
Why Don't We Hear About More Species Going Extinct? - headalgorithm
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/why-dont-we-hear-about-more-species-going-extinct/
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decasia
One of the big things that comes to my mind is that kids who grow up in cities
are literally, tangibly cut off from wild natural environments. They often end
up not even knowing how to recognize practically any species of plants and
animals. So how can you really value a diversity you've barely ever
encountered in your own life?

relevant research:
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0193993)

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decasia
FWIW I was super lucky to grow up on an abandoned farm with a huge patch of
woods, streams, and swamps. It was sad to eventually figure out that there was
just no way to make that experience scale to the whole US population (even if
they wanted it too). Of course it was also lonely sometimes and required quite
a bit of driving, so I'm not going to defend it as an ecological or social
utopia.

Nevertheless, I think it was really good to be around so many plants and
animals as a kid.

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rjf72
Why do you say it would be impossible to scale it? The US has 330 million
people, and 2.3 billion acres of land. That's averages out to 7 acres of land
for every man, woman, and child. 700 acres for a little residential area of
100 people. Of course some of the land is barren and other parts have to be
used for agriculture, but the numbers are just so large here that I don't
think it matters so much.

Of course this is all just pie in the sky since it never _will_ happen, but I
think it's interesting to think about. It's easy to forget how huge our
country really is. Urban areas only make up 3% of our entire landmass.

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hyperbovine
> Urban areas only make up 3% of our entire landmass.

And 80% of our population. Yet our political system was conceived in an era
when those numbers were roughly comparable. It amazes me that more people do
not see this as a problem.

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brighter2morrow
The US political system isn't trying to use states as a proxy for population
measure. The US is a federation of states that only agreed to join the
federation on the condition that they get a certain guarantee of clout within
the federation.

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kshacker
Does not mean that a political system is a god given commandment that can not
change to move to a better system. And if some states did agree to join a
model, it would be the 13 original colonies. I suspect (but do not know) that
the other 37 were annexed.

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brighter2morrow
The only two states that were annexed are Texas and Hawaii. Most other
territory of today's states was purchased although some of it was ceded to the
US, particularly much of the Southwest was ceded to the US by Mexico as a
result of the Mexican-American war of the 1840s. (This doesn't include Puerto
Rico and a number of unincorporated territories which were a mix of annexed
and purchased.)

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kshacker
Tomato, tomato: ha ha. A war is a war, the losing side gives up, the winning
side gets what the losing side gave

Annex: add (territory) to one's own territory by appropriation

Cede: give up (power or territory)

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b_tterc_p
I’m never clear in what it means to lose biodiversity. Rainforests are < 10%
of the earths land mass but contain a massive proportion of biodiversity.
There are many species that live in small segments of a single rainforest. We
cut down rainforests all the time. I would assume naively that if we reduce 1%
of rainforest area we lose some single digit percent of the earth’s
biodiversity.

Reducing biodiversity in other ecosystems would take a lot more effort (not to
make it sound like a goal).

It wouldn’t be incorrect to say the earth’s biodiversity is rapidly dropping,
purely due to the Amazon. What do we mean?

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Retric
One use of the term was in reference to novel biological compounds. In that
context species diversity means quite a bit with millions of samples not being
significantly more useful than hundreds.

With so many medical compounds arising from plant or animal life it’s not an
unreasonable idea that a major drug has been lost with the loss of tropical
species. Though, this seems to be less important with advances in
biotechnology.

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dnautics
The irony though is that the rainforest is actually one of the least
biodiverse parts of the world for that particular purpose. Sure, the
rainforest is biodiverse for megafauna and, to a lesser degree, megaflora, but
if you really want to mine biodiversity for biochemicals, you ought to care
about bacteria and fungi, which reproduce and gene-share like crazy. The best
places for that are places which drive resource competition and don't have
jerk megaflora fumigating the area with simple terpenes -- the desert.
However, the desert is less photographically charismatic (in terms of showing
'life') and probably also researchers would rather ask for grants to visit the
rainforest or go scuba diving, so that biases the public's perception of where
biodiversity exists.

