Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by userbinator on Saturday November 18, 2017 @08:34PM
(#15731754)
But although there might be just a few hundred individuals left in the wild, tens of thousands can be found in home aquariums and research laboratories around the world. They are bred so widely in captivity that certain restaurants in Japan even serve them up deep-fried.
Doesn't that mean it's not actually extinction, but more like domestication?
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by azernik on Saturday November 18, 2017 @09:52PM
(#15731994)
There are worries about those in captivity, though:
> By the time that day comes, however, the wild axolotl may be gone. That worries Gardiner and Sandoval Guzmán because the animals that they study, like many lab animals, are highly inbred. Scientists use an ‘inbreeding coefficient’ to measure how small a gene pool is. Identical twins have a coefficient of 100%; totally unrelated individuals would score close to zero. A score above 12% indicates a population in which individuals are mostly breeding with their first cousins, and is considered a serious concern by ecologists and geneticists. The famously inbred and unhealthy Spanish Habsburg kings of the seventeenth century often had a coefficient somewhere above 20%. The average axolotl inbreeding coefficient is 35%.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by KineticLensman on Sunday November 19, 2017 @09:27AM
(#15734006)
The article makes the point that the problem isn't that there are very few axolotls left, but that the non-wild ones are very inbred. This makes them prone to mass die-off from disease. They also accumulate genetic abnormalities that make them less useful to scientific research - notably into limb development and regeneration.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by contingo on Sunday November 19, 2017 @06:55AM
(#15733522)
It just means they're headed for extinction in the wild, but that some populations are maintained in captivity. The term 'domestication' would not normally be used in this case, because it relates to the selection of improvement traits in some resource or behavior useful to humans.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by reassembled on Saturday November 18, 2017 @04:31PM
(#15730817)
Is there a reason they can't release them into a new habitat somewhere, even constructed specifically for the Axolotl?
Also if they are so prolifically inbred in captivity, couldn't they capture another specimen and start a new line either with a captive specimen or another wild specimen?
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by crispinb on Saturday November 18, 2017 @06:06PM
(#15731168)
We're losing so much of our planet's biota, and at such a catastrophic pace (eg 58% decline in vertebrate abundance since 1970), that it's hard to know where to concentrate resources. This is an ongoing debate amongst ecologists. There's a fundamental quandary: the problem is planetary, a specieswise response is known to be inadequate, but it's the only one on offer.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by meri_dian on Saturday November 18, 2017 @08:36PM
(#15731760)
The answer is to allow evolution to do its job and produce species capable of dealing with human dominance of the planet, while at the same time doing our best to transition to sustainable energy sources.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by crispinb on Saturday November 18, 2017 @10:00PM
(#15732023)
Science fiction is an entertainment, not an answer.
As for answers: answers to what? Topsoil loss (about 50 harvests left and counting)? Freshwater disappearance? Billions of sea-level-rise refugees with the inevitable resulting regional wars?
Unlimited so-called 'economic growth' has always been imaginary (it's not 'growth' in anything; it's entropy transfer as we shift from from complex and sustainable systems evolved over millennia to crude early-stage technological systems). It is not so glorious a work of the imagination it is worth destroying our real physical living home for.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by ekianjo on Saturday November 18, 2017 @09:46PM
(#15731976)
That's not how evolution works at all. Evolution is not about mutations and genetic changes, it's about who is the fittest for their current environment. It can happen, very, very fast, like when new species are introduced in an environment. This can be observed in Australia with several species that were imported with human interactions. That counts as Evolution as well.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by bipson on Sunday November 19, 2017 @02:52AM
(#15732808)
I think you're wrong, the theory of evolution has been suffering under the oversimplification that is 'survival of the fittest', that also led to e.g. Social Darwinism, which is dangerous and completely bogus.
