Puffins are in trouble(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Puffins are in trouble
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/29/climate/puffins-dwindling-iceland.html
62 comments
I live in Newfoundland and here the Puffin (our provincial bird) is doing really well [1]. The town where I'm from I can drive 5 minutes to two separate puffin nesting sites and in the city where I live I can get to a colony of 300,000 in ~20mins. Not trying to diminish the issues seen by the Iceland birds but I'm glad they appear to be doing well here. Great for our tourism too. (Should also note that they can't be hunted here either)
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/puffins-aplenty-newfoundland-despi...
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/puffins-aplenty-newfoundland-despi...
I'm glad they're still doing well in Newfoundland. I always enjoyed spotting them on the small island next to Cape Bonavista Lighthouse.
To summarize: it's climate change. Just working it's way up the food chain until it impacts the apex predator on this planet.
Eh, you left off the hunters "killed hundreds" per day part...
This is only tangentially related to the article, but if you have small children I can't recommend Puffin Rock enough as a kids show. It teaches really simple environmental messages in a very subtle way while being absolutely adorable and fun to watch.
I love that Chris O'Dowd [1] does the narration. Great mix of calming accent and my enjoyment of the IT crowd.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_O%27Dowd
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_O%27Dowd
Who knew puffins had irish accents? Watch out for those seagulls!
Compared to a lot of other kids shows, I find that it's still fun to watch but it's also really relaxing. The music, the narration and the design have a calming feeling to them. Really a good show :)
Came here to post the exact same thing.
Anyone who wants to passively save some puffins should eat Puffins the cereal.
http://barbaras.com/community/project-puffin/
http://barbaras.com/community/project-puffin/
When the adults can’t catch enough to feed themselves and the chicks, they make an instinctive Malthusian choice; the chicks starve. Dr. Fayet called her quest “heartbreaking”: “You put your hand in the burrow and feel with your hand a little ball on the floor, but then you realize it’s cold, and not moving.”
What can we do to help?
Global warming may be slowed down to less catastrophic levels if society changes to live more sustainably, most importantly by burning less fossil fuel. Vote for political parties who support this, lobby your elected representatives to push for sustainable policies. Try to convince as many people as possible that this an issue we need to address now.
Why does a GPS tracker cost $800? What's special about it that pushes the cost so high?
I don't know about GPS trackers, but my experience with scientific sensors in general has been that they tend to be quite expensive when compared to similar commodity items. They need to be in robust waterproof housings, compatible with other proprietary equipment and software, and accessible to non-programmers and newbs. I have seen things less fancy then a GPS tracker, like temperature or water level sensors with a few kb of storage and a serial port, that easily exceed $800 cost. This is frustrating to scientists, and many use substitute consumer equipment, roll their own when they can, or substitute cheap labor for overpriced automation. Sometimes an undergrad research assistant with sneaker-net is cheaper then then sensors' proprietary networking module. Most of this stuff has a "stuck in the 90's" kind of feel to it. 9600b serial ports, ncurses looking vendor software and propriety radio instead of wifi or cellular. Which would be cool if it was free and open, but it's not.
I think it's low-volume, high margin market, and not very competitive. An opportunity perhaps?
I think it's low-volume, high margin market, and not very competitive. An opportunity perhaps?
sure sounds like an opportunity
Our company uses various GPS trackers on a daily basis, the only thing that I can imagine pushes the cost that high is size. Smaller = Higher Cost. As the birds probably can only take so much extra weight
TLDR: Warming oceans lead to the decline of sand eels which they feed to their young.
Maybe the presence of 7,646,237,844 people in the world has something to do with it; at the end of the day for as sad as it seems the best thing it could happen to wildlife is a plague that only affects humans (perhaps a plague that sterilizes us would suffice)
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but please don't post shallow provocations to Hacker News. Those lead to off-topic and frankly dumb subthreads.
Seems like a productive topic considering the feature article concludes the cause is climate. Global population is a significant factor in most climate discussions.
The problem is that the smaller, curious topics—like puffins—tend to get sucked into the nearest black hole, i.e. the nearest large generic controversy. If we allow this, then the site will consist of the same few comments about the same few topics over and over. That's bad for intellectual curiosity. It also causes the site to burst into flames—not good for curiosity either.
I called this 'dumb' above because you can reliably see such threads deteriorate as you read down and to the right.
I called this 'dumb' above because you can reliably see such threads deteriorate as you read down and to the right.
I find the discussions about american lifestyle and how much it matters and how much consumption would be acceptable fascinating, and how countries laws would need to affect birthrates and all that as well; but if dang says its off-topic and dumb, well what can I do.
> if dang says its off-topic and dumb, well what can I do.
One option would be to listen & learn rather than expressing incredulity, assume that dang knows what he's doing and that you're getting downvoted by others for a legitimate reason.
The topic of American consumption is fascinating and important, but this article is about Puffins in Iceland. @dang didn't say it's dumb, he said it leads to dumb. But he did say it was off-topic, because it is. Don't assume that off-topic means dumb, don't take it personally.
