Friday 25 March 2011

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Hi, I'm totally new to blogging, but I thought I'd start by talking about a really interesting topic that was in one of my university lectures. There is a hawk on the Mauritius islands that was thought to be totally extinct apart from one male and one female in captivity. We hear so much today about endangered species and how we should all say goodbye to the lion and the tiger, but scientists are now starting to become skeptical about these doomsayers. These hawks, despite the odds, have come back from the brink of extinction and are now flourishing, with several hundred hawks now wild on the islands. We now believe that this kind of drop in numbers, whilst not so drastic in most cases, is quite common in nature. They are called evolutionary bottlenecks, and it is totally possible that all of the organisms we say are endangered species are undergoing an evolutionary bottleneck today because of limited resources supporting increasing numbers of organisms. It doesn't mean that all of these species will die out (although some inevitably will), but only the strongest of the species will survive. It is an interesting and sobering thought that these population decreases seen in thousands of species could be a part of nature, indeed, many proclaimed that the Mauritius hawks must have had unknown wild survivors too, as it is unheard of that a species can recover with just two remaining organisms, but genetic analysis proves it; bottlenecks are the way forward. The hawks are stronger than ever, they strive and outcompete their fellow predators to whom they were once losing out. Perhaps humans should just sit back and let nature take its course.

Humans just like to interfere with everything, we have a fear of the unknown so it seems perfectly rational to us that we should intervene in such issues and throw our weight around, but maybe we should all just take a break for a day and relax. There is so little time to relax, yet people spend all of their days worrying about things that are totally out of control, and as with the hawks, totally unnecessarily too.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that people shouldn't worry, they should be happy, because every little thing is gonna be alright. And anything that isn't alright is probably out of their control, so what's the point?

4 comments:

  1. let nature take its corse :) but idea of some amazing animals going extinct is a little scary.

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  2. Just over 99% of all species that ever existed are now extinct. with stats like that the only sensible thing to do is chill out!

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  3. This is my sort of thing. Good first post.

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  4. Got some good points in there.... yeah I think that the best thing for humanity to do, is to stop worrying about those kind of things, that is out of our control, and just work on the future. Great post.

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