
Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual - shawndumas
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mapping_the_mass_animal_die-offs.php
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ck2
They are up to 5,000+ dead blackbirds now in that one town.

I find that highly disturbing. If it was 5,000 across the USA, it would be
worrisome and sad but somehow in one place (and then more in another place)
gets the "alarming" label for me.

Don't forget all the fish-kills and how they now think the mass bee extinction
is from seemingly EPA approved pesticides.

~~~
sp332
5,000 birds across the country? That's about one for every area the size of
Rhode Island. Blackbirds are _the_ most abundant kind of bird on this
continent. A few thousand here or there is literally not going to make any
difference. This is not nearly on the same scale as the bee crisis.

Edit: Even if there are only 10 million blackbirds living at any given time
(I'm sure there are more), and they have a lifespan of 5 years, that's a
turnover of 5,400 on an average day.

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roc
The deaths aren't worthy of concern and investigation only if they're linked.

They're worthy of concern and investigation in each instance because history
has shown they tend to happen for one of two reasons: severe weather shock or
human activity.

Thus we need to carefully consider and investigate each occurrence, lest we
ignore the metaphoric canary in the coalmine on the grounds that 'canaries die
all the time'.

Truly the news cycle has latched onto an easy-to-sell trend and narrative. But
their behavior, and the laughable connections they imply, don't speak to
whether or not any given mass animal death truly is a non-issue.

~~~
jerf
The canary in the coal mine is only useful because there's only one plausible
explanation for it keeling over. If they died all the time for no good reason
they'd be useless. It might be _really cool_ if we could extract signal
against a noisy background but there's mathematical limits on our ability to
do that even in theory, and we're generally better off looking at the less
noisy signals.

Plus chasing noise turns out to be really dangerous. 5% of the time or so,
random processes will correlate with something else you look at with 95%
confidence. Your suggestion is not a good idea at all, it's a recipe for
spurious connections and wildly disproportionate responses, no matter how good
it feels to a human brain.

~~~
roc
Except that when it comes to mass animal deaths, the rate of it being caused
by human activity isn't anywhere near as low as noise. And mass die offs
simply don't happen "all the time". Canaries die of non-gas-related causes far
more often than entire flocks of birds and schools of fish die within feet and
seconds of one another.

Essentially, if a mass die off doesn't correlate with a particularly sudden
weather event, or known human activity (fireworks displays) it's safe to
assume it _is_ us, from something we (tautologically) didn't know was
happening or didn't expect to cause these problems.

And at that point, it's just straight-up good science to investigate the
remaining cases to better understand our environment and how our activity is
affecting it.

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SimonPStevens
The more complete historical data is here:
[http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/publications/quarterly_reports/inde...](http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/publications/quarterly_reports/index.jsp)

the NWHC has quarterly reports on wildlife mortality dating back to 1995
online (and they claim to have records back to 1975 in databases).

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msbmsb
The google map linked in the article[1] contains many entries that don't quite
fit the oddness of some of the die-offs people are talking about. For example,
[2] refers to 150 tons of tilapia that died because of being farmed too
densely. [3] refers to fish that died when a small city lake froze over with a
bunch of decaying leaves trapped under the ice releasing methane. And others.

[1]:
[http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=20...](http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=201817256339889828327.0004991bca25af104a22b&t=h&ll=64.320872,16.171875&spn=87.534022,210.585938&z=2&iwloc=0004991c2e41cf55affcb&source=embed)
[2]:
[http://business.asiaone.com/Business/News/Story/A1Story20101...](http://business.asiaone.com/Business/News/Story/A1Story20101231-255737.html)
[3]: [http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-
news/201...](http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-
news/2010/12/24/hundreds-of-fish-killed-in-greenbank-park-lake-after-water-
freezes-over-100252-27879505/)

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mcantelon
If mass die offs are so commonplace, why haven't tin foilers started tracking
and pointing them out before (as they have with "chemtrails")?

~~~
jerf
Because you can only conspiracy-theory about what you've noticed. They don't
actually notice anything new, or at least not very much new, the essence of
conspiracy theories is to weave existing readily-visible facts and a healthy
dollop of made up fantasy into some new theory. From what I can see they
hardly ever do anything like a real investigation and even when they do
there's a lot of the aforementioned fantasy in it. Like, someone writes a book
in which they claim to have spent a lot of time investigating UFO issues but
it's still mostly just regurgitated theories and a few allusions to trying to
get more info but mostly not. Info mostly just circulates and gets endlessly
chewed on, very little new info gets added into the morass by the actual
conspiracy theorists from what I can see, with a handful of exceptions.

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mahmud
Why is this article on ReadWriteWeb, an online zine for web-design?

Come to think of it, how would one classify RWW? "All the news that's
currently popular"?

~~~
Rubyred
ReadWriteWeb are linkbait whores. I'm totally serious. I stopped taking them
seriously a long time ago.

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metatronscube
They are perhaps quite common, but I think they are unusual and should be
investigated to see if they pose a risk to humans or other species.

~~~
shawndumas
investigate? yes. panic? no.

~~~
runjake
Who's panicking? I've only seen reports of alarm.

~~~
shawndumas
maybe not you and me but lots of people:

    
    
      Technology to blame for animal die-off panic [1].
    
      Mass Animal Deaths Leading To End Times Panic [2].
    
      Dead Bird Panic [3].
    

\----

[1]: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40961721/ns/us_news-environment/>

[2]:
[http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1974746/mass_animal_dea...](http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1974746/mass_animal_deaths_leading_to_end_times_panic/)

[3]: [http://metabunk.org/content/137-Dead-Bird-Panic-How-Media-
Fo...](http://metabunk.org/content/137-Dead-Bird-Panic-How-Media-Focus-
Distorts-a-Subject)

~~~
runjake
Yeesh, the media really likes to stir stuff up. Those articles read like self-
fulfilling prophecies.

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lfittl
Direct link to the map the article is based on:
[http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=20...](http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=201817256339889828327.0004991bca25af104a22b&t=h&ll=64.320872,16.171875&spn=87.534022,210.585938&z=2&iwloc=0004991c2e41cf55affcb&source=embed)

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DanI-S
Mass death hasn't been particularly uncommon throughout human history, either,
but it's probably not something to aspire to.

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newt
Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual ... especially in the middle of
winter, when food is hardest to find.

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Rubyred
I love the wording here: "not unusual". So what does it make it? Usual?

------
Rubyred
I can see it now: the moon spirals off into the sun, and some "expert" is
going to say that it's "not unusual".