FWIW, I think there are relevant on-topic ways to introduce topics of overpopulation and American consumption into this thread. Those are related to both the climate change and to the tourism and Puffin hunting that is affecting the Puffin populations in Iceland.
If you had tied your comment to something the article said specifically, it would have helped. And, of course, you really could have done without the apocalyptic suggestion for a mass human extinction event.
One option would be to listen & learn rather than expressing incredulity, assume that dang knows what he's doing and that you're getting downvoted by others for a legitimate reason.
The topic of American consumption is fascinating and important, but this article is about Puffins in Iceland. @dang didn't say it's dumb, he said it leads to dumb. But he did say it was off-topic, because it is. Don't assume that off-topic means dumb, don't take it personally.
FWIW, I think there are relevant on-topic ways to introduce topics of overpopulation and American consumption into this thread. Those are related to both the climate change and to the tourism and Puffin hunting that is affecting the Puffin populations in Iceland.
If you had tied your comment to something the article said specifically, it would have helped. And, of course, you really could have done without the apocalyptic suggestion for a mass human extinction event.
I definitely didn't mean to pick on you personally and am sorry if I came across that way. For more explanation see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17870574.
Or we could just, you know, decide to have fewer kids.
Alternatively, we could decide to eat more puffins.
Seems like a pretty inappropriate topic to joke about, honestly. Species-level extinction and/or extirpation is a pretty grave matter, and is accelerating.
Based on my interests and background, I have very little faith that humanity appreciates the scale of the problem, how intractable it is to short term resolution, and potentially how many people globally could die as a result of it. For example, I think there's a really substantial probability that all people could die within 50 years, because of 1) where climate change is likely to hit worst 2) the desperate nature of famine 3) the number of nuclear armed states in those areas 4) the number of automated counterstrike mechanisms out there.
So, get your cheap laughs in about the puffins while you can.
edit: To support my negativity, I will just say look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857964 to see how complicated something as trivial as building a house is... now, I cannot tell you how to avert global warming, but I can tell you that I have almost no faith at all any given poster here knows what is actually needed to successfully do a climate intervention or durable carbon sequestration program (materials, supply chain, technology, poltical coordination, etc). Another post on here notes we can't even agree to have fewer kids. It's very dire, and very few people seem to appreciate it. For example, the elected leader of the world's largest economy has already reversed policies that reduce CO2 emission and plans on reducing more, and has severely limited research on the subject.
Based on my interests and background, I have very little faith that humanity appreciates the scale of the problem, how intractable it is to short term resolution, and potentially how many people globally could die as a result of it. For example, I think there's a really substantial probability that all people could die within 50 years, because of 1) where climate change is likely to hit worst 2) the desperate nature of famine 3) the number of nuclear armed states in those areas 4) the number of automated counterstrike mechanisms out there.
So, get your cheap laughs in about the puffins while you can.
edit: To support my negativity, I will just say look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857964 to see how complicated something as trivial as building a house is... now, I cannot tell you how to avert global warming, but I can tell you that I have almost no faith at all any given poster here knows what is actually needed to successfully do a climate intervention or durable carbon sequestration program (materials, supply chain, technology, poltical coordination, etc). Another post on here notes we can't even agree to have fewer kids. It's very dire, and very few people seem to appreciate it. For example, the elected leader of the world's largest economy has already reversed policies that reduce CO2 emission and plans on reducing more, and has severely limited research on the subject.
If anything this article makes me wonder if they're good to eat. Generally speaking sea birds are to poultry as coons, possum and skunk are to meat.
They're delicious, but you have to like game. Kind of like a really strong tasting duck, but hard to describe. Maybe a cross between duck breast and liver?
That said, they should probably slow down on the hunting until they've worked out what's going on.
That said, they should probably slow down on the hunting until they've worked out what's going on.
Peak kids has already happened https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/08/reached-peak-bab...
volcel(1)
If there is one thing humans can't clearly do is agree on something; so I'm afraid that is not an option, specially since the desire to have kids is one of the most hard-wired desires in sexual organisms.
That's just not true, people tend to desire less and less kids, a lot of people deliberately chose to have no kids, something that was unthinkable several decades ago.
If ever there was a self-fulfilling prophecy, that's it. There's a first time for everything. And in fact, there's a proven way to make people decide to have fewer kids: make them rich. People in more affluent societies generally choose to have fewer kids, to the point where the fertility rate in some places (Japan, Italy) is below the replacement rate. So it clearly can be done.
Wealth is just a proxy. What lowers the reproduction rate is higher living standards. And having all humans on current industrialized nation living standards with current methods of production certainly would not make things more sustainable.
If you want sustainability you either need fewer humans or clean up the entire supply chain. And the latter might just suffer from jevon's paradox.
If you want sustainability you either need fewer humans or clean up the entire supply chain. And the latter might just suffer from jevon's paradox.
the desire to have kids is one of the most hard-wired desires in sexual organisms.
And yet, Europe and Japan have plenty of childless people.
And yet, Europe and Japan have plenty of childless people.
overcast(3)
matz1(1)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/03/shetland...