There was an attempt at scale.
(midwest.social)
fossilesque
Science MemesEach buffalo in the first picture represents 242,914 buffalo. Which means the last picture would be about 1/10th of a bison, and the middle one would be just the tip of a horn.
Settlers killed buffalo to force indigenous people into the reservation system. It was a big part of the genocide here, worth looking into if you get the chance.
THERE! ARE! FOUR! ~~LIGHTS~~ BISONS!!
There are 300 bison! presses button*
I don't know the history of bison population. From the image, I assume there used to be a ton of bison. But then a science experiment involving velociraptors went awry, and only a small group of bison were left alive. Then those bison made an uprising against the velociraptor-experiments and invaded their area, allowing their population to grow again.
How far off am I?
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wild-ones-live/
I like the optimistic message but the graph scale is throwing me
TIL There are 30,000 free roaming bison but there are 500,000 total including privately owned and commercial herds.
The white man had to kill the buffalo so that he could poop upon the land instead. We need our buffalo back in this land.
30,000 is roughly 1/3 of 60,000,000.
VERY roughly. Lol
Logarithmically scaled image. I'll leave the determination of the base of the Log as an exercise for the viewer.
I would show my proof, but I don't have enough space in this margin
I'm here for this comment all day.
well, we know bison in the middle are worth approximately 75 each...
OBVIOUSLY!!
yeah this graphic is terrible
...are you a bot trying to trick users into pedantically identifying images for your training data? Cus these are not what you claim the are.
Yeah, we need 799613 more bison images to justify the graphic.
It's only off by roughly 20,000,000
Also, like, it wasn’t just a “decision to stop” it was the end of a coincidence of factors. The mid century climatic conditions that led to several years of poor grass growth, with the combined hunting efforts of European American settlers on rail roads supported by the army’s policies against the Great Plains Indians, south eastern Indians displaced in to the great planes, and Great Plains Indians intensifying hunting via sophisticated methods they’d developed using horseback and fire arms, all driven by a demand for buffalo hides for use in industrial machinery. The end of the bad climatic conditions and the collapse of the hide trade due to development of other industrial materials is what stoped the over hunting.
With the pressures of hunting decreased and a historic climatic event over, the population was able to rebound somewhat, but, due to the encroachment of farms and ranching never really recover. Also the genetic bottleneck of the population probably hasn’t helped things but that’s not super well studied.
Because they finally caged the velociraptor in the middle image?
Look at the gunbarrel around it. That's the velociraptor equivalent of James Bond. You can't put it in a cage.
It's the veliciraptor you're aiming at, while the clever girl is watching you.
The decision to stop was required, but a ton of work was done to help the population rebound. What kind of misguided message is this trying to send?
It's trying to tell people who think it's too much work to bother that it's not. I do it all the time, like when I have to wash the dishes and I tell myself "I'll just wash one dish" because I know if I do that I'll be a lot more motivated to continue, but if I keep looking at the whole problem before I start, I'll be too overwhelmed to do anything at all.
Sure, the bison population is 0.05% of what it once was. And now that we're not actively attempting to extinct them, everything is hunky dory and no more work is needed.
I don't know how else to interpret this. It sounds like the Bison Society would rather be a society dedicated to literal anything else. The Kick the Can Down the Road Society, perhaps.
I think it gets the point across even if it's off by orders of magnitude.
I get that, but I personally think 60,000,000 tiny buffalo would be more impactful. Can someone do a quick edit in Photoshop?
There's not even 60,000,000 pixels in that image.
Well not with that attitude.
We just need dithering with different levels of grey representing a different amount of Bison, arranged so that the macro pattern still registers as a Bison; but in fact it would be a mega Bison.
Each of the bison shapes in the 60mil example are actually clusters of bison so small you can't see them with the naked eye.
Jokes on you, I wear glasses and still can't see them
Jokes on you, I have no eyes and I can't even read what you said.
The jokes on you, the post you couldn't read contains the winning lottery numbers.
Jokes on you, those winning lottery numbers were for the hunger games. Here’s your bow and arrow
Each bison image is worth 75 bison according to the middle section.
Joke's on you, my eyes are the only part of me that isn't naked right now.
Log scale?
graph designer "i don't like math" scale
I don't think this is to scale.
I agree. Bison are much larger than that.
300 is a hell of a bottleneck
Apparently there is a certain amount of inbreeding with cattle, but several large herds without any interbreeding with cattle are closely managed to prevent inbreeding.
Science/Biology question for someone. If the Bison that exist today are all sourced from those last 300 Bison, are there genetic bottlenecks/recessive traits and defects that we've just permanently given to the entire Bison species forever and ever?
semi-serious question: i think almost every species extinct in recent history can be brought back to live with genetic engineering?
Not really.
First of all, because we would need the DNA of those animals. Sure, you can cobble some shit together, to make an animal that looks like that extinct species, but it would not actually be that extinct species.
Another issue is the biome/niche that species lived in. They either went extinct because of changes to their environment, or, they went extinct, and that caused changes in their environment. So if you want to bring the species back, you also need to make sure they have a suitable environment to survive in.
You also can't just bring back one. A population needs generic diversity to adapt and survive. So to de-extinct a species, you need to bring back like 25 generically varied examples. Much more work than just creating a single specimen.
Behavior matters for a species as well. If orcas went extinct in the wild, and we brought them back with a breeding program in zoos and aquarium and just released those solitary orcas into the wild, do you think they would act like orcas? Would they hunt with the same techniques? I think the pack mentality would be gone, their "language" would be gone, and I don't think they would survive.
The reality is, extinction is a permanent thing. We may possibly have the ability to bring a species "back" but there will be permanent, population-altering irreversible effects from going extinct in the first place.
As a biologist, can confirm.
Just to add to your point. But if anyone wants a good example of what a genetic bottleneck can do to a species look no further than the cheetah, poor bastards have nigh universal anxiety. Let alone the fact that they are about as genetically diverse as a rural Icelandic town populated exclusively by scions of the Von Habsburgs, seriously they are all universal donors for each other and donated organ rejections are basically non existent.
Not gonna lie, thought those were coffee tables until I zoomed in
Thank goodness for the Bronx Zoo and the WCS.
60,000,000? Seems like they would've starved anyway.
I thought this was about vaccines until I read the bottom.
