This Photo of a Starving Polar Bear Might Not Be All it Seems

Metro UK ^ | Monday 14 Sep 2015 | Nicholas Reilly

[OldNewYork]

Clearly this polar bear identified as a spider monkey. The real story here is the cruelty of the Norwegian social health system in not providing the operation for free. And why didn’t we give it a reality TV show to validate the feelings of those others out there who identify as spider monkey? Haters.

[Ditter]

My husband raises cows. Several of them look like this polar bear, thin and frail. They are standing knee deep in grass so they aren't starving. We have had a normal weather year so it isn't global warming or cooling.

Oh yeah, I know, they are old and they are going to die soon, just like this bear.

[JimRed]

This ridiculousness about rising sea levels is so easily disproven.

Right. There are foundation remnants in the surf zone of a couple of towns near us, proving that a hundred or more years ago there were buildings there. The libs try to use that to prove sea level rise, but they conveniently ignore the littoral drift and the beaches a few towns away that are now twice or three times as wide as they were 50 years ago. Truth doesn't fit the narrative.

[MarMema]

The high population of deer and resulting collisions is a direct consequence of there being too few predators to control their numbers.

There is not a single published wildlife scientist/author who agrees with this. It is your opinion and very wrong.

There are very few deer where I live but people hit them because at times they simply leap into the road in front of you. Be careful about your overly simplistic cause and effect summaries.

[exDemMom]

The high population of deer and resulting collisions is a direct consequence of there being too few predators to control their numbers.

There is not a single published wildlife scientist/author who agrees with this. It is your opinion and very wrong.

Seriously????

Predator/prey dynamics was one of the basic principles of biology taught when I took Bio 101, something like 30 years ago. If there is *any* new research that has invalidated that basic paradigm, it has been such a well-kept secret that those of us who are life scientists don't even know about it.

In fact, not even the editors of Nature, one of the top scientific journals in the world, are aware of such a paradigm shift. As recently as five years ago, they were still publishing educational articles on it: Dynamics of Predation. I would bet that if I were to search the academic databases, I would find very recent articles discussing nuances of that basic paradigm.

I admit, I am very curious about why you want so much to reject that basic paradigm.

BTW, if you do not believe me about the overpopulation of deer in the east, why don't you visit sometime and see for yourself? I can guarantee that if you drive along I-70 or any of the other major roads, you will see dead deer. You will see even more live deer. They are all over. It's scary, because if you are driving at night, you probably won't see them before they jump in front of your car--totaling it, and maybe seriously injuring or killing you.

If the lack of predation is not the cause of the deer overpopulation, then what can possibly explain it? I really don't think people are slipping fertility drugs to deer.

[goat granny]

In Michigan such things as dead deer along the roadside are called bumper hunting...Some one hit a deer in front of my other home, gutted it and left the innards for me to clean up...but venison is tasty if you know how to cook it...I just cut the grass around the pile and it grew pretty high, until only the dried liver was left, then I cut down the tall grass. But they should have done me the courtesy of taking the inners with them..Over the years I had many dead deer on my property, it was a 2 lane State road. thousands are killed by cars, thousands more are taken during hunting. Man is quite a good predator when he wants to be...

[MarMema]

The notion of balance, Kricher writes, is “part observational, part metaphysical, and not scientific in any way.” Furthermore, and this may be the nub of his definition it is “an example of an ancient belief system called teleology, the notion that what we call nature has a predetermined destiny associated with its component parts...

'The concept of natural equilibrium long ruled ecological research and governed the management of such natural resources as forests and fisheries. It led to the doctrine popular among conservationists that nature knows best and human intervention in it is bad by definition. Change and turmoil ''Now an accumulation of evidence has gradually led many ecologists to abandon the concept or to declare it irrelevant, and others to alter it drastically. They say that nature is actually in a continuing state of disturbance and fluctuation. Change and turmoil more than constancy and balance is the rule. As a consequence, say many leaders in the field, textbooks will have to be rewritten and strategies of conservation and resource management will have to be rethought.''

I am sorry you are still believing something from 30 years ago but is has been debunked. You can google this stuff yourself I would think.

