Monday, June 04, 2007

Global Swarming - Net Species Gain...

Mr.Atos

Reuters reports today that a
purple frog is among 24 new species found in Suriname ,

A purple fluorescent frog is one of 24 new species found in the South American highlands of Suriname, conservationists reported on Monday, warning that these creatures are threatened by illegal gold mining.

The discovery of so many species outside the insect realm is extraordinary and points up the need to survey distant regions, said Leeanne Alonso of Conservation International, which led the expedition that found the new species.

"When you go to these places that are so unexplored and so remote, we do tend to find new species ... but most of them are insects," Alonso said by telephone from Suriname's capital, Paramaribo. "What's really exciting here is we found a lot of new species of frogs and fish as well."

24 new species found in one survey of one place alone. It makes you wonder, in the midst of the man-made global warming catastrophe meme, if the number of species discovered is ever added to number of species lost, to determine a net species gain. That is of course assuming that anyone really knows the historical average overall rate of global species replacement in the first place.

Welcome to Earth, little guy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mr. Atos, I think you have a gross misunderstanding. The purple fluorescent frog didn't just suddenly evolve into a new species. It's species is probably many millions of years older than the 250,000 year old human species. It has existed all along but has, until recently, not been discovered due to its extreme islolation in South America.

Your commentary at the end says a lot about you. Your comment, "welcome to Earth, little guy" seems to indicate that you equate truth with reality. I can see that you have difficulty confronting that your reality isn't the truth. You cannot confront that unknown, undiscovered species still exist. You cannot confront that unknown, undiscovered, unrevealed, unexamined, uninvestigated TRUTH exists that is different than the false self-serving reality that you desperately cling to. You don't think something exists until it penetrates the boundaries of your reality. By simply dismissing and ejecting any ideas or thoughts that disturb your reality, you are able to maintain a comfort zone of false reality that deviates from the truth but serves your interests as you falsely perceive them. You are seriously deluded but unfortunately, you're not alone. Our society teeters and will eventually fail because of it.

dueler88 said...

Wow. Amazing how a cutesy-sarcastic comment offhandedly demonstrating Man's planetary arrogance suddenly becomes grounds for presumption of ruinous ignorance.

But, back to the topic at hand:

Wait a sec, Atos - isn't the frog supposed to be one of those animals whose demise predicts the collapse of the ecosystem around it? I had heard somewhere that the hole in the ozone layer and/or global warming was gonna kill frogs everywhere. That little guy has some nerve - he and his bretheren haven't already been decimated by homo-sapiens' careless behavior.

Mr.Atos said...

orsyiWell, being that he just "popped" onto Earth, Dueler, as I understand it(?), perhaps he simply evolved on the wrong day at the wrong time, into an environment hostile to his continued existence. Some are unlucky that way. God throws 'em down here on the planet with little regard for their delicate needs... like worms on asphalt. The last million years having witnessed very few climate variations to challenge their existence...until now that is. The 'lucky' ones that landed within more favorable allopatries should have been able to sustain themselves if not for the intrusion of the Man-virus. We have backed them all into a tight corner from which there is no escape. But as long as God keeps tossing down enough worms to make up for the whales and cave crickets we extinguish, the Ecosphere should be just fine.

The fact is that we don't even know the exact number of species that exist in a snapshot of geologic time on this Earth. Its like counting stars. A good number of the ones you count, have been gone from the universe already for over a billion years, and those that you can see are merely relative to your location and the accuracy of the tool you happen to be using to observe them. With species, those that you count, might have already passed through their favorable environment, 10,000 years prior to the evolution of Homo Sapiens Sapien... as is the case with the Holocene Megafauna like Bison, Elephants, Kodiak and Polar Bears. They should have since passed along with the Mastadon, Giant Sloth and Sabertooth Tiger. It is a testament to their adaptability that they still remain alive at all. But, clearly their favorable survival window closed even before man arrived on this continent some 12,000 years ago, when the global sea levels were over 300 ft lower then they are now.

So what we can count, in many ways are no more real than the light from a dead star. What we have yet to count, like 25 previously overlooked tropical species, are like the stars we can't quite see. And unless we believe that evolution happens in incremental schedules on the order of tens of thousands of years, we must assume that the species that evolve to the current conditions on this planet daily, are like the new stars born, whose light has yet to reach this Earth... ostensibly to be counted by presumptious little atavists with a myopic vision of Time, Biology, and Geomorphology and an absolute certainty of their immediate knowledge.

I believe the phrase you were initially looking for, Dueler, was...

'Uh... Um hum, sure!'