I’ll just edit instead!
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Tics. What’s their use in nature anyway?
I like the thought of an animal that already existed, terrifying, gruesome and truly terrible. But we humans were given a wish to extinguish a single type of animal from the face of the earth. And so we whose. And all memory of this horror from the dark was lost as it was cast into oblivion and humanity was relieved from its existence. Now all we are left with are in comparison cuddly squeaky companions of the animal kingdom and all is well, even the animals are glad to got rid of the horror. And now you ask that question when everything truly necessary was already done and now we ponder which one is the worst when all is well.
Kangaroos
Bed bugs.
Positive outcome would be no more having to burn contaminted possessions (or wash them in very hot water many times).
Viruses aren’t even alive in the technical biological sense
Yeah I think any human-specialized parasite is an easy choice. Head lice? Fuck em.
Canadian Geese, the animal that Canada stored all its rage inside and sent to battle the United States
And Finland…
If you got a problem with Canadian Gooses, you got a problem with me, and I suggest you let that one marinate
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Cobra Chickens are one of nature’s wonders. Leave them alone!
How dare you. I live for seasonal goose fly bys
I do honestly love hearing the honking and watching them fly by. I always point it out to my kids. I’ve seen lots of Canada geese in my life and they’ve never hissed at me, so I don’t have a problem with them other than the poops that are just everywhere.
You’ve been fortunate lol
I’ve been on walks in parks that got too close to someone’s nest and been charged. Those maniacs have serated tongues and beaks. I’m not kidding. You don’t want to be bit by these maniacs
https://a-z-animals.com/blog/goose-teeth-everything-you-need-to-know/
Oh I know they’re viscious! I’ve just been lucky and always kept enough distance between myself and them.
What have Emus ever done to you??? :(
Fucker stole my dimmie when i was six. Snatched it right out of my hand
Nothing it’s like they don’t even care about me :(
Not op, but an emu bit me as a child. Havent trusted them ever since. Just look at their shifty eyes.
Well they seem to have a reputation for winning battles after all
Cockroaches… as far as I’m aware, they don’t contribute anything to the eco system, they’re just pests.
Unfortunatelly, not even a nuclear war can erradicate them 😒.
One of the proposed explanations for the recent explosion in bed bug populations is the fact that pesticides have become more effective at eliminating cockroaches, which are predators of bed bug eggs
Hm 🤔… you know, I’ve seen roaches in the bathroom as well, and I always wondered what they were doing there, like there’s no food there. Apparently, if food is scarse, they’ll eat almost anything, dead human skin included.
In that case, I guess they’re not that bad. Sure, they should be regulated, cuz of deseases and all that, but living in a bubble is not good as well… for the immune system I mean.
OK, you’ve convinced me, I’m giving up on the roaches 😂.
They are extremely important for getting rid of dead things. Everything contributes to the ecosystem, except invasive species, OP’s premise is impossible to begin with.
Like really? Even pest cocroaches, they eat dead flesh 🤨? Cuz I thought they only went after good food (not rotten).
They don’t just eat dead animals, they also eat dead plant matter. Humans decided that some animals are “pests” because they don’t like having them around for one reason or another.
My main concern is hygene, nothing more (spread of jerms and viruses)… other than that, I have no problem living with all sorts of insects.
I was in Egypt once and stayed in a trailer in the middle of the desert (long story 😂). Anyway, the trailer was kinda dusty, so I decided to clean it a little bit. I pull the bed, a big fucking spider underneath it… OK, I guess we’re not cleaning inder the bed 😂. Pull a drawer, a scorpio inside… OK… so, that about sums up my cleaning for the day 🤣.
My point is, I wasn’t scared of them. They attack only of you do stuff to them, you stay out of their way, they won’t do amything to you ☺️.
Cockroaches do contribute.
‘Cockroach’ encompasses a wide range of species, the majority of which have no interest in living in a human’s home, and contribute to the work of decomposition on the forest floor. Many smaller predators also eat them.
OK, just the pest ones then 😁.
I’m on board with that 👍
Some pests (not only cockroaches) keeps the sewage unclogged by consuming solids.
Oh, come on 🤣… people just have to find an excuse for cocroaches to exist 🤣.
Just learned recently that there are over 3000 species of cockroaches and about 10 are invasive to humans.
That’s an incredible statistic. Where did you learn that?
I was watching the streamer piratesoftware who before he became a programmer/hacker was in college for entomology.
That’s really only German cockroaches that are colony roaches. At least in my region.
I think they’re a good diet to some insectivores.
Cats hunt them sometimes… I mean, some cats 😁.
I meant more like lizards, hedgehogs, frogs, but yeah, cats too.
but they cute though
They’re too lazy to even reproduce.
I feel like a reasonable but controversial answer to this is cows
Cows are awesome. Go pet a cow sometime, they’re extremely affectionate and just super chill.
just super chill.
Lol, they can be, they can (and do, several times a year in the UK alone) also stampede and trample a human/s to death quite easily (but also very deliberately. Edit to clarify - the stampede part is deliberate, I don’t think the cows are necessarily homicidal lol).
Sure, they normally only do this when they feel threatened, but all it takes is a small dog nearby, or for the cow to have a calve you might not even see, and it’s in defence mode.
I’m not trying to frame the cows as the problem, but this idea that they are docile animals you can just do whatever around (like people are literally paying money to “cuddle” cows) is wrong and dangerous. They are wild animals that are bigger and stronger than us, and should be treated as such.
But why cows?
