Sorry, the tone seemed accusatory in your original post. As if the US and Europe were somehow morally above poaching, but I understand that is not the intention.
"Does anyone know if they are catching the criminals that steal the animals, and where they are being exported to?"
Unfortunately, this would likely devolving into arguments similar to the plastic pollution in the ocean. When we know it's all the same countries doing the crimes, it looks like some kind of racism or stereotyping.
So either we ignore who the culprits are or we can be mature and civily discuss why these same country's culture seem to thrive on certain consistent destructive behaviors.
It's an amazing claim that that modest sized country was the source of much of the global problems given that plastic bags and six-pack rings etc are routinely used across the globe.
Maybe it's true. Perhaps Filipinos are vastly more likely to discard plastic bags than most of the rest of the world. But how were these assessments and rankings really made?
I can't find any reports of Komodo dragons being used in Chinese medicine.
I can find news reports from 2017 of discoveries that compounds found in Komodo blood could have medical applications as an antibiotic, but I can find no mentions of it having started to be used in Chinese medicine.
Carmine offers Clark the opportunity to make a lot of money just for running small errands. The first is to pick up a Komodo dragon from JFK Airport and transport it to a specific address.
Who is stealing them? Why? For what purpose? Who is buying? What an impressively useless article void of any important information.
For those wondering, it's for hocus-pocus "traditional" medicinal nonsense elsewhere in Asia, like Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is solely driving many global species to extinction.
Anyway, Komodo is very remote and there's no easy trip there and back, it's either a multi-day seasick inducing trip from Bali or a puddle jumper over to Flores before riding a boat for a couple of hours so you can watch a guide toss some meat slop at the lizards and maybe push one away with a stick if it gets too close. Hard to imagine how closing the area off to tourists is going to help anything.
I know. But acknowledging that some glorified voodoo like Traditional Chinese Medicine is singlehandedly driving many species to extinction is merely acknowledging a well known fact.
Anyway, I lived in China for a while. The sale of endangered species is rampant and in open display all over the country. TCM is still a huge part of culture for much of the population, arguably more so than ever with the growing middle class. Even something as nonsensical as bear bile cough drops are as routine to many as something like taking Dayquil is to a westerner.
Your post is sinophobic and racist because it's not based in facts but rather on your desire to push a false narrative. Komodos are NOT used in TCM at all, ever, end of story.
I'll pay you $150,000 for proof Komodos are being shipped to China for use in TCM. Accept or deny within 12 hrs of my post with your financial information and binding contractual agreement because if you fail to deliver proof you get to pay me $100,000. It's a fair wager since you are so incredibly confident the inane and vile racism you spout are facts. Put up or shut up. If you have proof I'll pay you and apologize and I'll even come to wherever you are and wash and detail your car. Accept?
I don't know who is stealing Komodos. Based on the price it's probably not the redneck meth makers who keep pitbulls and mountain lions. I'd suspect Saudi Arabians and UAE and Kuwait folks who love to keep bad-ass animals. In their case the animal will have a comfy life but that doesn't mean it's what's best for the animal and it's probably not.
edit: massive downvoting and flagging. Rather than a super easy $150,000 pay out if parent post can prove his extremist racist claims. Flagging and downvoting instead of proof. It's what I expected. The offer stands. And why does HN allow racism like parent post to stand when it can't even provide proof when are called out and highly incentivized to document their racist claims.
I appreciate your desire to prevent HN from sinking into that kind of conflict, prejudice, and shaming—but breaking the site guidelines yourself is no way to go about it.
We ban accounts that break the guidelines regardless of which side they're on, and actually regardless of whether they're right or not. Being right doesn't help; it actually makes it worse, because right flames burn more intensely than wrong ones. So can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, follow the rules, and not post anything more like the above to this site?
Keep in mind that Europeans have hunted species to extinction simply for hats. People are people. Where I live in Japan, the Japanese worlf is extinct (less than 100 years ago). The Japanese river otter is extinct (only about 15 years ago). The river eel (unagi) is going extinct and so the price at the restaurant has gone up like crazy (like about $60 for a single eel). Let me emphasize: everybody knows it is going extinct and yet they are still eating it. You've got blue fin tuna being sold at auction for $3 million for a single tuna -- because it is going extinct.
And before you say, "Oh those pesky Japanese people don't care about the environment", these are the things I know about because I happen to live here. Before I moved the US removed quotas from Pacific salmon in retaliation for Canadian softwood lumber prices! The idea was to destroy the fish stocks so that the Canadian fishing industry would be hurt and they would agree to increase prices for softwood lumber. It took something like 10 years for the returning salmon counts on Vancouver island to recover.
We (collectively) suck at this stuff. The more we point our fingers at those pesky Chinese or those pesky Japanese or those pesky Portuguese (don't get me started about the Grand Banks) or those pesky Americans, the more we abandon the idea that we need to work together.
