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Starting Scenario, Five Million Years
Topic Started: Oct 7 2013, 01:23 AM (376 Views)
Citrakayah
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We didn't go out with a bang.

We didn't go out with a whimper, either.

We're still here. Honestly, I can barely believe it. War, plague, climate change, famine--humans have basically been the universe's chewtoy. Also our own chewtoy, really. Humans endured everything everyone threw at it. We continued to improve our technology. We united, solved many of our old problems, even if we replaced them with new ones all too easily. Finally, we developed FTL, by opening wormholes connecting gravity wells. The stars were opened to us. We built a fleet of ships, big ones so we could travel the universe. They were designed to carry colonies, and they were wonders.

In 2400 BCE, we left Earth. Most of the entire population, eleven billion people, left, with the rest retreating to isolated, self-sufficient cities. We used our technology to terraform Mars, built a wormhole generator, and went off to live life as a rogue planet, hopping between solar systems.

But we never forgot Earth. How could we? It was our birthplace. We kept an eye on it, watching it with interest. With us gone, how would it fare?

Winners and Losers

Winners:

  • Introduced species did quite well. Cats, dogs, ferrets, goats, camels, all had been introduced to new environments, often with few competitors. Often they were introduced to islands, and the result was rapid speciation after we left.
  • With the extinction or decline of several species of large apex predators, mesopredators moved to fill the gap. Wolves, despite our best efforts, became functionally extinct in the United States, so coyotes took advantage of the niche. In Africa, lions went extinct, and the result was that cheetah, jackal, fox, and small cat populations exploded and diversified. An arms race was on.
  • While cetaceans never went completely extinct, they did decline. Pinnepids took over some of their niches, though dolphins continued to dominate truly pelagic niches.
  • As with pinnepids, varanid lizards. Several species of monitor lizard adapted to a littorial existence quickly.
  • Macropods, of all things, actually invaded Hawaii, of all places. They did well there, maintaining a breeding population and gradually expanding outwards, into the rainforest and the hardened lava floes.
  • Of all the organisms that one would expect to suddenly colonize a new habitat, trees would be the last one. But colonize they did. Trees, descended from the mangroves, began to colonize deeper and deeper parts of the ocean. Mangrove seeds began to elongate, until they could root in nearly a meter of water. Even better adaptations would come soon enough.
  • With the extinction of several predator species, and having their range greatly expanded in some cases by humans, bovids, especially sheep, did particularly well (though a fair percentage of sheep species went extinct, feral sheep diversified).


Losers:

  • Panthera never entirely went extinct. In Africa, leopards survived, and fragmented jaguar populations managed to persist. But the tiger completely vanished, the lion went extinct, and snow leopards (turned out they were Panthera uncia after all), while they didn't go completely extinct, were all moved to Mars, where we take care of them, and they prowl the frozen glaciers of the poles. Someday perhaps we'll bring them back. Maybe. But probably not.
  • The roquals suffered heavy losses. Of all the species, only a few survived. We didn't render them extinct, not completely, but we reduced their numbers so much that they could not survive without our help.
  • Toothed whales also suffered a decline, enough of one that pinnipeds started encroaching on some of the niches they had formerly controlled.
  • Large pachyderms nearly went extinct. All Asian rhinoceroses went extinct, as did all elephants but the African bush. The Southern white rhinoceros survived in a few parts of its range.
  • Frog biodiversity declined by 50% in some parts of the world as they were ravaged by chytrid fungus. They were hardly going to go extinct as an order, but it would be a long time before they returned to their former glory.
  • While tree ferns and cycads didn't go extinct, locally many species vanished, the result of overcollecting.


The World
The world can be described, roughly, by the projection at right; the world is in an ice age, there's a great big desert in North America, etc. However, there are significant differences.

It's significantly drier than showed on the right, comparable to the climate of the late Pleistocene, because of this some species can be remarkably similar to its Pleistocene counterparts. One example is the swamp lion being similar to the Pleistocene owen's panther.

In Africa, the savannah has turned dry (drier than it already was, that is) and is close to turning to desert. Woodland remains in Central Africa, and is heavily present in the section that has broken off of Africa, but is less wet than it used to be. It is more comparable to a temperate rainforest, at least in terms of rainfall. The forests of the area that has broken off of Africa (hereafter referred to as Somaliland) are especially wet, however, due to constant fog and mist being sent in from the ocean. The freshwater lake in the center of Somaliland is extremely deep, rather akin to Lake Baikal, and has a great many interesting species living in it.

