They would overpopulate and exhaust all the resources.
Save your right-wing “overpopulation” bullcrap. Barely anything predates on elephants and rhinos, yet they haven’t managed to strip the continent of Africa and “exhaust all the resources.”
Because their evolutionary defense is literally defense, and not just having enough numbers to overcome predation.
Sure, there are species that exist without predation, but introduce predators (like humans) and oh, would you look at that… extinction!
Life is complex, and doesn’t have any one single explanation for how it exists.
but introduce predators (like humans) and oh, would you look at that… extinction!
Mammalian mega-fauna stil exists (and thrives) on the continent where human beings literally evolved.
Save your right-wing “overpopulation” bullcrap
Wild what you guys think of as political. It’s just how it sometimes goes in nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Deer
It’s exactly what happens, and we have about as good a natural experiment on this as it gets:
https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/when-reindeer-paradise-turned-purgatory-0
tl;dr: a Reindeer herd was setup on an uninhabited Alaskan island as a potential food source during WWII with no natural predators. The war ended before anything came of it, so the herd was left on its own. Within a few decades, they had stripped the island bare of all vegetation the deer could possibly reach, and then they all starved to death.
Also, see predator reintroduction programs, such as how wolves change rivers.
Elephants and rhinos don’t breed the same way a lot of other animals do. If they did, evolution would very quickly do what happened in Alaska to those deer. Animals like deer and rabbits breed in great numbers with the evolutionary expectation that predators will keep them in check.
If you think this process is brutal, well, yes, it is. The conservative thing would be to say that this is “natural” and therefore the correct and only way to run human society. This is wrong; we can choose a better path for ourselves while also accepting that nature works this way all the time.
tl;dr: a Reindeer herd
So your eco-fash hottake can literally be disproven by the fact that elephants exist, yet you are so desperate to cling onto it that you try to peddle forcing deer into becoming an invasive species on an island they have never adapted to as proof?
They addressed the elephant issue in their comment. I recommend you read it again. The summary is elephants evolved without predation, so they don’t bread in large numbers. Prey animals breed with the assumption a not-insignificant portion of their population will die prematurely due to predation. If this doesn’t happen then their population balloons until it consumes all available resources, then it collapses.
This happens fairly frequently where we’ve removed predators from the ecosystem. Its why we promote deer hunting, for example. We’ve removed their natural predators, and if they aren’t culled then they will grow until they collapse. This is well understood and not controversial.
I guess we could engineer the planet until this isn’t an issue, but that’ll take a few millenia and probably isn’t the best idea. Let nature be natural. It’d be fascist to assume it’s our domain to conquer and dominate into submission.
absolutely wild that someone would assume someone’s political views based on their understanding of ecosystems-level biology, but on lemmy, somehow, i’m no longer surprised
absolutely wild that someone would assume someone’s political views based on their understanding of ecosystems-level biology,
Lol!
What did you think the (so-called) “Tragedy Of The Commons” right-wing myth was all about, eh? It’s literally the same argument as the one being peddled here.
The tragedy of the commons, an argument as to why unfettered capitalism is bad, is right wing (i.e. pro-capitalist) propaganda.
I’ve officially heard it all now.
Being fair, humans now have no realistic predators and we’re stripping the planet bare…