"It is time to let the Panda go"

[karohemd]

Interesting viewpoint and I think quite valid as "survival of the fittest" applies here and the panda is, quite frankly, too stupidill adapted to survive. It would be entirely different if all it took was to conserve or expand his habitat.

I'd be interested to hear what my naturalist/conservationist friends think about this.

(thanks to raggedy_man for the link)

Comments

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

Would the panda survive if humans had not damaged it's habitat/ taken it.

If yes, then we have a duty to protect it. Simple as.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

*nods* That's the main question and I guess the answer would be no.

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

I don't know that that is true, and would have to check it. Humans ARE destroyign its habitat, so maybe it could survive if not for that, I am not an expert

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

Given how specialised the pandas adaptations are I think the guess from people like Chris Packham is that even without humanity selection pressure would probably be against the panda, its difficult to truly know though

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Well, selection pressure must have been in favour of it at one time, or it wouldn't have evolved into a self-sustaining species in the first place. There seems no reason why it shouldn't have continued pottering happily along if the bamboo forests had persisted in extent.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

but at the same time something kills all the bamboo (human or otherwise) and they are scuppered

They are very very well evolved for a very small niche. Humans aren't the only force which can change niches and start exerting negative selection pressure. Their very slow reproduction rate probably wouldn't help here

There is also the pragmatic view that Pandas might already be past the point of new return and we are really swiming up stream, would we be better spending more money on species which are easier to save or provide greater benefit to other species or humans

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

In the long run, of course, everything's scuppered -- no species lasts for ever. But pandas lived quite happily for around eight million years without anything killing all the bamboo, until humans came along.

Sure, eventually all small niches get closed off. But this argument seems to be trying to evade the fact that we hastened the closure of this particular one.

I'm sure that the panda is already past the point of no return, so I accept the pragmatic argument that money might better go elsewhere. But I am disgusted by the attempt (not accusing you of this, but I've seen it made repeatedly) to blame the panda for its own extinction, for somehow being too crap to live -- when the truth is, it had been around a lot longer than humans have, and was under no threat until they turned up and destroyed its habitat.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

pandas have been around 8 millon years, really

Most of the online info I can find put fossils at around 600,000ya which makes them about the same age as human as a species

The pragamatic argument does indeed hold more weight but it doesn't mean that the evolutionary argument is wrong.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

600,000ya which makes them about the same age as human as a species

Humans only arrived in China only about 50,000 ya. And farming, which is the activity that destroyed the habitat, much more recently than that.

(The 8 Mya figure is for pandas as a whole rather than modern giant pandas, so I'll withdraw that as not strictly relevant.)

[zenmeisterin.livejournal.com]

This. Selection 'pressure' in an environment where you have few to no natural predators is weak, and in the interests of energy conservation the species that doesn't over-breed and wind up running out of food would do well. Until human settlers began causing drastic alterations in their habitat, they were doing just fine. They are a fragile species and they cannot handle the human invasion of their habitats. It's quite likely that they would have come to an end at some point in the future even without human intervention, as 99.9% of all species that ever lived have done, but in this case they've been cut short by humanity as many other species have been.

I think it's quite unfair to single out which species to conserve and which ones not to bother with becasue of how useful they are to us at present, or how cute they look. To say that a species of animal 'deserves' to be wiped out by humanity's actions becasue it wasn't good enough to adapt to our blink-of-an-eye colonisation of the planet is arrogant beyond belief. As a species, we have an attrocious sense of responsibility.

[fearmeforiampink]

I think the question that's being raised is more the old NHS one:

Yes, that drug might save you from dying of cancer. But it has only a 10% chance of doing so, and for the same money spent on this other drug, we've got an 80% chance of saving these five other people. Who gets to live?

Swap pandas for the first drug and other more viable but currently at risk species for the second, and I think the situations are rather similar.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

It is very difficult to kill a couple of square feet of bamboo, never mind a whole forest - it fights back quite hard. I don't think any species without JCBs could do it.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Well, selection pressure must have been in favour of it at one time, or it wouldn't have evolved into a self-sustaining species in the first place.

Are you sure? I think this a myth.

Over time, fitter creatures will tend to replace less fit ones in any given environment, but there's no rule which says all environments have to be fiercely competitive all the time.

You see this over shorter timescales in the world of business all the time. One day there's lots of money sloshing about and you get an explosion of interesting-sounding startups. Then ten years later there's a shortage of cash and the vast majority of them vanish again. They were never actually fit in the usual sense of the term.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

Indeed a not insignificant proportion of evolution is down to random genetic drift rather than selective pressure

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Or to be more precise, it's all random genetic drift, sometimes filtered by selection pressure.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

very true

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Rhubarb.

It might be unpredictable, it might even be chaotic, but there's no way it's random.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

Random genetic drift follows the definition of the statistical adjective random quite well as defined by the OED

'b. Statistics. Governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population; (also) produced or obtained by a such a process, and therefore unpredictable in detail.'

From the OED, subscription needed

Most loci in a genome aren't under any strong selective pressure or purifying selection which means the chance of any single allele reaching fixation in the population is roughly equal accounting for differences in allele frequencys, variable mutation rates can alter this

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

there's no rule which says all environments have to be fiercely competitive all the time

I appreciate that: I was simplifying for brevity, and ended up overstating the case. Better would have been something like "selection pressure must not have been against it at one time, or..."

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

This is true the environment which suited it and encourage population spread and spread of these alleles to fixation must of existed for a long time >100000ya and it might be that without human intervention that it would of continued

Unfortunately humanity forces other animals to adapt or die out, some do very well, rats, seagulls and rabbits and others really suffer badly, their adaptability is one of those things which alters this and unfortunately pandas really don't appear very adaptable.

[fearmeforiampink]

Y'see, to me a more important question is "Can we actually save it?"

Has the numbers dropped sufficiently such that the panda just won't survive pretty much whatever we do?

Also, what about the (making up numbers here) three/seven/twenty less cute but more viable species, that have more drectly been put in an insurvivable position by us, and that could be saved with the money that's currently being spent trying to save Pandas?