In what was one the Mediterranean Sea, the land has become almost completely a salt flat. What life does survive mainly lives on former islands. Interestingly, due to the vertical barrier, different species often live on the islands than the salt flats, even if they were fairly recently related.

The Americas are significantly drier than shown on the map. Central America has retained woodlands, and Florida has developed one. Much of California is a rich grassland, and California has been separated from the rest of the United States by a shallow strait of water for some time.

Despite what the map shows, the Himalayan Mountains remain very cold.
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Citrakayah
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Obviously, any review of this would be appreciated.
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Zirojtan
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Sorry I was typing a review earlier and kept pulled away to do this and that... I'm gonna go check on my squash and I'll be right back.
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Zirojtan
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It smells so delicious... I'M SO EXCITED!


Although I will probably be eating it before I'm done posting this...


Anyways, ok. I don't FTL means, as I'm not much of a science fiction type, so some clarification on that would be nice. Sorry if it's a term I should be familiar with... perhaps we should have a thread in announcements that covers the jargon used in this genre. There are also a few grammatical/spelling errors that you might want to check up on. I always re-read something after I'm done writing it, because I find that most of my errors are done when I went back and tried to "fix" or change something.


Although I WOULD definitely like to know a little more about why humans left Earth for the most part, because that would/could be a very big determiner in what species are around after we're gone. Had we made the planet so insufferable that even WE couldn't stand to live on it anymore? Because we seem to be able to handle some pretty disgusting environments of our own creation and not think much of them.


Also I would caution you about the extinction of wolves. They may be extinct in much of their "natural" range (the reason I put it in quotation marks is because they had a very different range before the Quaternary Extinction, which definitely had a human element to it), but they, like any other animal are capable of rapid recolonization when the opportunity presents itself. Populations in the United States are currently checked by human destruction of habitat, which is mostly for agricultural purposes, and a major shift in agricultural methods, such as, say, a shift to aquaponics-based agriculture would open the door for this kind of recolonization. Wolves are not having much trouble at all in Canada or Alaska, remember. Also, wolves are a "mesopredator" themselves, presently in the process of trying to take over niches previously filled by other predators. The North American gray wolf was not originally a hunter of large animals like the various species of bison, horse, and camel that once roamed the continent, instead subsisting on smaller prey like elk and llamas. Of course the prey selection has decreased with the predator diversity, but the larger prey animals, i.e. bison, are something that wolves have a little bit of trouble taking down at the moment. Sometimes it can take up to 3 days for a bison-hunting pack to take down one bison.


So yeah, that's something to consider. An opening currently exists that they're trying to fill, so unless the gray wolf goes extinct from its entire range, including Eurasia, then it will be they as the mesopredators filling the niche that predators such as the dire wolf, Smilodon fatalis, and a specialized ecomorph of the gray wolf in Beringia filled prior to the Quaternary Extinction and coyotes who will be moving up to take their niche instead. I wish I could attach the pdf about that Beringian ecomorph that took the place of dire wolves, but if you just google the title, 'Megafaunal Extinction and the Disappearance of a Specialized Wolf Ecomorph you should be able to find it.


But without further description of your scenario here I can't really tell you. Although, personally, I think once our society starts pulling its head out of its ass and realizing that there are some very good solutions to our problems with the environment already in existence (aquaponics is a viable and more efficient alternate to traditional agriculture), the decline in biodiversity on this planet may not be as bad as many would predict. So that's also something I'd consider.


I would also recommend some research into the introduced species of North America in this particular instance and their possible effects. Kudzu vine is one particularly destructive one that there is no real solution to, and it creates an entirely new kind of habitat (I believe I mentioned this today in another thread). Emerald Ash Borers are also a real problem for ash trees in North America, and ash trees provide essential habitat for a number of insect species, which would effect your smaller predators, and so on and so forth. It doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of things will go extinct, but that species are in for some redistribution, at least.


I don't know much about seals at the moment, but from what I understand, they are largely limited to coastlines, so justifying their filling of cetacean niches could be a bit difficult. I'll have to read some more about that later. Mind you, when a predator goes extinct before its prey, that can cause a trophic cascade in the ecosystem through boom and bust cycles when prey overpopulate, and that rule is as applicable in the water as it is on land. So when cetaceans experience a serious enough decline for another animal to being eying their niche, what else has that done?


