ALRIGHT MY FRIEND I have received about six messages in this vein since yesterday, but I worked for thirteen hours today and I have no time for this nonsense. Short answer: YES.
I’m gonna summarize some salient points on why pandas are awful from a conservation standpoint:
PANDAS LITERALLY CANNOT MATE IN CAPTIVITY. IT’S UNBELIEVABLE
Artificial insemination and hand-rearing of cubs are basically standard practice, and still they usually die. At what point is it reasonable to give up because I think we hit it DECADES AGO
In 35 years, only 90 cubs have been born in captivity outside of China
Wild panda numbers have increased a bare (bear?) 200 individuals in 10 years, despite literal billions of dollars being poured into conservation
NO OTHER AREA OF ANIMAL CONSERVATION EVEN COMES CLOSE TO THE MONEY BEING POURED INTO PANDAS. NONE
And yet we’ve managed to literally rebuild populations of black-footed ferrets, oryx, and California condors with exponentially less money
Despite all of this, only 10 pandas have been released since the 80s, and all but two died
I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that it’s because their habitat is destroyed and fragmentary and barely protected!!!!!!
The only good thing about panda conservation is that protecting their range is also protecting tons of other species. Which would be great, if more of their range was being protected effectively.
There is way more money in keeping captive pandas captive than in releasing them!! surprise!!!!!!
Zoos pay a lot of money to get pandas on loan because people just LOVE looking at pandas and they can’t afford to house and care for their other animals without people coming to visit! Or do any kind of conservation whatsoever!! Panda-economics! (this is kind of a pro as opposed to a con but its the kind of pro that makes me feel like I need a shower)
Pandas are endangered and sort of have a role in spreading bamboo seeds around, so they get billions of dollars. Every shark ever is MORE endangered, and without them the entire ocean ecosystem would collapse, but that’s fine they don’t need money (I’m not bitter) ((I am bitter))
I’m gonna be frank with you. We are in the middle of a mass extinction event, caused by us. Not to be a downer (jk, I’m gonna) but we’re already driving so many species to extinction that we cannot afford to save them all with the money and interest that is in conservation right now.
Instead, we have to do some kind of awful extinction triage and assess which animals will do the most good to work to conserve – and getting into keystone species, ecosystem engineers, and other truly integral species is a whole other can of worms I’m not gonna touch on – but there are animals that are “more important” in a certain sense than others, in that they can support or affect a much wider range of other species than another.
People only care about big, cute, fluffy animals – a common lament heard from conservationists, but it’s so true. There are thousands, if not millions of species that don’t fit this mold that conservation work would benefit eons more than pandas. It’s like fixing a pretty, stained-glass window in a house whose foundations are collapsing and thinking you’re helping.
Pandas have always been the face of conservation, and they continue to be one of the biggest and most expensive ongoing failures.
[Sources/ stuff to read to make sense of my incoherent response!]
This Fossil Friday is all in the family…the armadillo family, that is!
This is Panochthus frenzelianus, a giant glyptodont that lived in South America, just before the extinction of the glyptodonts, at the end of the last ice age, about 30,000 years ago. Some glyptodonts grew to be over 10 feet long and may have weighed as much as a ton, including the shell.
Although scientists including Charles Darwin collected partial remains of glyptodonts in the early 19th century, at first nobody knew what kind of mammal they represented. It was eventually accepted that glyptodonts must be related in some way to armadillos, the only other New World mammals to develop a protective bony shell. However, because of the many physical differences between these two groups, most paleontologists have held the view that they must have separated very early in their evolutionary history.
Just this week, new research by an international team of researchers, including Ross MacPhee from AMNH, that used a novel technique to recover ancient DNA revealed that instead of representing a very early, independent branch of armored xenarthrans, glyptodonts likely had a much later origin, from ancestors within lineages leading to the modern armadillo family Chlamyphoridae.
“Contrary to what is generally assumed about the distinctiveness of glyptodonts, our analyses indicate that they originated only some 35 million years ago, well within the armadillo radiation,” said researcher Frédéric Delsuc of the French National Center for Scientific Research. “Taxonomically, they should be regarded as no more than another subfamily of armadillos, which we can call Glyptodontinae.”
Okay, this picture is HUUUUUUUUUUUUGE, and it’s amazing.
It’s surreal to see a world without* an atmosphere and therefore a deep black sky. And before you claim it’s fake because there aren’t any stars, that’s because camera exposure to see the surface is too short.
*technically the moon has an atmosphere, but it’s around 10-100 trillionth of ours^
^assuming you’re reading this from Earth, and this isn’t being read in the year 2050 on a Mars colony
I was zoomed in on it, trying to figure out why it was making me vaguely uncomfortable and why my mind kept insisting this was fake, and I realized the problem I was having was that I was expecting atmospheric perspective to fade the contrast on the farther objects and make the horizon hazy, but….. no atmosphere.
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 