No, focusing exclusively on those we judge to be the worst offenders without owning our own failings means we lack empathy and look hypocritical, and thus our appeals are less likely to be taken seriously.
You're exactly right, and also why it bothers me so much that some people are trying to solve global warming by encouraging other people to walk more. It ignores the reality that we need to work together to make global policy decisions.
Many of the examples you cite are used as foods. It’s at least somewhat useful.
Rinho horn, bear bile, etc is not functional in any way (except perhaps wealth signaling) and the sooner we shame the Chinese (and other cultures, including our own - big game hunting, hello!) the better the world will be.
The issue is that you're making pejorative generalizations about an entire population, which crosses into national slur—or at least dips a toe into that toxic waste. Not ok here.
Please don't "shame the Chinese" or "shame a culture" on Hacker News. Turning HN into a battlefield helps no animals, and there are infinitely many ways to make your points without violating the site guidelines. Please review them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You're right. It's not ok to "shame the Chinese" on Hacker News, or to shame any other population. It sucks that it has become necessary to say that, but group behavior is unfortunately volatile and degenerates quickly. I'm sure that crushcrashcrush wouldn't deliberately shame someone in person just because their background was from China, or anywhere else.
The world at large is headed into more of this, so for HN to succeed, it needs to get a little less like the world at large.
The desire to protect birds in America and Canada from being turned into hats is what induced the creation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which was a sufficiently bold law to be (unsuccessfully) challenged in the supreme court.
So yes, this is an issue that's been generally understood for a century at least.
> something as nonsensical as bear bile cough drops are as routine to many as something like taking Dayquil is to a westerner
More and more studies I've read show that over-the-counter medicines often do nothing (the easy-to-sell sudafed replacement is the most obvious example), but we take them anyway. It's just as much nonsense as bear bile cough drops, just in a different form that seems normal to us. In the end, you're sick, and it doesn't make you get better or feel better. So nobody is really crazy here -- we are promised a cure, and really want one, so we try to believe because it's all we've got. Bear bile or phenylephrine... it's all the same.
> More and more studies I've read show that over-the-counter medicines often do nothing
You make a fantastic claim but provide no evidence whatsoever. Counterpoint: diphenhydramine (aka Benadryl), ibprofan and other NSAIDs, clotrimazole and other antifungals, ... the list just keeps going.
Admittedly, the Sudafed replacement (ie phenylephrine) is not nearly effective as the original (ie pseudoephedrine) for large segments of the population including myself. To that end, one of my favorite mock journal articles of all time is "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine" (http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf).
Are they poaching the dragons or stealing them while they're still alive? Usually you'd say "poaching" or "illegally hunting" or something if that's what it was, but stealing a live Komodo dragon sounds like a foolhardy endeavor.
I think they are very difficult to breed hence why farming is not common. Indonesia a pretty poor country so labor and land should be cheap. Whatever you have to do to get them to breed... you could figure it out.
Komodo Dragons are notoriously reluctant to breed in captivity. There have been ~200 born in captivity the last 20 years, making the economics of your Dragons farm questionable.
Given the choice, I'd take a Komodo dragon over a crocodile any day. They're large for a lizard, but much smaller and less murderous than crocs, and generally not an active threat to adult humans.
Komodo dragons having filthy saliva that causes deadly infections is a myth. In actual fact they have venomous saliva, which functions as an anti-coagulant (whether it counts as a venom seems to be disputed, but the anti-coagulant properties of the saliva one way or the other seem to be established fact.) They kill by inflicting massive bleeding[1][2].
Related to the bacteria/saliva myth are misconceptions on how they hunt. They often eat their prey alive in a very brutal manner[3], rather than biting them once then hanging back for their prey to die. They also have exceptional endurance by reptile standards. Crocodilians are known for very rapid burst speed, but monitor lizards and particularly Komodo dragons can chase prey at very high speeds for much longer than you'd expect[4].
>just a scratch from a bite from a Komodo can be deadly
That's incorrect.
>In 1969, Walter Auffenberg came along and made his detailed study of Komodo dragon behaviour. He made two critical observations:
>1) Komodo dragons can kill large prey, occasionally even buffalo, outright.
>2) buffalo that escape a Komodo dragon attack often die of infection.
>Auffenberg, based on the second observation, hypothesized that the dragon had septic saliva and used it to kill large prey slowly over days or weeks, even though his own published field observations contradicted this. The public caught wind of this idea, and the myth of the Komodo dragon as a slow killer with a virulent bacterial brew was born.
>Then, in the 21st century, Dr. Bryan Fry discovered the presence of modified salivary glands in the dragon's lower jaw. The compound produced by these glands proved to be a potent anticoagulant.