I can only see the invasion of the littoral zone by varanid lizards in the absence of anything else that can decently fill the niche. It doesn't quite sound like your littoral predators are particularly at risk here, so I'm skeptical on this one


Macropods in Hawai'i is not a big jump to make, honestly. There are already introduced populations of wallabies in Europe, and although I didn't actually hear of any wild populations of them when I was living there, I would not be surprised if there were some. I saw muntjacs in the jungle out there when riding my bike twice, and I've NEVER seen a word on them having viable populations there on the internet. Maybe because its primarily in the rainforest, where you can't observe it on a regular basis, people aren't talking. I don't know. But there are also introduced deer, cows, horses, and billy goats every hwere to consider as well here. Also, the islands might not last that much longer anyways, evolutionarily speaking. Islands that are formed that way have a tendency to eventually turn into atolls (although, after tens of millions of years).


I don't know enough about the nature of trees that are called "mangroves", just that the term encompasses a few different groups, so I don't have anything to say here besides the fact that trees are something that you would expect to colonize new habitat, as they do so all the time. I mentioned this in the 'Afroterra' thread earlier today when I was talking about the composition of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States during the Pleistocene, which has completely changed in the last 12,000 years.


May I also comment that sheep right now are more of a highland/woodland animal than one of open lowlands. In North America in particular, there are already large, viable introduced herds of different kinds of antelope, such as nilgai, blackbuck, eland, and scimtar oryx that would be better suited for the job. Let me also direct you to a pdf that I have in my collection called 'Evolution, Ecology, and Biochronology of Herbivvore Associations in Europe During the Last 3 Million Years' by Jean-Philip Brugal and Roman Croitor. It talks about the separate feeding and resource partitioning approaches of cervids, bovids, and perrisodactyls, so I think it would be particularly helpful here.


As much as I hate to say it, I do agree that we are probably looking at the extinction of the tiger unless we introduce populations to new habitats, such as the Siberian Tiger to British Columbia where there is an open niche. Other subspecies, like the Sumatran Tiger probably cannot be saved at this point. One could in theory introduce them to tropical Mexico or South America, but they would then be in direct competition with jaguars and cougars.


I'm not so sure about the disappearance of the lion, especially if we were to change our agricultural methods, and those changes were applied to Africa as well, but I can definitely see it happening if we don't stop doing what we're doing. Again, we need a proper setting here.


Do you mean rorqual? I think that their extinction might be good for your restructuring of oceanic food webs though... just saying.


What is driving this decline in cetaceans though?


And I think that your decline in amphibian diversity is going to be something more like 80%. We're already witnessing a severe decline in amphibian diversity due to habitat encroachment as well as chytrid fungus, and I'm not sure that's avoidable. Yes, we can change our ways, but changing our ways will be a long process, and a little too long for such a fragile group of animals, I think.


Now your climate here is something I'd like to take a little bit of time and talk about as well. In the Pleistocene, during the ice ages, Africa had a tendency to seriously and rapidly dry out, with its rainforests being restricted to only a few refugia. It was dominated instead by grasslands, and an extremely expanded Sahara Desert. I do understand that the break off of Somaliland will probably restructure how the precipitation works though. That's something to look into, I think. How exactly will precipitation change in Africa with that big streak in it? I have a link about the biome distribution in North America during the final millennia of the last ice age here. I don't think it would quite that dry, but it would definitely dry up in sections.


As to the nature of the Mediterranean once the Strait of Gibraltar closes, I think that it would certainly start out as a giant salt flat once the majority of the sea had finally dried up, but I think that the rivers flowing into the Med would carve some pretty spectacular canyon systems into it, as well as pool in their own lakes. You might get something a little more like the sabkhas and kors of Iran.


How many millions of years in the future is this project going to take us, by the way? I know that Somaliland isn't projected to break off for about another 10 million years, right?
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Citrakayah
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Anyways, ok. I don't FTL means, as I'm not much of a science fiction type, so some clarification on that would be nice. Sorry if it's a term I should be familiar with... perhaps we should have a thread in announcements that covers the jargon used in this genre. There are also a few grammatical/spelling errors that you might want to check up on. I always re-read something after I'm done writing it, because I find that most of my errors are done when I went back and tried to "fix" or change something.


Thanks for telling me that. As far as FTL, that means faster-than-light. We invented wormholes to allow us to cross interstellar distances instantaneously.