Evolution Darwin already knew (and even more so we nowadays know) is a complex mechanism, that includes favoritism of certain traits of species over others, which steers a species' fitness for the environment, and several factors play various roles, e.g. epi-genetics.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by agumonkey on Saturday November 18, 2017 @10:04PM
(#15732034)
Aren't you distorting the concept ? if no axolotl is fit to survive in the current wild, then that's it, no more axolotl. Evolution is not only filtering but also adapting, and it takes reproduction to do whatever (be it gene shuffling or else) to improve fitness.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by anigbrowl on Saturday November 18, 2017 @05:48PM
(#15731086)
Presumably they don't want to wreck the ecosystem of other species. I mean you can't exactly order up an empty habitat on Amazon, though I'm sure Alexa is now working furiously on the concept in case any of the Axiolotls have money.
Re:The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat
by crazygringo on Saturday November 18, 2017 @07:52PM
(#15731616)
"The species originates from numerous lakes, such as Lake Xochimilco underlying Mexico City... As of 2010, wild axolotls were near extinction due to urbanization in Mexico City and consequent water pollution, as well as the introduction of invasive species such as tilapia and perch... Surveys in 1998, 2003 and 2008 found 6,000, 1,000 and 100 axolotls per square kilometer in its Lake Xochimilco habitat, respectively. A four-month-long search in 2013, however, turned up no surviving individuals in the wild. Just a month later, two wild ones were spotted in a network of canals leading from Xochimilco." [1]
No idea how long the eggs can aestivate. Nice genetics/biocaching crossover there.
I hoped to see a nationload (MX, BR, something) of LEED living roof that included or adjoined estuary, I guess we know the jaguar (ocelot...) is less a hazard. It just has to be nicer to keep occupied canopy over most of the estuary (so birds don't run off with the cache in minutes) than it is to run ventilation or spend marginal time (¨) on cash crops.
Doesn't that mean it's not actually extinction, but more like domestication?
> By the time that day comes, however, the wild axolotl may be gone. That worries Gardiner and Sandoval Guzmán because the animals that they study, like many lab animals, are highly inbred. Scientists use an ‘inbreeding coefficient’ to measure how small a gene pool is. Identical twins have a coefficient of 100%; totally unrelated individuals would score close to zero. A score above 12% indicates a population in which individuals are mostly breeding with their first cousins, and is considered a serious concern by ecologists and geneticists. The famously inbred and unhealthy Spanish Habsburg kings of the seventeenth century often had a coefficient somewhere above 20%. The average axolotl inbreeding coefficient is 35%.
You may be interested in learning more about genetic drift and effective population size, it should clear things up:
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/Genetic-Drift-and-...
Also if they are so prolifically inbred in captivity, couldn't they capture another specimen and start a new line either with a captive specimen or another wild specimen?
As for answers: answers to what? Topsoil loss (about 50 harvests left and counting)? Freshwater disappearance? Billions of sea-level-rise refugees with the inevitable resulting regional wars?
Unlimited so-called 'economic growth' has always been imaginary (it's not 'growth' in anything; it's entropy transfer as we shift from from complex and sustainable systems evolved over millennia to crude early-stage technological systems). It is not so glorious a work of the imagination it is worth destroying our real physical living home for.
Evolution Darwin already knew (and even more so we nowadays know) is a complex mechanism, that includes favoritism of certain traits of species over others, which steers a species' fitness for the environment, and several factors play various roles, e.g. epi-genetics.
All of us dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Their only natural habitat is city canals?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl
No idea how long the eggs can aestivate. Nice genetics/biocaching crossover there.
I hoped to see a nationload (MX, BR, something) of LEED living roof that included or adjoined estuary, I guess we know the jaguar (ocelot...) is less a hazard. It just has to be nicer to keep occupied canopy over most of the estuary (so birds don't run off with the cache in minutes) than it is to run ventilation or spend marginal time (¨) on cash crops.
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/hope-for-the-axolotl is nice. Maybe every kid needs a little Nausicä dungeon, bugs and all.
So Toothless was inspired by Stitch and, probably, cats.