SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
When geoecologist Steffen Zuther and his colleagues arrived in central Kazakhstan to monitor the calving of one herd of saigas, a critically endangered, steppe-dwelling antelope, veterinarians in the area had already reported dead animals on the ground.
"But since there happened to be die-offs of limited extent during the last years, at first we were not really alarmed," Zuther, the international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science.
But within four days, the entire herd — 60,000 saiga — had died. As veterinarians and conservationists tried to stem the die-off, they also got word of similar population crashes in other herds across Kazakhstan. By early June, the mass dying was over.
Are mass-die-offs like these indications of stress in the larger ecosystem?
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 04 2015, @01:00AM
My kids are into sheep and goats. The daughter in law has been workng with them all her life. Their digestive systems are easily upset, and we've lost animals for unexplainable reasons. Little to nothing upsets them, and when their digestive system is out of whack, it is often fatal.
To make things more complicated, different plants are highly desired in one season of the year, and fatal in another season.
Fragile little beasts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @02:45AM
I remember reading about mustard used as fodder but it must be harvested before it blooms because in that stage it turns poisonous.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @03:07PM
I remember reading somewhere, I think it was here, that plants can detect when under attack (and adjacent plants can 'hear' when other plants are being eaten) and they release chemicals to deter predators and warn other plants to do the same.
I found it, it was in the comments of one of the threads
Posted by bob_super (1357)
"I read something at least 25 years ago about some trees in the savanna releasing chemicals when goats eat their leaves, and the trees downstream starting to produce toxic chemicals when they perceive these chemicals.
Herd protection, in a sense."
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?threshold=0&highlightthresh=0&mode=improvedthreaded&commentsort=0&op=Change&sid=8688#post_comment [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday September 04 2015, @09:44PM
I remember this one time... at band camp...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 04 2015, @02:48AM
Being familiar with sheep -- yeah, they can be insanely tough yet drop dead for no discernible reason. But cyanogenic glycoside generation by native grasses is the most likely explanation here -- it's not an unknown phenomenon by any means, and can kill an entire population in very short order. (See my link in another post.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @04:54PM
Isn't the natural order of these things, a cycle of some sort.
There is plenty of food/plants.
Animals eat food.
Animal population goes up
Food population goes down
There is little food.
Animals die
Plants grow back
There is plenty of food
...