>Dr. Fry believed that this substance was venom, since many types of snake venom also cause uncontrollable bleeding. He also recognized that Komodo dragons kill prey quickly rather than over a long time, since he actually observed these animals hunting. Unfortunately, the press totally missed that last bit, so the myth lived on in modified form, with venom replacing bacteria.
>The original venom hypothesis has come under fire recently (Hargreaves et al, 2015), and many scientists now believe the anticoagulant is a digestive enzyme. There are many reasons to indicate that venom doesn't play a role when killing prey, which certainly fits with the observations of Komodo dragons killing prey violently and swiftly.
>In 2013, another study revealed that there was no septic bacteria in the Komodo dragon's maw. In fact, it has a cleaner mouth than most mammals due to constantly replacing its teeth, leaving no chance for trapped food to rot and fester before they fall out along with the dentition.
>It is a fact that Komodo dragons do not wait for prey to die, even though this myth is still being presented as true by pop culture. What really happens in these cases is something else entirely: prey escapes, gets infected, dies, and is eaten by a dragon (possibly the same one if it happens to be nearby). There is never any intent by the dragon to kill its prey in this way. They try to kill quickly, in some cases even near-instantaneously, and usually in just a few minutes.
They're cold blooded, meaning they're basically completely paralyzed for about 12 hours a day. Until 10am or so you can basically sit on them for a photo op if you want.
You've tried it personally or you just presume it? I've seen them only in ZOOs, but according to AccuWeather night temperature on Komodo islands right now is just a few degrees below the daily max (27^C at 5am is the min. and maxes at 30^C at 2pm). My leopard gecko is fully active on lower temperatures than that...
I was there in 2015. I didn’t actually sit on one, but we got right up next to them for pictures. The park rangers just poke each one with a stick first to make sure it doesn’t move. But yeah you could pet them and everything.
Then in the afternoon they start running around and the rangers use the sticks to keep them away.
Interesting, thanks for the link, I've heard sepsis theory many times before, this is the first time I hear about them having actual venom glands. Anyhow "toxins that lower blood pressure, cause massive bleeding, prevent clotting and induce shock" sound even scarier than bacteria to me.
Check out this video of a Komodo dragon eating a monkey whole [0] or this video of a Komodo dragon killing a deer by ripping open its jugular [1] I'll be honest, they are pretty fucking murderous [3]
> ...swallowing is still a long process (15–20 minutes to swallow a goat). A Komodo dragon may attempt to speed up the process by ramming the carcass against a tree to force it down its throat, sometimes ramming so forcefully, the tree is knocked down
It's a nice addition for any Bond villains lair. Big bad man like big bad toys.
This is actually a common problem in Mexico: "They [drug lords] like charismatic animals that symbolise power and strength: big cats such as lions, tigers and jaguars, along with big snakes, monkeys and nice looking birds," [1]
I'm not saying I'd want to try to a catch Komodo dragon, but they're still less half the size of a saltwater crocodile, which can go over 6m! Here's one tackling a wildebeest:
There are 23 species of crocs and some are smaller than Komodo dragons. Temperaments vary quite a lot between species also, with crocs from the alligator side of the family considered to be "easier", though they're all crocs so everything is relative.
This kind of thing gets me furious. I mean, I realize that folks gotta eat, but damn... poaching / stealing individuals of a threatened species that is also one of the coolest animals on the planet -- it just shows no respect. Same thing goes for elephant poachers, etc.
If you are so hungry you need to steal then you'd steal food, not exotic inedible animals.
I hear the same argument about ivory poachers being poor people faced with no other choice but it's simply not true, the amount of money gained from killing one animal is 20 years salary, it's not a choice between going hungry or not.
How stupid someone has to be to steal someone's food day in day out (and eventually get caught, beaten or worse) when they can "steal" something that belongs to no individual and get away with it?
If the animals actually had a private owner, poachers would mostly get caught and the island wouldn't be closed to tourists.
I’ve been hanging out with comservationists the last few months - universally I hear the same things. Poachers are young men who start due to need and stay due to greed.
My sense is most of such poaching is organized crime. The foot soldiers, poachers, are one end of a supply chain. My guess is they make a few hundred bucks, not 35K. Beyond poachers are transporters, a dozen checkpoints who are paid off, a marketer/dealmaker and an eventual buyer who would have paid 35K.
At least that's how it works in India (Sandalwood, ivory etc.,) so I'm guessing this is standard modus operandi across the world.
The point I'm trying to make is, ivory poachers are indeed poor people. However, the amount of money they make from killing one animal is good enough for a week or month's worth of living. Nowhere near 20 years salary. So they are driven by hunger.
The bigger players, politicians, corporations are the ones driven by greed. The movie Blood Diamond is quite accurate IMO.
