Wild Asian vultures are likely going to the way of the dodo, a new study says. The white-backed vulture population has plunged by nearly 99.9 percent in India since 1992, and two other vulture species have seen a drop of 97 percent, say researchers publishing in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Researchers blame diclofenac, a drug given to livestock and ingested by the birds when they snack on carrion. Unless diclofenac is banned and more birds are able to be bred in captivity, the vultures will be extinct within a decade, say researchers. The vulture decline is already a public-health problem in India: less vultures means more animal carcasses rotting in the open, which in turn has caused more disease and rabies in rats and stray dogs.
source: Reuters, BBC News, The Independent, The Guardian
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caniscandida Posted 8:42 pm
30 Apr 2008
There is no reason otherwise why these vultures should suddenly have started to drop dead.
Probably the sudden decline of some species of bats in the Northeast of this country is also to be blamed on the recent introduction of some new chemical, related to agriculture -- in the bats' case, perhaps a pesticide targeting moths.
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wiscidea Posted 7:49 am
01 May 2008
(2) A drug might help one business -- the livestock industry -- save money, but the cost of doing business is inevitably passed onto someone. Who is going to pay for services the vultures once freely provided? If it was happening over here, businesses would complain that they have to use the drug to keep costs down and preserve jobs and no one would consider who will pay for it in the long run. This must stop. WHY DON"T ECONOMISTS PRESENT THIS IN SOME UNDERSTANDABLE FORM TO THE AVERAGE VOTER???!!!
(3) This is why it should be illegal to control rodents with poison bait. Raptors, owls, and other critters eat the toxic rodents and die. You're poisoning rare birds when you try to poison rats and mice.
(4) I had forgotten all about the compassionate Indians who respect their cows by not eating them... but don't mind using them as a source of leather for export. There is an enormous amount of animal abuse occurring over there. Funny how religious beliefs are held so dearly, except when they stand in the way of capitalism.
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caniscandida Posted 10:46 pm
01 May 2008
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulture.
(But elsewhere, in Wikipedia's article on Falconiformes, the contributor there seems to be leading a recent movement to reinstall Cathartidae in Falconiformes! -- most confusing.)
Unfortunately, convergent evolution does little to argue against Intelligent Design: the ID folks can always argue that the Designer repeats a good design wherever it fits.
Anyway, I like the detail that the Egyptian vulture-shaped hieroglyph stands for the glottal stop, and that in Southern African languages, the word for "Nubian vulture" is also used for "lover," because those birds are so often seen in pairs (but usually a mother/child bond, apparently).
Notice that diclofenac in India has already received a paragraph.
I do not know enough about South Asian religions to understand there to be generally an abhorrence of cruelty to animals, or at least of cruelty to cattle. The "sacred" cows wandering the streets of Indian cities are famous; and it is also true that groups in India actually raise money to try to save cattle in THIS country, even as Americans raise money for charitable contributions to human-directed causes in the developing world.
Nevertheless, I have seen a video shown by the HSUS, documenting clandestine transport of cattle in India, full of abuse and cruelty, for the purpose of selling their hides in the leather industry. Formally, that seems to be illegal in India, probably reflecting a religious pro-cattle value. But quite clearly, not everyone in India shares that religious scruple.
Here is a rule of thumb: No religious system or tradition deserves to be criticized or condemned because of the ill-informed, ill-educated, ignorant, self-centered conduct of any of its alleged followers or practitioners.
On condors: It is possible that the reduction of their range, formerly across North America, has something to do with the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna. But there were probably other factors at work too. The California and Andean condors, while not matching the size of Teratornis, seem to get by on animals smaller than mastodons.
And although it has been said that in Africa, the group of animals who eat the most meat, biomass-wise, are the vultures (?; I can believe it, but I do not remember where I heard it), I do not know that there is a definite niche for scavengers of that sort.
During the Mesozoic Era, the pterosaurs were a very diffuse taxon. Because of the vagaries and incompletenesses of the fossil record, most forms that we know of seem to have had a gull-like, pelican-like, cormorant-like or albatross-like lifestyle. But in the late Cretaceous of the US Southwest, the huge Quetzalcoatlus was discovered, the largest flying animals, around 25 years ago; and its behavior is reconstructed as having been condor-like, with a preference of the carcasses of large dinosaurs.
If there were indeed a secure vulture-like or condor-like niche in vertebrate-dominated terrestrial ecosystems in which flying vertebrates are present, one might have expected there to be more signs of vulture-like pterosaurs throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous.
But then again, it is very possible that they indeed existed, but their remains never got fossilized. Or they did, but have not yet been discovered.
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