Yet another Hacker News

Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is vastly overestimated

115 points pseudolus 3 hours ago 50 comments

zhivota 2 hours ago | parent

I had always assumed this, and my idea of nature bouncing back was more on the millions of years time scale as evolution would result in the refilling of empty ecological niches.

All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

Kichererbsen 2 hours ago | parent

> All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

The modern version of Carthage should be destroyed.

poncho_romero 1 hour ago | parent

Carthage MUST be destroyed.

NoHedgeAllBets 1 hour ago | parent

> All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

I'm doing my part

b3lvedere 1 hour ago | parent

Spaceship Trooper or Helldiver? :)

Joel_Mckay 1 hour ago | parent

"Saving the Planet" (George Carlin)

https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?si=HqyW8mys0uNBuFdW&t=147

Humorous, but not inaccurate about what climate change means to primates. =3

Fricken 1 hour ago | parent

Nature is not harmonious, it is in constant flux. Saying it can bounce back implies there some state of equilibrium for it to bounce back to. I guess there's no reason why it can't bounce forward.

micromacrofoot 1 hour ago | parent

Right, we know deserts weren't always deserts, systems collapse.

bcjdjsndon 7 minutes ago | parent

The earth isn't split up into separate "ecosystems" split by continent and land mass you realise? It's one big system that isn't even sealed off from outer space. And in terms of a truly barren planet, the Sahara is teeming with life

s08148692 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah the news for me here is that people thought nature could "bounce back" on a human timescale. Any human lifespan is just the blink of an eye to nature

themaninthedark 1 hour ago | parent

There are differing views on evolution, between slow and gradual and punctual equilibrium( a sudden breakthrough that triggers a biological arms race), this article is looking more at the very short term and saying if a species goes extinct another species does not immediately or fully occupy the space...which I guess needs to be stated but I would think that it was already understood...

The article is more focused on oceanic and coastal diversity but I agree about the mosquitoes.

micromacrofoot 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, we often see the history of earth's ecosystem through a geological timescale... human scale is almost light speed by comparison.

sarreph 1 hour ago | parent

I always find the silver fox domestication experiment[0] an interesting point about how much smaller evolutionary timescales can be than expected.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Avicebron 1 hour ago | parent

Sure we should get rid of the diseases, but what about the niche mosquitos serve as food for birds, bats, etc?

bcjdjsndon 11 minutes ago | parent

Details, bro. Just kill stuff until we feel better about our situation

hncbw02z5a 1 hour ago | parent

Did stream restoration for a few years and the thing that stuck with me is you can put the habitat back and the species still don't return. Some of them just have nowhere left to come from.

dylan604 12 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, at some point, natural restoration can only do so much. If humans cause nature to go out of balance, it gets to a point where it'll take human intervention to come close to getting it back. That might mean manually reintroducing livestock predator and prey.

themaninthedark 1 hour ago | parent

I feel like we should do our best to not destroy the environment, for altruistic reasons but also for the very selfish reason that I have children and relatives with children so I want to leave them with a place they can live in and enjoy not a mess they have to deal with.

I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.

Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.

kakacik 1 hour ago | parent

Nature itself ain't in no long term stasis, its just us humans projecting our wishful thinking on our environment. Planet is warming since last ice age (ie all glaciers in the Alps are provably receding since 1850 when measurements started, and ie vineyard region where I live was provably under huge glacier some 25k years ago).

Often cited mosquito eradication (at least those transmitting malaria, dengue, yellow fever, zika and so on) would change few things even though most folks would not even notice... and I couldn't welcome it more intensively. These academic discussions in the west would quickly die off when people around you start dying frequently from these (especially small children, but also grandparents or just weaker / more unlucky folks).

Massive droughts this summer still continuing here where I live wreaked way more havoc not only in insect world than any such engineering would do, yet I see no violent mass protests all around the world about banning cars, huge transport ships or commercial & private jet flying for example, or some other big pollutants. Literal frog in boiling water situation.

flowerthoughts 1 hour ago | parent

That was a pointless source. Which 23 categories? How do I know if I care about them?