I really disagree with your perspective, what you need to recognise is that people in the West effectively have a system of wage-slavery over other places, and it's based on chance not some deep system of justice. I love nature and animals and extinction fills me with existential sadness but at the same time if someone wants to kill Komodo dragons and the alternative is making 5k a year by being worked to death with no security, my aesthetic sadness about declining beauty feels a bit smug, and I certainly can't be moral about it. Until the world has anything approaching rough equality, fair enough go massacre white rhinos if that's what it takes to get a fraction of the freedom I was born with.
I was thinking this too, and wondering what sort of punishments they were going to have for people that sneak onto the island now... because they better be pretty severe if they're supposed to dissuade people who are willing try capturing literal dragons alive. Komodo dragons are terrifying.
As a bit of an aside, I posted a comment [0] on Reddit when this was posted yesterday. It links to a gallery with a lot of interesting info about Komodo dragons. Like me, you probably have at least a few false beliefs about Komodo dragons (such as the fact that they are slow scavengers, or that they are venomous or use bacteria to poison animals before waiting for them to die).
Anyone curious should check out this amazing gallery of pics/videos and captions that really blew my mind and totally changed my perception of this fearsome lizard!
There was a video on /r/natureismetal, I watched about 10 seconds before fast forwarding - bunch of dragons munching on a deer, while it is still alive :(
Warning to those who want to watch : it is horrible, and I just watched a few seconds. Really, don't watch it if you can't see nature in its most raw form
As horrific as that video is, it leaves me with so many questions. How did the deer stay alive so long? Why didn't it scream / fight more? What caused it to kick into survival mode right at the end, seconds before death?
That's very sad. Stayed in Flores and went to Komodo Island on my honeymoon. The dragons are amazing and was fortunate enough to see fully-grown males have a battle for dominance.
The ranger's carry a long branch with a fork in it to defend themselves (by catching the dragon's neck in the fork). Dragons are smart enough to catch things like goats, so they are a danger to adult humans - more by sneaking up rather than a frontal attack.
Wouldn't be too much of a challenge to take one unfortunately. They're usually quite hungry (lots of them hang around the rangers' hut waiting to be fed), so setting a trap with a piece of meat in it would work with little danger to the operator if they were careful.
Excellent question, I too think that the comment and perhaps post quality has somewhat deteriorared. To me it's the inane comments that don't add anything which bother me the most. And I don't want to start downvoting everyone for doing that but still, I'd much rather read some deep and thought-provoking observations than remarks such as "that's interesting" or even worse, puns.
But I guess this is what happens with all services when they start to get "main-stream" and start to become diluted by the masses. Without sounding too elitist, it's not all too terrible but you can see the difference between older posts comments and new.
What concerns me the most is a wave of people who don't like learning. It's the best part of our jobs! People are complaining about new languages, frameworks, platforms, features here more and more.
There's always at least 1 post hanging in a top that is about "You don't really need X", which really says "If you're going to keep doing next 5 years what you've been doing last 5 years, don't bother", which as I suspect some read as "Relax, you don't need to bother about this tech, just memorise a few sentences to sound smart if asked about".
It's HN. There's something new? Cool! You managed to serve 1000s users per second from linode $20 node? Awesome! How? What tradeoffs you had to do and where? You have a good idea on how to better make choices about your tech and created some nice decision tree chart? Thank you. Hope it's on github, we'd like to collaborate.
Would it not make sense to instead of restrict all extraction put a number < what is extract up for sale each year at an exorbitant price in a highly regulated market?
Then you can fund conservation. It would create an economic incentive for protection, since all parties would want to keep the cash cow alive (instead of this being more of a PR issue, which is how conservation is treated)
In the US, much of national conservation came from hunting. Bullet taxes pay for it.
It's a shame conversations about cold hard realities are driven by ideals and feelings and not trade offs.
This is exactly how African game reserves work. It’s a fantastic system which provides life changing income to the locals, ensures a large thriving population of animals through conservation funding, cuts down on poaching, and lets trophy hunters partake in their sport legally and ethically. Yet Western animal rights activists lose their minds when Cecil the Lion is killed because they grew up watching Disney movies and have no conception of reality when it comes to conservation. In a perfect world of course we would want to provide funds to protect these animals without the need for killing. But the simple fact is that without managing them like a natural renewable resource akin to forestry, they simply would not exist. The number one way to ensure the survival of an animal species is to make its’ existence financially viable.
Yeah, like paying protection for your restaurant from time to time to the mobsters instead of being totally burnt down. This way the local economy can rake off knowing you are safe. Win-win.
Like with nuclear energy, we are stuck with bad options because most people see two options with pros and cons and decide to ignore all cons of one option, and all pros of another.