There have been quite a few studies done that show there is no equilibrium. After that wolves are not starving to death in many places. That is why some tribes in BC are airlifting out pregnant caribou to a place where they can safely give birth away from wolves. According to your theory the predators should now decline, but in truth many caribou and elk herds in the west are beyond recovery because of predation from wolves.

Then you still have the 1200 moose on Isle Royale to explain.

It is not your checkbook, it is nature and it doesn't check and balance itself, no matter how badly you wish it would.

[exDemMom]

The notion of balance, Kricher writes, is “part observational, part metaphysical, and not scientific in any way.”

I think I get what is going on here. I was not talking about any kind of balance, since that does not exist. In nature, you have dynamic equilibrium, which is to say that conditions fluctuate around some sort of midpoint (the midpoint itself probably never exists, except in some fleeting form while the system changes from one state to another).

What I was talking about is the predator/prey cycle. A cycle is not balance. There is no magical balance where there are exactly n individuals of species y... nature fluctuates. I will say that I was as dumbfounded when you tried to tell me that the paradigm of predator/prey interdependency has been debunked as I would have been had you tried to tell me that the concept that gas exchange at the alveolar/air interface in the lungs has been debunked. There are certain scientific observations that have been made so many times, by so many people, using so many methods, that people don't even conceive of questioning them any more. The predator/prey relationship is one of those.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the Isle Royale situation. It is not an experiment, since humans did not perturb the system in any way (except to capture animals to measure them and place radio collars). Technically speaking, it is a long term observational study. Contrary to your assertion that it debunks anything I have said, my hypotheses about the situation were confirmed when I read the details of the study. When you mentioned an unusually high number of moose, and an unsustainably low number of wolves, my immediate thought was that some other factor--disease or inbreeding--has decimated the wolves, since there obviously is an adequate food supply. As it turns out, both processes have been going on to suppress the wolf population. A high number of wolves were killed by parvovirus, and the population was so small that inbreeding was severely impacting its genetic diversity (and, hence, its fertility rate). Contrary to debunking the paradigm that predators increase in number until they deplete the prey population, at which point they die off and the prey population rebounds, at which point the predators are able to thrive again, etc., ad infinitum, it highlights the principle that if a well-established paradigm seems not to be operant in a specific system, some other process is going on that perturbs the system. Or, to put it another way, if what you observe is not what you expect, you have to investigate to find out why.

The paradigm is very simple, really. Animals thrive when food supply is plentiful. Animals die when food is scarce. One of the most common reasons for food scarcity is that there are too many consumers of that food. You have seen an example of that if you have ever driven past a cow pasture where the cows have eaten every single piece of plant material and there is nothing but bare dirt left--you know those cows would starve if the farmer were not feeding them.

That is why some tribes in BC are airlifting out pregnant caribou to a place where they can safely give birth away from wolves. According to your theory the predators should now decline, but in truth many caribou and elk herds in the west are beyond recovery because of predation from wolves.

That statement is actually an acknowledgement that the predator/prey cycle is a real factor in population dynamics. I do not know what "beyond recovery" means, because prey populations always rebound when the predator population crashes. If there are so many wolves that they have eaten a large proportion of those herds, then the wolves actually have little to eat and many of them will not survive. That is, unless wolves are supernatural beings that actually do not need to eat to survive--in which case, we all need to wonder what is going on and maybe get worried about it. If the prey populations are having difficulty rebounding, it is not because of the wolves--since these populations have cycled interdependently for eons--it is because of human encroachment on habitats.

There have been quite a few studies done that show there is no equilibrium...It is not your checkbook, it is nature and it doesn't check and balance itself, no matter how badly you wish it would.

Equilibrium is not balance. Balance implies a static situation, which does not exist in nature. Equilibrium is dynamic and responsive to many forces.

And I can assure you that the predator/prey paradigm has not been "debunked", nor is it likely that it ever will become debunked. As I already pointed out, one of the top two scientific journals in the world produced an educational article on it only 5 years ago. And the paradigm is still under intense study, as evidenced by the fact that articles are still being published: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=predation+and+prey

[hal ogen]

After reading this thread, I conclude that this is a picture of an emaciated syrian “refuge” who has a poor sense of direction.

[exDemMom]

Yeah, I think you figured it out. ;)