Reply With QuoteDon't forget bumblebees!
Wow, what a week! This subject may not be Religion or Politics, but I think it would be appropriate to discuss here with the idea of denouncing the strong stench of dumbness that these events are giving off.
So let's have a look, what died?
The National Post has a great round up of the tragedies, and offers a great ensemble picture of the amount of dead animals.From birds dropping out of the sky, to marine life floating to the surface, mysterious animal deaths are becoming a global phenomenon.
- Beebe, Ark. Dec. 31, 2010: Thousands of redwing blackbirds and at least one duck fall to Earth dead.
- Arkansas Jan. 3, 2011: 100,000 dead drum fish found along the banks of the Arkansas River.
- Point Coupee Parish, La. Jan. 4, 2011: 500 dead redwing blackbirds fall from the sky and are found scattered along a quarter-mile portion of highway.
- Chesapeake Bay, Md. Jan. 5, 2011: "Cold-water stress" kills an estimated 2-million fish.
- Sarnia, Ont. Jan. 4, 2011: Officials say hundreds of dead fish that washed up on shore in the north end of the St. Clair River were killed by temperature shock and such die-offs are not unusual.
- Rio De Janeiro, Brazil: 100 tons of Sardines, Croaker and Catfish have washed ashore dead since Dec. 30, 2010.
- Falkoeping, West Sweden, Jan. 5, 2011: 50 to 100 jackdaws, a type of crow, found dead in a snow-covered street.
- Kent, England Jan. 5, 2011: 40,000 velvet swimming crabs (also known as devil crabs) wash up on the Kent coast after dying from hypothermia in freezing sea.
- Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand, Jan. 5, 2011: Hundreds of snapper fish, many of them missing eyes, wash up on local beaches.
We know humans, dumb as we are, tend to see patterns where there none. So instead of looking at this as individual events that need attention, we have seen the usual bunch talk up their usual bullshit.
The birds and fish were killed by HAARP.
New World Order killing the birds.
Birds killed by UFO.
Polar magnetic shift is killing the brids.
Birds were killed by 2012. Gragorian barbarism up in this bitch.
Birds killed by the Reptillians, and Barack Obamas hellish alien agenda.
Finally, good old biblical end times explain the death of brids.
So in the face of so much dumb, how can we honestly hope for a future where reason will prevail? No doubt the mainstream media has been playing the usual role of wanting more hits with articles such as "2 million fish found dead in Maryland" or "Nearly 3,000 Dead Birds Fall From Arkansas Sky". In the articles they of course say that there are experts and scientists doing research to determine the exact cause of these incidents, but it clearly doesn't matter if people react with their dumb theories. The headline is all they know and keep in mind, never mind wondering if they read the articles. Some kind of anti-intellectual playboy, where they jerk off to the sensationalist headline and don't bother reading the content.
Don't forget bumblebees!
If it were two and a half years ago it could almost be a stealth marketing campaign for The Happening.
Wait - maybe that's the twist. Is a scruffy looking dude somewhere waxing nostalgic about hot dogs?
All end times talk aside, the crap like the thousands of birds dying in a single region and falling to earth is weird, right? I mean, has someone come up with an realistic explanation as to what the hell caused that? Seems pretty freaking creepy.
More than 100,000 brain cells found dead in a 10 feet radius?
This what you get when members of Congress go into a football huddle.
I was thinking more for Condemned.Originally Posted by Brian Seiler
I have seen at least one explanation for at least one of these events: fireworks panicked the Arkansas blackbird mob at night, and they crashed into things in a panic, being scared to fly above the roofline (due to the aforementioned fireworks right over their heads). Seems plausible. But obviously not all of these can be explained by that.
What I would really like is some cogent scientific analysis of these events. Is this a statistical rarity, but only that? Certainly these kinds of die-offs are not uncommon (rains of frogs, yadda yadda). But is this just a rare incidence of lots of them at once, purely by chance? Or is there really something worse going on, globally and biologically speaking?