There is nothing without pros and cons. It's just a matter of picking your poising. Most people don't want to think about that. So we get ruthless manipulators to sway masses. The masses meanwhile are adamant about making decisions and having a voice... while completely ignoring the reality out there. They want decisions made from the vantage point of what they feel with no real care about the real world consequences of what they choose.
Hunting also occasionally wipes out species or unbalances local ecosystems, which is pretty unfortunate. We need to be absolutely certain we can control for that before letting people just show up with a rifle and have a good time.
"Keep the cash cow alive" is indeed a good incentive but we have many historical examples of businesses valuing short-term income or success over long-term reliability. You need look no further than Facebook Games (where the big players basically destroyed the viability of a genre entirely, and knowingly did so - there are quotes from high-level Zynga leads on this) or the dust bowl to realize how short-sighted people can be.
It would be great if this could be executed in a way that helps the local economy and preserves the ecosystem, though.
Actually, you only need to compare one option to another. There are plenty of countries that have implemented this successfully.
My post says: we have two options (ideals or pragmatism) and a bunch of people focusing on ideals while the world burns.
To hear a response focus on ideals proves that for most emotions < real life. There are real world options, being used right now. With pros and cons. That are known. But it means taking a cold hard look at things, not feeling good about 'protecting' in an ineffective manner.
Putting satellite communicating GPS tracking devices in Komodo dragons would probably be one of the best ways to locate non-super villain headquarters.
Miguel you haven't there is a lot op misscommunication here. Komodo National Park is open!
The people of Flores went on had a meeting with Vice President after rumors started about Komodo closing down, earlier this year.
It is fake, it is not true! Marta Muslin says after meeting Mr Jusaf Kala the Vice President of Indonesia
The Director Gerneral of Nature Conservationa and Ecosystems, of the Ministry of Conservation and Forestry Mr Wiratno has announced in an official statement that te rumors of closing Komodo are not true.
Just recently I learned that Komodo dragons have the unusual feature of being able to reproduce via parthenogenesis. This means that a female dragon, can become pregnant spontaneously!
Apparently the cell which grows into the baby dragon is formed from an ordinary egg cell that duplicates each of its chromosomes rather than having a second set of chromosomes provided by a male sperm cell, as in sexual reproduction. It turns out that the Komodo sex determination system means the offspring are always male.
I believe this means that the offspring are thus completely homozygous, though not clones of their mother because the egg chromosomes were formed by the usual meiosis. Even more amazing (I think) is that there are apparently some boa snakes which can also reproduce via parthenogenesis but whose sex determination system makes all offspring female. IIUC, if any of these daughters were also to reproduce via parthenogenesis, then their offspring would indeed be clones of their mothers. A sort of genetic end point.
>> It turns out that the Komodo sex determination system means the offspring are always male.
> Do you mean when it is _not_ parthenogenenis? How does this work?
I mean all Komodo offspring produced by parthenogenenis are male even though offspring from usual sexual reproduction in Komodos can be either gender. The reason is that the Komodo sex determination system is logically opposite to that of mammals. Specifically, whereas in mammals, a pair of homologous sex chromosomes XX, produces a female, in Komodos this produces a male, ZZ. (Parthenogenenis means there is also the possibility of Komodo WW embryo but these are not viable.)
Happy to hear someone else thinks this is interesting.
124 comments
[ 12.2 ms ] story [ 3531 ms ] threadI’m sure we can make some educated guesses. Hint: it ain’t America or Europe.
"Does anyone know if they are catching the criminals that steal the animals, and where they are being exported to?"
Unfortunately, this would likely devolving into arguments similar to the plastic pollution in the ocean. When we know it's all the same countries doing the crimes, it looks like some kind of racism or stereotyping.
So either we ignore who the culprits are or we can be mature and civily discuss why these same country's culture seem to thrive on certain consistent destructive behaviors.
I read in the press that the Philippines is one of the primary producers of plastic pollutants that doom the oceans.
Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47608949
It's an amazing claim that that modest sized country was the source of much of the global problems given that plastic bags and six-pack rings etc are routinely used across the globe.
Maybe it's true. Perhaps Filipinos are vastly more likely to discard plastic bags than most of the rest of the world. But how were these assessments and rankings really made?
But most of these are used for traditional Chinese medicine.
I can find news reports from 2017 of discoveries that compounds found in Komodo blood could have medical applications as an antibiotic, but I can find no mentions of it having started to be used in Chinese medicine.
Can you point to any evidence for this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freshman_(1990_film)
For those wondering, it's for hocus-pocus "traditional" medicinal nonsense elsewhere in Asia, like Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is solely driving many global species to extinction.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-foils-il...
Anyway, Komodo is very remote and there's no easy trip there and back, it's either a multi-day seasick inducing trip from Bali or a puddle jumper over to Flores before riding a boat for a couple of hours so you can watch a guide toss some meat slop at the lizards and maybe push one away with a stick if it gets too close. Hard to imagine how closing the area off to tourists is going to help anything.
