h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After Noah's ark had left solid ground and started to float away the unicorn Arthur found his significant other, smiled and said "So, seems to be down to us to save our species, love. What's you name, gorgeous?"
"Albert"

This made me think about what to do should Greenland and Antarctica melt and apocalyptic weather threaten life on

It has been suggested to get rid of the mosquitos if we ever get the chance. Not sure if that's a good idea (what would the birds have to eat?) but it would be interesting to hear other suggestions anyway

Discuss!

It seems there is a place for everything, and everything in its place.

But does there really need to be so many of them?


lil x

Wasps.

People. That would solve most, if not all of the world's problems.

Ah yes, people. I'm afraid you are right

More right about them as you are about wasps anyway. Who will pollinate now that so many bees have croaked?

Did I just myself

That last posting was a response to both Yarreau and TC, of course

Mosquitoes would be a minor nuisance were it not for the diseases they carry. Birds and bats eat them, but couldn't they eat something else instead?

Massive volcanic eruptions could make us forget about all the other problems we have. An eruption in 586 killed about a third of the Earth's population by some reckonings. Yellowstone seems to erupt at infrequent intervals, but when it does it wreaks havoc on everything within 1,000 miles. Does it erupt every 700,000 years or every 250,000 years? I've heard both estimates, and can't figure out why the estimates are so far apart. Seismologists say that there are rumblings under Yellowstone now. Is this the time, or is it a false alarm?

I don't know what would happen if we removed mosquitos from the menus of the birds and the bats, but I am pretty sure it would be disastrous. We would be tampering with the balance of the planet's ecological system and that is never a good idea.

A number of years ago it was estimated how much of China's crops were eaten by birds. Staggering numbers! So they decided to kill the birds. What followed was an eerie silence - until gargantuan swarms of mosquitos filled the air...

Maybe killing all the mosquitos might force birds to eat more crops

I'm ~70m/230ft below sea level here and the Colorado River delta land between here and the sea is not notable for high elevations.

The most recent occasion there was an open channel to the sea was back in the 16th century and the Spanish conquistadores brought a ship into explore.

They lost the ship when the channel closed again, leaving them landlocked.

Relics occasionally turn up.

Any chance of finding Torquemada's gold?

Ticks, we must get rid of those. I don't think anyone would suffer.

On 'Torquemada's gold', there was no gold here before the conquistadores came and its improbable they'd have brought much with them.

On gold mysteries, Bobadilla's gold, there are reports he was seen in Spain after the hurricane that supposedly wrecked his treasure fleet off Florida, so its possible his gold ended up back in Spain with him.

"A number of years ago it was estimated how much of China's crops were eaten by birds. Staggering numbers! So they decided to kill the birds. What followed was an eerie silence - until gargantuan swarms of mosquitos filled the air..." [Pierce]

The Chinese Communist government decided that sparrows [or was it swallows? I forget] were too bourgeois, so they had massive killings of them. Maybe the *real* reason was that the birds were eating too many crops. I have absolutely no use for Communism because so often it has been applied in unimaginably stupid ways.

In a more recent era, some Chinese orchard owners used pesticides too liberally and killed off all the bees that were pollinating the blossoms. That meant hiring people to take small paint brushes and pollinating by hand.

Actually, the Chinese have been using a number of techniques to hand pollinate.

One of the simplest is to take a hand full of twigs bearing flowers in bloom, hold over the flowers that you're trying to pollinate and give a tap to shake loose some pollen, a much more practical method than the camel hair brush for tree crops, like pears.

If its something like squashes, the pollen bearing flowers are separate from the fruit bearing flowers, so its sufficient to detach a male flower from the plant, peel back petals and place the anther of the male flower inside the pistils of the female flower. (This approach also works for hibiscus.)




As to what has been causing the die off of honeybees, its a global phenomenon and the cause is as yet unknown.

My own guess is that its probably related to a fungal pest that has also been killing bats, another important class of pollinator organisms.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/What-is-Killing-the-Bats.html

*skips reading link*

Last I heard was that two herbicides are to blame for the fungal pest but what would I know about it? Other than it is disastrous of course

Pesticides and cellphone signals are being blamed to some extent. meanwhile, most areas have native bee species that do their work in obscurity while the honeybees get all the press attention. Of course, most bee species are fairly specialized, while honeybees will pollinate almost anything.

Mosquitoes in their larval stage are food for fish and amphibians. Speaking of which, frogs are also in trouble, like bees and bats. I can't think of anything we could do without on the ark, except for deniers of anthropogenic climate change. I really grieve for the planet.

Mind you, Gaia will bite the human species in the butt soon enough, just like she does with any factor that gets out of balance. Koyaanisqatsi.

Tree frogs in Hawaii and cane toads in Australia are not in trouble. To the contrary, they are serious pests. But I see what you mean. Frogs and toads have less and less room in which to breed because humans keep draining swamps to build houses or plant crops.

Even when we don't tamper with nature there will be different pests from time to time. They are part of our common evolution and they too shall pass.

A Danish author wrote a short story about a forest suddenly attacked by enormous swarms of locusts. This was during the Nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-1945) and everybody in Denmark except the German censors knew what he meant

One type of pest all too well-known to soldiers in World War I was lice.