At least partly, anyway.
Here's more of the truth of the matter from Yahoo! News and the Associated Press earlier today:
The reality, say biologists, is that these mass die-offs happen all the time and usually are unrelated.
Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don't notice them and don't try to link them to each other.
"They generally fly under the radar," said ornithologist John Wiens, chief scientist at the California research institution PRBO Conservation Science.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin has tracked mass deaths among birds, fish and other critters, said wildlife disease specialist LeAnn White. At times the sky and the streams just turn deadly. Sometimes it's disease, sometimes pollution. Other times it's just a mystery.
In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that's probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California.
Weather — cold and wet weather like in Arkansas New Year's Eve when the birds fell out of the sky — is often associated with mass bird deaths, ornithologists say. Pollution, parasites and disease also cause mass deaths.
So what's happening this time?
Blame technology, says famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. With the Internet, cell phones and worldwide communications, people are noticing events, connecting the dots more.
"This instant and global communication, it's just a human instinct to read mystery and portents of dangers and wondrous things in events that are unusual," Wilson told The Associated Press on Thursday. "Not to worry, these are not portents that the world is about to come to an end."
Now, here's the flip side to this, too, however--we're not totally out of the woods, so to speak (certainly no pun intended, let me be clear):
The irony is that mass die-offs — usually of animals with large populations — are getting the attention while a larger but slower mass extinction of thousands of species because of human activity is ignored, Wilson said.
The frogs and salamanders and other amphibians, among a lot of other animal groups, are threatened by extinction from we-don't-know-what-yet. Pesticides possibly/likely have a good bit to do with it, certainly, along with nitrogen run-off from farms and fields, into the waterways.
And that's just one animal group.
Another threatened group is definitely the bats I mentioned the other day, that have begun dying off due to some mysterious new fungus, it seems.
Who can say what killed the 2 million fish I mentioned the other day in the Chesapeake Bay? We'll see if that's a natural or man-made disaster, I expect.
The honey bees and the collapse, internationally, of their colonies and the associated die-offs seems clearly a man-made and huge problem that we likely won't be able to address and fix. This is one problem--the loss of pollinating honey bees--that has such ramifications it's difficult to even know how bad this could get.
Finally, then, the coral reefs and their dying is also key to life in the oceans and this will likely have huge ramifications for both ocean life and humankind.
So don't get all "the sky is falling" yet but there are some things out there that are scary enough, all by themselves that we can hopefully fix before it's too terribly late.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/05/132675539/latest-report-of-animal-carnage-2-million-fish-die-in-chesapeake-bay
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/honey-bees-dying-scientists-suspect-pesticides-disease-worry/story?id=10191391
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=bees+dying&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&psj=1&fp=e8de98ca5b405b41
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1 comment:
I copied this post and keep my own list as I read about things in the news. The Dolphin/Pelican die off (CNN April 29, 2012) looks like a double whammy. Do you have an updated list since your original post? Your post really blew me away, thanks.
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