Anyway, I lived in China for a while. The sale of endangered species is rampant and in open display all over the country. TCM is still a huge part of culture for much of the population, arguably more so than ever with the growing middle class. Even something as nonsensical as bear bile cough drops are as routine to many as something like taking Dayquil is to a westerner.
I'll pay you $150,000 for proof Komodos are being shipped to China for use in TCM. Accept or deny within 12 hrs of my post with your financial information and binding contractual agreement because if you fail to deliver proof you get to pay me $100,000. It's a fair wager since you are so incredibly confident the inane and vile racism you spout are facts. Put up or shut up. If you have proof I'll pay you and apologize and I'll even come to wherever you are and wash and detail your car. Accept?
I don't know who is stealing Komodos. Based on the price it's probably not the redneck meth makers who keep pitbulls and mountain lions. I'd suspect Saudi Arabians and UAE and Kuwait folks who love to keep bad-ass animals. In their case the animal will have a comfy life but that doesn't mean it's what's best for the animal and it's probably not.
edit: massive downvoting and flagging. Rather than a super easy $150,000 pay out if parent post can prove his extremist racist claims. Flagging and downvoting instead of proof. It's what I expected. The offer stands. And why does HN allow racism like parent post to stand when it can't even provide proof when are called out and highly incentivized to document their racist claims.
We ban accounts that break the guidelines regardless of which side they're on, and actually regardless of whether they're right or not. Being right doesn't help; it actually makes it worse, because right flames burn more intensely than wrong ones. So can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, follow the rules, and not post anything more like the above to this site?
And before you say, "Oh those pesky Japanese people don't care about the environment", these are the things I know about because I happen to live here. Before I moved the US removed quotas from Pacific salmon in retaliation for Canadian softwood lumber prices! The idea was to destroy the fish stocks so that the Canadian fishing industry would be hurt and they would agree to increase prices for softwood lumber. It took something like 10 years for the returning salmon counts on Vancouver island to recover.
We (collectively) suck at this stuff. The more we point our fingers at those pesky Chinese or those pesky Japanese or those pesky Portuguese (don't get me started about the Grand Banks) or those pesky Americans, the more we abandon the idea that we need to work together.
Rinho horn, bear bile, etc is not functional in any way (except perhaps wealth signaling) and the sooner we shame the Chinese (and other cultures, including our own - big game hunting, hello!) the better the world will be.
I’m shaming a culture who contributes to the distraction of endangered species. I don’t see the issue
The issue is that you're making pejorative generalizations about an entire population, which crosses into national slur—or at least dips a toe into that toxic waste. Not ok here.
Please don't "shame the Chinese" or "shame a culture" on Hacker News. Turning HN into a battlefield helps no animals, and there are infinitely many ways to make your points without violating the site guidelines. Please review them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The world at large is headed into more of this, so for HN to succeed, it needs to get a little less like the world at large.
I'd like to think that modern science has given humanity more awareness of the value of nature.
So yes, this is an issue that's been generally understood for a century at least.
More and more studies I've read show that over-the-counter medicines often do nothing (the easy-to-sell sudafed replacement is the most obvious example), but we take them anyway. It's just as much nonsense as bear bile cough drops, just in a different form that seems normal to us. In the end, you're sick, and it doesn't make you get better or feel better. So nobody is really crazy here -- we are promised a cure, and really want one, so we try to believe because it's all we've got. Bear bile or phenylephrine... it's all the same.
In the US and EU, for pharmaceuticals, there is no such thing - these are very highly regulated markets in western countries.
(Note: This statement does not apply to dietary supplements and other such un- or under- regulated items!)
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/you-cant-beat-the-common-co...
https://www.cochrane.org/CD001831/ARI_over-the-counter-otc-m...
You make a fantastic claim but provide no evidence whatsoever. Counterpoint: diphenhydramine (aka Benadryl), ibprofan and other NSAIDs, clotrimazole and other antifungals, ... the list just keeps going.
Admittedly, the Sudafed replacement (ie phenylephrine) is not nearly effective as the original (ie pseudoephedrine) for large segments of the population including myself. To that end, one of my favorite mock journal articles of all time is "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine" (http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf).
Can you point to any?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569299
Sounds to me like they should be farming these things. 100 animals is 3.5 million. Not a bad way to make money.
Unless say,you were trying to put one in a bag. Also they don't need to hang on to you to kill you like a croc does.
What are you basing this on?
Related to the bacteria/saliva myth are misconceptions on how they hunt. They often eat their prey alive in a very brutal manner[3], rather than biting them once then hanging back for their prey to die. They also have exceptional endurance by reptile standards. Crocodilians are known for very rapid burst speed, but monitor lizards and particularly Komodo dragons can chase prey at very high speeds for much longer than you'd expect[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon#Saliva
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/06...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrg9hYjW8ts
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O16-IrBIscI
That's incorrect.