It’s an understandable answer that kind of misses the point. Cows are an incredible strain on the environment because of how fucking many of them humans breed in order to abuse and murder. But deleting cows would just prompt people to breed and abuse a different animal so it wouldn’t help that much
What do you think we’d use? Just out of curiosity. Horse? Deer? We have the infrastructure and such for horses. I don’t know why we haven’t domesticated deer for meat production but I’d imagine they’re next. Horses have much less utility in the modern world so I can definitely see them being the go-to.
More farming of pigs and goats probably.
Bison, most likely.
Yeah I honestly think they’d just reinvent the cow.
I don’t kniw why but for some reason the phrase reinvent the cow is so funny to me.
Methane and total acreage needed per cow
But why male cows?
Mosquitoes are pollinators. Sucking blood and being annoying is only a small part of their functionality.
I know you said that we shouldn’t say humans but I’m gonna say it anyway:
Humans.
Sorry.
Humans are not the problem. Ultrarich people are.
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Oh come on, really? Is the problem ultrarich people? Or is the problem poor people who won’t eat those ultrarich people?
Natural selection
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Touché. We need to do better xD.
I’m going to provide one very important reasons it would be disastrous to the ecosystem if humans were suddenly deleted from the Earth: what happens to the many currently active nuclear reactors? And what happens when Chernobyl’s sarcophagus finally corrodes entirely and exposes that radioactive blight to the entirety of Europe and central Asia? Probably nothing good is the answer.
I would be willing to put money on “likely nothing” being the answer for active nuclear reactors. They’re highly automated from a safety perspective these days. I’d be more worried about chemical plants
That’s a good point, too. My general idea was we have certain things we’ve created that we can’t leave unchecked or else it might be disastrous for the environment. Human infrastructure expects humans to exist.
Humans are the only species that would ask a question like this with ecologically damning effects. So, yeah.
Would be interesting to tally up the negative impacts of removing humans as well.
Culls of invasive species would no longer occur, which would be detrimental in those ecosystems.
A fairly significant number of endangered animals probably only exist today due to human intervention and breeding programs (i am well aware that we probably made them endangered in the first place)
Cross breeds would be done as well, Ligers and Mules require humans for breeding. Although in fairness they are definitely not natural to begin with.
Many animals we have domesticated would be done for as well, most smaller dogs are completely, reliant on humans for food and grooming. Many cats would be okay, but some breeds are likely dead ends as well. Jersey cows would probably have a bad time as well, without milking, sheep might have issues as well?
Interesting thought experiment.
Life After people. Whole series exploring this
Ooh, thanks for the suggestion. Seems its on youtube as well. Thanks!
Link for anyone else interested: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLob1mZcVWOagLL-shJOp-d5_qJOG2MvCJ
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I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Was this the one with flying cats? Because that show was SO GOOD!! Except for the first few minutes with the dog…
Yeah, this is a good topic. I can add a few:
Short term, pets in houses, farm animals, etc will need to escape and start fending for themselves otherwise they’ll starve (or dehydrate).. Oops, I’d somehow missed an entire paragraph of your post 🤦♂️ Sheep need us to trim their wool, because we’ve bred them up grow fair more than they need. They’ll get too hot if they don’t have problems with defecation first (an actual thing farmers have to worry about).Medium to long term, when dams and dikes aren’t maintained they’ll eventually fail, flooding vast areas including the Netherlands.
I guess that the world will continue heating for a bit even once we’re gone, so we wouldn’t be around to theoretically use our tech to help. Obviously, we’re the reason it’s happening in the first place, but nature’s not equipped to deal with change that’s this rapid.
Yes, most of those we created through breeding, but you could argue that wolves and coyotes created modern deer the same way.
I do wonder if many would go extinct in the medium term from predation, before they can evolve fast enough to adapt; I’m thinking farm pigs and chickens would be OK in the short term - they don’t need us to survive - but wild dogs/coyotes/wolves, large cats like the NA lions, raptors, foxes… they’d all be putting a lot of pressure on those mostly defenseless breeds. Pigs are not wild hogs. Cattle and horses exist just fine in their environments without humans. Even with predation, herds are large and they aren’t defenseless.
Sheep are an exception; like you said, they need us to perform maintenance because of how we’ve bred them. Are there others?
My thoughts go to a lot of our stored and operational fuel supplies. Nuclear fuel (both civil and weapon) would eventually become exposed through lack of storage container maintinance and cooling starting meltdown reactions in their localized environments. Oil extraction, distribution, and refining systems are automated to an extent but somewhere a tank is going ng to rupture or just run out of space and then it’s all getting into the environment, likely at sea to have what effects that may cause.
Oh, yeah. If we suddenly disappeared, there’d be so many environmental catastrophes.
I’m sure it’d level off, but a driver falling asleep at the wheel on the highway tends to cause problems. If the BP spill in the Gulf had nobody trying to cap it off who knows how long it’d have kept going.
Mosquitoes
Mosquitos are important pollinators and have a very important place at the bottom of the food chain.
Surely something else can be eaten. And there are many species of mosquito that do not eat human blood. I think we can nuke the species that does and still get by.
Perhaps I’m under informed here.
I think we can nuke the species that does and still get by.
I think people in China had similar ideas about sparrows… Nature is immensely complex and I can’t think of a single instance in which human Intervention improved anything at all
That’s fair. I’m entirely uninformed on the sparrows but I do understand nature is an endlessly complex system which we do not and probably can not ever truly understand. Not trying to be absolutist.
But I do wish death on every blood sucking mosquito.
Only good bug is a dead bug.
I’m doing my part!
Humans
Bedbugs