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Although I WOULD definitely like to know a little more about why humans left Earth for the most part, because that would/could be a very big determiner in what species are around after we're gone. Had we made the planet so insufferable that even WE couldn't stand to live on it anymore? Because we seem to be able to handle some pretty disgusting environments of our own creation and not think much of them.


Honestly, I don't know. I deliberately left it vague, but I personally imagined us deciding that we simply should go, that it was time to start over on a different planet. Therefore, the terraforming of Mars and the creation of the wormhole drive that allows it to hop between stars after charging up for a few years.

Basically, think something similar to a new religious movement. Not everybody left, of course, just the majority. The vast, vast, improbably vast majority.

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Also I would caution you about the extinction of wolves. They may be extinct in much of their "natural" range (the reason I put it in quotation marks is because they had a very different range before the Quaternary Extinction, which definitely had a human element to it), but they, like any other animal are capable of rapid recolonization when the opportunity presents itself. Populations in the United States are currently checked by human destruction of habitat, which is mostly for agricultural purposes, and a major shift in agricultural methods, such as, say, a shift to aquaponics-based agriculture would open the door for this kind of recolonization. Wolves are not having much trouble at all in Canada or Alaska, remember. Also, wolves are a "mesopredator" themselves, presently in the process of trying to take over niches previously filled by other predators. The North American gray wolf was not originally a hunter of large animals like the various species of bison, horse, and camel that once roamed the continent, instead subsisting on smaller prey like elk and llamas. Of course the prey selection has decreased with the predator diversity, but the larger prey animals, i.e. bison, are something that wolves have a little bit of trouble taking down at the moment. Sometimes it can take up to 3 days for a bison-hunting pack to take down one bison.


A fair point. Perhaps wolves would only be functionally extinct in the southern areas of North America? I know that they aren't doing nearly as well there, and recovery efforts are mostly focused on the northern areas rather than the southern ones. While it's true that they could reach farther down, they might in the process get swamped with coyote genes... which raises a question; might the coyotes of the future be all hybrids?

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I would also recommend some research into the introduced species of North America in this particular instance and their possible effects. Kudzu vine is one particularly destructive one that there is no real solution to, and it creates an entirely new kind of habitat (I believe I mentioned this today in another thread). Emerald Ash Borers are also a real problem for ash trees in North America, and ash trees provide essential habitat for a number of insect species, which would effect your smaller predators, and so on and so forth. It doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of things will go extinct, but that species are in for some redistribution, at least.


Hmm. I had more or less assumed that we'd have wiped kudzu out of North America by virtue of the fact that if we didn't, the sheer voraciousness of the stuff means that we'd either have to introduce other species or risk it taking over huge tracts of land.

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I don't know much about seals at the moment, but from what I understand, they are largely limited to coastlines, so justifying their filling of cetacean niches could be a bit difficult. I'll have to read some more about that later. Mind you, when a predator goes extinct before its prey, that can cause a trophic cascade in the ecosystem through boom and bust cycles when prey overpopulate, and that rule is as applicable in the water as it is on land. So when cetaceans experience a serious enough decline for another animal to being eying their niche, what else has that done?


Well, I based that off two observations:

1. Coastal dolphin populations are declining off California, unless I remember incorrectly.
2. Californian sea lions are expanding, and are believed to be reaching carrying capacity.

Therefore, I envisioned that trend continuing--dolphins gradually declined, and sea lions gradually grew in number. This more or less continued for four hundred years or so. The main problem, of course, is why dolphins are declining... but unless I remember incorrectly, a main part of that are mass beachings, and we don't completely understand why that happens. Our best guess is sonar, IIRC, which I don't see us simply giving up easily.

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I can only see the invasion of the littoral zone by varanid lizards in the absence of anything else that can decently fill the niche. It doesn't quite sound like your littoral predators are particularly at risk here, so I'm skeptical on this one


Well, they're already known to cross large bodies of water. And near as I can find, there isn't anything that currently occupies the niche of littoral predator/scavenger in the Sunda Shelf. The water monitor seemed an obvious choice to take what appears to be an empty niche: They are cold-blooded and have a slow metabolism, they are known to be good swimmers that can cross large areas, they are reasonably intelligent, can remain underwater for thirty minutes, and are active pursuers of prey (which is useful when one is chasing prey in open water).