>In 1969, Walter Auffenberg came along and made his detailed study of Komodo dragon behaviour. He made two critical observations:
>1) Komodo dragons can kill large prey, occasionally even buffalo, outright.
>2) buffalo that escape a Komodo dragon attack often die of infection.
>Auffenberg, based on the second observation, hypothesized that the dragon had septic saliva and used it to kill large prey slowly over days or weeks, even though his own published field observations contradicted this. The public caught wind of this idea, and the myth of the Komodo dragon as a slow killer with a virulent bacterial brew was born.
>Then, in the 21st century, Dr. Bryan Fry discovered the presence of modified salivary glands in the dragon's lower jaw. The compound produced by these glands proved to be a potent anticoagulant.
>Dr. Fry believed that this substance was venom, since many types of snake venom also cause uncontrollable bleeding. He also recognized that Komodo dragons kill prey quickly rather than over a long time, since he actually observed these animals hunting. Unfortunately, the press totally missed that last bit, so the myth lived on in modified form, with venom replacing bacteria.
>The original venom hypothesis has come under fire recently (Hargreaves et al, 2015), and many scientists now believe the anticoagulant is a digestive enzyme. There are many reasons to indicate that venom doesn't play a role when killing prey, which certainly fits with the observations of Komodo dragons killing prey violently and swiftly.
>In 2013, another study revealed that there was no septic bacteria in the Komodo dragon's maw. In fact, it has a cleaner mouth than most mammals due to constantly replacing its teeth, leaving no chance for trapped food to rot and fester before they fall out along with the dentition.
>It is a fact that Komodo dragons do not wait for prey to die, even though this myth is still being presented as true by pop culture. What really happens in these cases is something else entirely: prey escapes, gets infected, dies, and is eaten by a dragon (possibly the same one if it happens to be nearby). There is never any intent by the dragon to kill its prey in this way. They try to kill quickly, in some cases even near-instantaneously, and usually in just a few minutes.
[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/RUeB9
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/b8joz9/komodo_island_...
Then in the afternoon they start running around and the rangers use the sticks to keep them away.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLxRAcBYhKE
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf45e9J-GMA
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPBiLXp5Uj8
> ...swallowing is still a long process (15–20 minutes to swallow a goat). A Komodo dragon may attempt to speed up the process by ramming the carcass against a tree to force it down its throat, sometimes ramming so forcefully, the tree is knocked down
Jesus, they're mental.
This is actually a common problem in Mexico: "They [drug lords] like charismatic animals that symbolise power and strength: big cats such as lions, tigers and jaguars, along with big snakes, monkeys and nice looking birds," [1]
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/indepth/features/2011/09/20119...
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/worlds-deadliest/...
I hear the same argument about ivory poachers being poor people faced with no other choice but it's simply not true, the amount of money gained from killing one animal is 20 years salary, it's not a choice between going hungry or not.
How stupid someone has to be to steal someone's food day in day out (and eventually get caught, beaten or worse) when they can "steal" something that belongs to no individual and get away with it?
If the animals actually had a private owner, poachers would mostly get caught and the island wouldn't be closed to tourists.
At least that's how it works in India (Sandalwood, ivory etc.,) so I'm guessing this is standard modus operandi across the world.
The point I'm trying to make is, ivory poachers are indeed poor people. However, the amount of money they make from killing one animal is good enough for a week or month's worth of living. Nowhere near 20 years salary. So they are driven by hunger.
The bigger players, politicians, corporations are the ones driven by greed. The movie Blood Diamond is quite accurate IMO.
It could be that you have—in theory at least—two options:
1) Try to plant corn. 2) Kill a rhino.
There is no option here that makes exactly $3 or whatever is may be that your food need is for that timestamp.
I think he means "people got to eat" as in you need some kind of income.
How is killing chicken not worse than capturing lizards?
Anyone curious should check out this amazing gallery of pics/videos and captions that really blew my mind and totally changed my perception of this fearsome lizard!
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/b8joz9/komodo_island_...
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/RUeB9 (credit: theitinerantnaturalist on imgur)
These are scary animals! They do look cool though
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPBiLXp5Uj8
Warning to those who want to watch : it is horrible, and I just watched a few seconds. Really, don't watch it if you can't see nature in its most raw form
Refuse to arrest and jail people for illegally hunting/pouching
Refuse to ask for help from other countries
Refuse to hire security staff
The ranger's carry a long branch with a fork in it to defend themselves (by catching the dragon's neck in the fork). Dragons are smart enough to catch things like goats, so they are a danger to adult humans - more by sneaking up rather than a frontal attack.