So, fuck the loons, bring on the clue bats please. Anyone got any good references to intelligent discussion of this business?
Edit: some minimal surfing of news.google.com indicates that the Sweden blackbird deaths seem also due to physical trauma, likewise probably caused by firework panic at night.
Double edit: wow, an article that actually has some relatively sane potential causes for each incident. Seems mostly related to firework scares, or else environmental pressure due to unusually cold conditions. (The latter is almost certainly related to global climate change, which, as we non-frothing-lunatics know, exacerbates global temperature extremes considerably, increasing environmental pressure on vulnerable animal populations. That's a legitimate thing to be globally concerned about.)
Last edited by RepoMan; 01-06-2011 at 09:19 AM.
Most of the incidents are normal seasonal type events, like water getting too cold in winter, etc.
Oh hey sorry guys, it might have been the DDT I was using the other day. The guy selling it out of the back of his truck said it would be fine.
I'm not surprised that fireworks kill birds and bats occasionally. These explosions create high pressure waves follow by low pressure areas that would certainly kill small animals at close range, although that doesn't explain why so many were killed unless - say - they were all roosting in a large colony over which numerous fireworks exploded.
Even wind turbine blades are known to kill bats (and some birds) due to the low pressure that they create as the blade sweeps through the air. Bats flying into these low pressure waves experience burst blood vessels in their lungs which kills them. They're pretty sensitive to sudden pressure changes.
... no
That's not normal.
If it was normal, the fish would, over the millennia, have adapted.
I'm wondering if this happens every year, and just doesn't make the news... because there are usually fireworks every year, but I don't remember thousands of birds dying before.
Pretty sure Occam's Razor suggests it must be the end times.
Please tell me you're kidding.
Uh... ya, I was obviously kidding.
Animals aren't invincible creatures that have adapted to every possible scenario just because they've been around for a while. Unpredictable events can lead to populations being in "the wrong place at the wrong time", such as local microclimatic conditions, and this can lead to mass die-offs.
In northern Australia, for example, every year there are millions of fish that die in pools towards the end of the dry season - oxygen runs out in the water, and they all die. It can be extreme in some years, and mild in others, but alas those fish haven't evolved their way out of it. It's just part of natural mortality, variable though it may be, and the fish have other ways of dealing with it - reproduction primarily. We tend to sentimentalise such events, but that's life.
Of course, mass die-offs are also regularly caused by human factors - usually pollution. I think in this case you have a mixture of extreme climatic events coupled with human factors (eg. fireworks) and the media whipping the story up into a froth by gathering as many of these reports as possible.
Or, it could be a biblical apocalypse, but I'm going with the more likely explanations. And Timex, there certainly are many animals killed indirectly due to fireworks but generally nobody is too concerned about a few blackbirds. I really can't be bothered right now to do an extensive literature search, but it's one of those things that's should be fairly obvious.
It is at this time that I cordially invite each of you to surrender to me all of your worldly assets and in return be spared the effects of my Berserk-O Ray.
No need - the Elemental Shaman is supposed to interrupt the berserker ray.
Wait....wrong thread.
Same thing happens to humans all the time, I supposed. Tidal wave kills 100,000, mudslide kills 10,000, heat wave kills 2,000 old people. Sad when they are humans, but same deal basically, right? Just excess, overly crowded, or the old and sick being culled. Other animals or man.
I noticed the fish that died in some of those articles are general the young fish of a certain species. Perhaps breeding conditions were just really good this spring/summer or whenever these fish were born, and now it's winter and now not all of them can make it? Or small environmental fluctuations kill off a certain percentage every year, and because of the population boom it just seems like a lot now.
Let's just be glad they sacrificed themselves to save us from the green pigs.
I was going to say it sounds like my apartment in college, but that works too.
Coupled with the hundreds of micro-earthquakes in the South recently, my money's on Cthulhu.
Prepping for his 2012 presidential bid.
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