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Macropods in Hawai'i is not a big jump to make, honestly. There are already introduced populations of wallabies in Europe, and although I didn't actually hear of any wild populations of them when I was living there, I would not be surprised if there were some. I saw muntjacs in the jungle out there when riding my bike twice, and I've NEVER seen a word on them having viable populations there on the internet. Maybe because its primarily in the rainforest, where you can't observe it on a regular basis, people aren't talking. I don't know. But there are also introduced deer, cows, horses, and billy goats every hwere to consider as well here. Also, the islands might not last that much longer anyways, evolutionarily speaking. Islands that are formed that way have a tendency to eventually turn into atolls (although, after tens of millions of years).


Could still be cayes, though.

This is set five million years in the future to start with. As far as how far it'll go, Jagger seems to be aiming for 75. I think he's being too hasty and we should finish making a decent 5 myf to start with.

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I don't know enough about the nature of trees that are called "mangroves", just that the term encompasses a few different groups, so I don't have anything to say here besides the fact that trees are something that you would expect to colonize new habitat, as they do so all the time. I mentioned this in the 'Afroterra' thread earlier today when I was talking about the composition of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States during the Pleistocene, which has completely changed in the last 12,000 years.


That's not quite what I meant--I'm referring to trees accessing a type of ecosystem that they couldn't before. I'm not referring to them going to an area that previously was grassland, or desert--that's to be expected. Rather, I'm talking about trees growing in three feet of water. Saltwater. Over time, they'll grow even longer, and grow in even deeper water...

As far as the mangroves, I direct you to this thread.

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May I also comment that sheep right now are more of a highland/woodland animal than one of open lowlands. In North America in particular, there are already large, viable introduced herds of different kinds of antelope, such as nilgai, blackbuck, eland, and scimtar oryx that would be better suited for the job. Let me also direct you to a pdf that I have in my collection called 'Evolution, Ecology, and Biochronology of Herbivvore Associations in Europe During the Last 3 Million Years' by Jean-Philip Brugal and Roman Croitor. It talks about the separate feeding and resource partitioning approaches of cervids, bovids, and perrisodactyls, so I think it would be particularly helpful here.


I'll pass that along, and add it to a new revision that I'll start working on.

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Do you mean rorqual? I think that their extinction might be good for your restructuring of oceanic food webs though... just saying.


Yes, and how so?

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What is driving this decline in cetaceans though?


A combination of factors: Hunting, sonar use, environmental toxins, and some degree of bycatch. Oil spills didn't help either.

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And I think that your decline in amphibian diversity is going to be something more like 80%. We're already witnessing a severe decline in amphibian diversity due to habitat encroachment as well as chytrid fungus, and I'm not sure that's avoidable. Yes, we can change our ways, but changing our ways will be a long process, and a little too long for such a fragile group of animals, I think.


Simple enough for me to change.

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Now your climate here is something I'd like to take a little bit of time and talk about as well. In the Pleistocene, during the ice ages, Africa had a tendency to seriously and rapidly dry out, with its rainforests being restricted to only a few refugia. It was dominated instead by grasslands, and an extremely expanded Sahara Desert. I do understand that the break off of Somaliland will probably restructure how the precipitation works though. That's something to look into, I think. How exactly will precipitation change in Africa with that big streak in it? I have a link about the biome distribution in North America during the final millennia of the last ice age here. I don't think it would quite that dry, but it would definitely dry up in sections.


Yeah...

I objected to that, and to the vanishing of rainforests in South America. As far as figuring out how the biome distribution would change... haven't the faintest idea. New world, new biome distribution, and I can't find a damn thing about what the change would mean.

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As to the nature of the Mediterranean once the Strait of Gibraltar closes, I think that it would certainly start out as a giant salt flat once the majority of the sea had finally dried up, but I think that the rivers flowing into the Med would carve some pretty spectacular canyon systems into it, as well as pool in their own lakes. You might get something a little more like the sabkhas and kors of Iran.


Interesting. I'll look into that. Would the Strait of Gibraltar close in five million years?

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How many millions of years in the future is this project going to take us, by the way? I know that Somaliland isn't projected to break off for about another 10 million years, right?


I don't. I was just going off the map.
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JaggerTheDog
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Yep, a majority of the humans, some stayed in Earth in some cities like Tokyo, Manila, Sydney, Paris, New York etc. If anyone is wondering if what's the percentage of extinct species, it's thirty to fifty percent. Also, the wolves aren't extinct, they're just extinct in north america due to hunting, but they still remain common in south america and Eurasia.
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Zirojtan
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Thanks for telling me that. As far as FTL, that means faster-than-light. We invented wormholes to allow us to cross interstellar distances instantaneously.