Wouldn't be too much of a challenge to take one unfortunately. They're usually quite hungry (lots of them hang around the rangers' hut waiting to be fed), so setting a trap with a piece of meat in it would work with little danger to the operator if they were careful.
But I guess this is what happens with all services when they start to get "main-stream" and start to become diluted by the masses. Without sounding too elitist, it's not all too terrible but you can see the difference between older posts comments and new.
There's always at least 1 post hanging in a top that is about "You don't really need X", which really says "If you're going to keep doing next 5 years what you've been doing last 5 years, don't bother", which as I suspect some read as "Relax, you don't need to bother about this tech, just memorise a few sentences to sound smart if asked about".
It's HN. There's something new? Cool! You managed to serve 1000s users per second from linode $20 node? Awesome! How? What tradeoffs you had to do and where? You have a good idea on how to better make choices about your tech and created some nice decision tree chart? Thank you. Hope it's on github, we'd like to collaborate.
Then you can fund conservation. It would create an economic incentive for protection, since all parties would want to keep the cash cow alive (instead of this being more of a PR issue, which is how conservation is treated)
In the US, much of national conservation came from hunting. Bullet taxes pay for it.
It's a shame conversations about cold hard realities are driven by ideals and feelings and not trade offs.
There is nothing without pros and cons. It's just a matter of picking your poising. Most people don't want to think about that. So we get ruthless manipulators to sway masses. The masses meanwhile are adamant about making decisions and having a voice... while completely ignoring the reality out there. They want decisions made from the vantage point of what they feel with no real care about the real world consequences of what they choose.
"Keep the cash cow alive" is indeed a good incentive but we have many historical examples of businesses valuing short-term income or success over long-term reliability. You need look no further than Facebook Games (where the big players basically destroyed the viability of a genre entirely, and knowingly did so - there are quotes from high-level Zynga leads on this) or the dust bowl to realize how short-sighted people can be.
It would be great if this could be executed in a way that helps the local economy and preserves the ecosystem, though.
My post says: we have two options (ideals or pragmatism) and a bunch of people focusing on ideals while the world burns.
To hear a response focus on ideals proves that for most emotions < real life. There are real world options, being used right now. With pros and cons. That are known. But it means taking a cold hard look at things, not feeling good about 'protecting' in an ineffective manner.
No they are not.
Smugglers are smuggling dragons (Well, one case anyway) and Komodo is being shutdown while they rehabilitate their environment.
https://travel.tempo.co/read/1190380/wisata-pulau-komodo-dit...
Sure the article might be technically correct, but it's very misleading.
I'd also like a bipartisan look at whether breeding native animals for sale increases smuggling or not.
It seems like one of the many BS tales people tell that has no actual proof but we all base policy on it.
The people of Flores went on had a meeting with Vice President after rumors started about Komodo closing down, earlier this year. It is fake, it is not true! Marta Muslin says after meeting Mr Jusaf Kala the Vice President of Indonesia
https://wickeddiving.com/2019/04/komodo-is-open/
#Komodoisopen https://wickeddiving.com/2019/04/komodo-is-open/
This is true of the general populace and all of us. We might not be stealing dragons, but bit by bit each of us contribute negatively.
Eventually we will have to police one-another, be it through Government or through societal change and pressure.
Apparently the cell which grows into the baby dragon is formed from an ordinary egg cell that duplicates each of its chromosomes rather than having a second set of chromosomes provided by a male sperm cell, as in sexual reproduction. It turns out that the Komodo sex determination system means the offspring are always male.
I believe this means that the offspring are thus completely homozygous, though not clones of their mother because the egg chromosomes were formed by the usual meiosis. Even more amazing (I think) is that there are apparently some boa snakes which can also reproduce via parthenogenesis but whose sex determination system makes all offspring female. IIUC, if any of these daughters were also to reproduce via parthenogenesis, then their offspring would indeed be clones of their mothers. A sort of genetic end point.
> It turns out that the Komodo sex determination system means the offspring are always male.
Do you mean when it is not parthenogenenis? How does this work?
EDIT: these are some of the snakes that I think it has been (partially) documented for:
Copperhead
Fur de Lance
Some types of rattlesnakes
Burmese Pythons
Reticulated Pythons
> Do you mean when it is _not_ parthenogenenis? How does this work?
I mean all Komodo offspring produced by parthenogenenis are male even though offspring from usual sexual reproduction in Komodos can be either gender. The reason is that the Komodo sex determination system is logically opposite to that of mammals. Specifically, whereas in mammals, a pair of homologous sex chromosomes XX, produces a female, in Komodos this produces a male, ZZ. (Parthenogenenis means there is also the possibility of Komodo WW embryo but these are not viable.)
Happy to hear someone else thinks this is interesting.
So that means that the female will have ZW, but it would double its Z_1 and give its offspring Z_1Z_1?