (i support humane control methods) but im not against them existing as a whole either. you wouldn’t complain about someone drawing a lionfish because they are invasive; animals do not exist with a concept of being good or evil, they’re ultimately neutral beings and it’s not their fault we put them in non-native ranges where they thrive

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

How much of our scientific thinking has an unconscious religious bias?

This is in response to this post, from @headspace-hotel, about campaigns to eradicate Hybrid Cattails as an "Invasive Species," even though both individual species hybridizing themselves are native plants (But I didn't want to muddy a discussion about science with a rant about religion. So: a separate post it is)

I sometimes wonder if our dominant views of "natural vs. unnatural/invasive" were shaped, are shaped, by the particular theologies of Protestant Christianity...

You Know, the theology that teaches / believes:

Our world was created by a single, all-knowing god

Humanity Fell by disobeying that god, and thus tainted the world with Sin (so Humans are now apart from Nature [aka the Garden of Eden])

The Protestant Christians fetishized the North American Continent as an example of what Eden was like "Before the Fall," and the people who were already living here were Noble Savages.*

So now, anything that evolves in response to human influence (such as brackish cattails hybridizing with freshwater cattails), is considered "unnatural," as if it's been tainted by our sin.

I sometimes wonder what our environmental understanding would be like in an alternate universe where the sciences had evolved in a polytheistic culture.** Would we be more generally accepting of the idea of coexisting forces constantly intertwining, and changing, rather than there being a single, fixed, "pure" world, that must be protected from contamination?

[BTW. I've become an atheist in this last third of my life, so I don't think any one religion is "more true" than any other: they're all metaphors that help us frame and understand the actual world we live in; they are very powerful metaphors, and for some, can be helpful and emotionally healthy ... for others, not so much.]

*(even though the abundant environment the colonizers found here was actually deliberately managed and curated by humans -- it's just that it wasn't managed in the form of fenced off square plots, and straight rows of crops).

**If you don't believe scientific thinking can evolve within a polytheistic paradigm, check out (what survives of) the writings of Democritus and Epicurus. Their philosophies weren't following what we now consider the Scientific Method, but they were already drifting in that direction.