Ok. A little handwaving here and there for a story isn't completely inexcusable. As much as I try to explain the existence of magic in my book for example, it still has know real scientific explanation, just an explanation as to why it exists on one world where it doesn't exist on others. Ultimately in Science Fiction and Fantasy, there is a certain level of 'suspension of belief' in any story, and sometimes, key elements just can't really be explained... at least at the moment.


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Honestly, I don't know. I deliberately left it vague, but I personally imagined us deciding that we simply should go, that it was time to start over on a different planet. Therefore, the terraforming of Mars and the creation of the wormhole drive that allows it to hop between stars after charging up for a few years.

Basically, think something similar to a new religious movement. Not everybody left, of course, just the majority. The vast, vast, improbably vast majority.



Well, that would be a much larger number of people than have ever been swindled by a single religious/ideological movement, so some kind of explanation I think would be nice. Personally I don't think that we necessarily have to leave the planet to be able to leave most of nature untouched, we just have to change how we interact with the planet.


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A fair point. Perhaps wolves would only be functionally extinct in the southern areas of North America? I know that they aren't doing nearly as well there, and recovery efforts are mostly focused on the northern areas rather than the southern ones. While it's true that they could reach farther down, they might in the process get swamped with coyote genes... which raises a question; might the coyotes of the future be all hybrids?



I intended to reply to this weeks ago and I never did... I've been so enveloped in trying to figure out how corals might not have a place in Eurydicean ecosystems when the answer was right under my nose. lol. Anyways, I don't really think that this is a realistic approach considering how the two species interact with one another, or how repopulation generally works or the present scenario in Southern North America. See, the situation in Mexico is actually kind of different than the situation in say, the Eastern Woodlands of North America, where a lack of predators and human hunting has caused a spike in populations of prey animals (deer and elk). In Southern North America, for the most part, the prey populations are still down, and the main predators are also out of the picture, so there isn't really the same incentive for coyotes to try and fill the niche of gray wolves that there is for gray wolves to try and fill the niche left vacant by dire wolves. Even if this were the case, once human populations were marginalized enough so as to allow this to happen, gray wolves would rapidly recolonize areas that humans had left vacant as prey populations would be in recovery. Coyotes might try and take the niche over for a small intermediary period as Canadian Gray Wolves made their push south, but the allotted time probably would not be enough for them to be able to make the changes needed to hold onto the niche, and so they'd be pushed aside by the incoming gray wolves. It's possible that with time though, as human populations are marginalized and nature is allowed to continue with significantly less interruption, that we will see the evolution of larger herbivores in North America that will require larger carnivores to keep their populations in check. So you could see a niche rearrangement happening as a result of this. I just really don't think that the present marginalization of gray wolves (which really isn't as severe as it's played out to be) will be the incentive behind this.


Of course, who knows. We could see a complete rearrangement of niches as is due to introduced species. On the Old Forum I mentioned that there is a stable population of some kind of big cat in Upstate New York that is believed by some biologists to be leopards, but as they haven't been filmed, nobody is quite sure what it is, and nobody is talking about their exotic pets having escaped either. There is also the recolonization of the northern portion of North America by jaguars, who used to live there. The point being that pantherine cats have drastically reorganized predator guilds in North and South America in the past and are in a position to do so again, be it by human introduced cats or by those that came here a few million years ago that will presumably have niches open to them that weren't before. There is also a lot of talk of introducing Siberian Tigers and Amur Leopards to Canada to save both species from extinction, since the Russians don't seem to be up to the job.


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Hmm. I had more or less assumed that we'd have wiped kudzu out of North America by virtue of the fact that if we didn't, the sheer voraciousness of the stuff means that we'd either have to introduce other species or risk it taking over huge tracts of land.



Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be possible, and will continue to be impossible in the foreseeable future. Kudzu is more established in Eastern North America than the Emerald Ash Borer is in the same region and then Lion Fish are in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. It is unfortunately here to stay, as are most introduced species. It creates an entirely new biome when left unchecked, as it is in North America for lack of natural competition and predators, so that might also be something to consider. What plant learns to outcompete it, or what herbivore adapts to eat it? Or perhaps humans introduced the natural competition, even further altering the natural order of things?