[https://www.pnas.org/content/103/3/626.short](https://www.pnas.org/content/103/3/626.short)

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Retric
In terms of medicine, the further an organism is from humans the less likely
it's compounds are directly useful. Bacteria have a huge variety of compounds,
but are so alien they have been a poor source of medical compounds. Plants on
the other hand while still very separated from us need to interact with
animals on a regular basis which closes the gap.

CRISPER is arguably the exception that proves the rule here. Extremely useful,
but no need to preserve exotic locations.

PS: Not that I necessarily agree with this, but I have seen this line of
reasoning put forth.

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dnautics
What? Every single compound that ends in -mycin/-micin comes from bacteria.

Erythromycin Azithromycin Tobramycin Kanamycin Clindamycin Clarithromycin
Gentamicin Streptomycin Vancomycin Lincomycin Telithromycin Fosfomycin
Doxorubicin

Etc...

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Retric
That’s from something like 1 trillion bacteria species vs 300k plant species.
Considering we have 120+ important medical compounds from plants we would need
~400,000 from bacteria for each species to have equal weight.

Further, fighting bacteria is a connection between us and bacteria so deriving
an antibiotic is an obvious connection. Looking for say an anti cholesterol
drug on the other hand and your stuck with random interactions.

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dnautics
normalizing by number of species (which is a vague concept anyways, most
species nomenclature in bacteria is driven by the need to publish - salmonella
and e coli are basically the same) is completely irrelevant concept for this
discussion.

When you're looking for 'random interactions' most chemists reach for
combichem anyways. Look at all of the drugs that treat CML - (gleevec eg) none
of them come from any biotic source.

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amelius
So what metrics are there for biodiversity? Which metric should the media
adopt?

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brighter2morrow
I would rather the media not be involved. The media presents biased
perspectives on behalf of powerful interests to mislead the public. If the
media got behind one measure or another then I would be immediately skeptical
of it. For the integrity of science we should keep the media as far away from
this as possible.

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frankbreetz
How are people supposed to learn about a problem if not by the media?

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BurningFrog
I assume the vast majority of these species are insignificant insect species
almost no one has ever heard of?

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pfdietz
Because most people don't actually care about biodiversity, and efforts to
make them care have failed.

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vixen99
Your evidence regarding 'most people'? Pew Research last year report that 63%
of Americans say the the government is doing too little to protect animals and
their habitat. They evidently do care about these matters.

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SomeOldThrow
If you look at their actions, they do not care. You aren’t gonna vote or
consume change into the world.

EDIT: to be clear, voting is useful, but politicians facing a complacent
population will follow their own agenda—you need to act outside of the voting
booth to push them in the direction you want.

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weberc2
Seems most likely to me that the public doesn’t know what to do or how to
help. The things that are most publicized are often the least impactful (e.g.,
plastic straws. All we hear is that the house is burning but there’s no
discernible authority telling laypeople what they can do about it. And we need
an authority to weigh in because misinformation is rife and reasoning properly
isn’t possible for laypeople (e.g., what uses more carbon, the shrink wrapped
vegetables that stay fresh longer or the ones that go bad sooner but don’t use
plastic? What about local organic produce that isn’t shipped as far but has
much lower yields than its GMO counterparts? Etc etc). Personally I want to
make a difference but I don’t know how and I am probably more in-the-know than
the average layperson. I firmly believe that environmentalists and scientists
need to build a credible information pipeline—it’s not enough to proclaim
fear, they need to communicate what we should do. “Use less carbon is not
actionable”.

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SomeOldThrow
We need strikes in america. I don’t see any other way. This is a fairly
useless action yourself. I also don’t have great answers, obviously.

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brighter2morrow
Strikes only work when the media portrays them sympathetically. The media will
never even report a strike happened if powerful interests are against it.

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bubblewrap
I wonder if Chinese Medicine would know? They seem to extract medicine from
anything that lives on the planet, so perhaps they would notice if supply
dries up?

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southern_cross
Probably because extinctions aren't actually occurring at the rate they're
being claimed to, that's why. Population collapse from large numbers down to
much smaller numbers is one thing (and is probably what's really happening
here), but outright extinction is something else.

I've lost track now of the number of times some species has been declared
"extinct", only to have it pop up again later. And IIRC, lately there have
even been claims that a species can actually go extinct, only to have a
closely related species then morph into that extinct species, almost like
nature has a "reboot" button for when a species does go extinct.