Quote:
 
Well, I based that off two observations:

1. Coastal dolphin populations are declining off California, unless I remember incorrectly.
2. Californian sea lions are expanding, and are believed to be reaching carrying capacity.

Therefore, I envisioned that trend continuing--dolphins gradually declined, and sea lions gradually grew in number. This more or less continued for four hundred years or so. The main problem, of course, is why dolphins are declining... but unless I remember incorrectly, a main part of that are mass beachings, and we don't completely understand why that happens. Our best guess is sonar, IIRC, which I don't see us simply giving up easily.



As I've learned more about cetacean intelligence in the past few days, I really can't agree with this one. Dolphins and killer whales specifically are either sapient, or near-sapient, and many biologists believe that the mass beachings in question may be deliberate attempts by the animals in question to communicate with humans. But given their intelligence, I don't think that they're going anywhere in the next 5 million years, especially as we humans come to understand it.


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Well, they're already known to cross large bodies of water. And near as I can find, there isn't anything that currently occupies the niche of littoral predator/scavenger in the Sunda Shelf. The water monitor seemed an obvious choice to take what appears to be an empty niche: They are cold-blooded and have a slow metabolism, they are known to be good swimmers that can cross large areas, they are reasonably intelligent, can remain underwater for thirty minutes, and are active pursuers of prey (which is useful when one is chasing prey in open water).



Alright, I stand corrected :) But these animals live in a very specific area of the world for the moment, and so it would be good to look into how they might go about expanding outside of that area of the world.


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Yes, and how so?



Because they're a major predator of krill and small fish, that's why.


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A combination of factors: Hunting, sonar use, environmental toxins, and some degree of bycatch. Oil spills didn't help either.



Again with my above statement about cetaceans, I'm very skeptical about such a decline, especially if it is human induced. It is true that they are in decline right now primarily because of anthropomorphic factors, but I don't think that we're going to lose a huge portion of them before we realize what we're doing and take the necessary measures to change. I emphasized in the 'Carbocene' that human civilization is only going to move forward, not backward, and right now the awareness of these animals and their sapience or near-sapience is spreading across the world to all corners of society, including people who aren't even interested in marine biology, with the help of recent efforts, like the documentary 'Blackfish' and that series 'Whale Wars'. Knowledge is on the rise, and that knowledge is only going to push us towards conservative efforts, not further into carelessness.


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Yeah...

I objected to that, and to the vanishing of rainforests in South America. As far as figuring out how the biome distribution would change... haven't the faintest idea. New world, new biome distribution, and I can't find a damn thing about what the change would mean.



I would look at biome maps during the last ice age, for a good example. This is one I've been using for my alternate history timeline, mind you, not every Ice Age is going to have the same freezing patterns or redistribution of habitats, but it gives you an idea. There is a general trend toward decrease of rainforests and other woodlands.


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Yep, a majority of the humans, some stayed in Earth in some cities like Tokyo, Manila, Sydney, Paris, New York etc. If anyone is wondering if what's the percentage of extinct species, it's thirty to fifty percent. Also, the wolves aren't extinct, they're just extinct in north america due to hunting, but they still remain common in south america and Eurasia.



Cities decline in importance over time. Detroit is one of the oldest and formerly one of the most important cities in the US, and now it's a crumbling ruin. And I really doubt that anyone is going to continue hunting gray wolves.
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JaggerTheDog
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It wasn't me who planned wolves will be extinct. :ermm:
Also, that was a long time ago. New cities might form over a period of time; but the city that your talking about has only a few million, present day cities have over twenty-two million, nineteen million, etc. It's impossible that they'll form new cities and abandon that city if there's that much people.

PS- You don't want to know my age, Citrakayah knows. :3
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JaggerTheDog
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How does this count as a crumbling ruin? When it has five million people? When there's lots of buildings and it's perfectly stable?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit
Look at the photos.
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martiitram
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JaggerTheDog
Oct 28 2013, 01:16 AM
It wasn't me who planned wolves will be extinct. :ermm:
Also, that was a long time ago. New cities might form over a period of time; but the city that your talking about has only a few million, present day cities have over twenty-two million, nineteen million, etc. It's impossible that they'll form new cities and abandon that city if there's that much people.

PS- You don't want to know my age, Citrakayah knows. :3
No problem about the age thingy.In deviantart all of my friends know my age and in here dragontunders and citrakayah know my age too.
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