Fig. 2 [1] lists them. Fig. 3 I think indicates that 20 of them have positive effect size on biodiversity, which I think was the point. "Learning and inspiration" is an interesting category. Carbon sequestration ranks high, with Terrestrial (as opposed to the larger Oceanic) having quite a few studies behind it.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03200-4

goda90 1 hour ago | parent

This doesn't mean we shouldn't make every effort to re-wild places. It'll slow or even prevent the loss of at-risk species and introduce resilience to ecosystems against the onslaught of climate change.

comrade1234 1 hour ago | parent

I think what happened to the cod fishery off North America is really interesting. They overfished the cod then decided to regulate the fishery to let the population come back. But it never recovered - the cod population is stable but at a much lower number. Other 'stuff' (other fish species, jellyfish, etc) had moved into the environmental niche that the cod were in.

bpodgursky 1 hour ago | parent

They never actually stopped fishing it though. It's regulated at a level to prevent 100% collapse, there was never political support to let it truly recover by banning fishing for a decade or two.

msandford 1 hour ago | parent

You don't even have to ban fishing entirely, just reduce the fishing to a point where fish populations increase. It might mean that fishing has to be at half the level it is now which still isn't great for the people impacted but you don't have to go 100% outright ban.

barbazoo 24 minutes ago | parent

I wish us humans adapted quicker to the realization that our food systems aren't sustainable for the planet.

b3lvedere 1 hour ago | parent

Example regarding clams: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pearl-buttons-muscatin...

mempko 1 hour ago | parent

We are in the 6th mass extinction event. Want to feel bad? Look at the numbers of decline in the last 40 years, it's dramatic. Even in my lifetime it's been dramatic.

jdh76 57 minutes ago | parent

I dont think its a big loss to the universe if humans go extinct. Humans didnt engineer the biochemistry of life or produce the atmosphere or the over rated buggy brain.

gls2ro 52 minutes ago | parent

I fail to understand this line of thinking.

Even letting aside any survival mechanism we have there are two rational posibilities:

1. We are alone in the universe => super huge loss of complexity and consciousness

2. We are not alone but at Universe scale intelligent life seems rather scarce => still huge loss in diversity

OroPla 45 minutes ago | parent

Welcome to nihilism, where nothing matters. On a grand enough scale, is there a difference between our universe existing and our universe not existing?

317070 1 hour ago | parent

On this topic, I can never end recommending Adam Curtis's series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and on this topic of "bounce back" the second episode in that series.

The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy projected onto the natural world rather than an accurate reflection of ecological reality. We can model the world in the language of system theory, but the models we make there might not have much to say about the real world. We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning. The parallel with economics based on the "homo economicus" is striking, also there you reason from an ideal model and try to make inductive statements about the real world, which in many places directly conflict with observation. The "eco-system" and "natural equilibrium" stem from this approach of applying system theory to ecology, and are ideas which are now _very_ ingrained in western thinking, but which are obviously off.

Here is the start of that second episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgoereMDUJ0

WarmWash 58 minutes ago | parent

A bit of caution with this line of thinking, because I was blindsided by it after more than decade of hand waving away "academics"

When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples. "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.

The actual reality is "the models work great until they don't". Not "the models don't work."

Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.

317070 42 minutes ago | parent

It's because the models have different purposes in decision making, in ways which decision makers don't often appreciate.

Models are still great at helping us understand the world and are in many ways the best thing we have. The problem is that today we are overly relying on them to make real policy interventions on an ecology (e.g. what is a "healthy" amount of animals to cull or fish) based on an ecosystem, which is just a poor model.

If we could get rid of this idea of "stability" and "equilibrium" in economics and ecology, I would be a happy man.

> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this

Exactly why I'm here :-)

WarmWash 21 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the best way to illustrate our point is to use weather models, as it's pretty tangible for regular people.

Weather models are ridiculously advanced running on super computers crunching a massive global network of real time data. But they still aren't anywhere close to perfect.

That being said, just because it rains on your birthday when it was said to be sunny, doesn't mean you delete your weather app, call meteorology pseudoscience, and start a substack of "the forecast was wrong again" blog posts.

People intuitively grasp this foolishness because they constantly interact with weather models. But for things they have almost no contact with, it's easy to write it off on a single "bad forecast"

(I'll also admit the caveat that not every model is as good (or bad) as weather models, another dimension at play to throw a wrench in peoples gears)

breuleux 16 minutes ago | parent

> if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

Even if that's true, quite a bit rides on how long "longer" is. If "longer" is a million years, that's not exactly good news.

tkdb 10 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't the premise of bouncing back imply an ideal state to bounce back to?

And there we have it: ideal state for one species? the most possible species? longevity for individuals or the species?

The myth of some "natural" (the word literally means without human influence) state that is desired/better is somewhat ironic, right?

Any ideal state brings with it subjective criteria.

OroPla 51 minutes ago | parent

The "natural" state of the universe is having no life at all. And once our sun implodes this region of the universe will cease to be an exception.

Instead of trying to perform a balancing act with nature we should just continue to shape things into things that are more convenient to us. Like redirecting water into a desert.

corps_and_code 38 minutes ago | parent

There must be myriad unintended consequences that would come with dumping a whole bunch of water into a desert though? It feels like there's an awful lot of hubris in thinking we could accurately predict all the changes that would cause and know it would have a net positive outcome.

dylan604 22 minutes ago | parent

If the Sahara wasn't dry, what would be the knock on effects of losing the dust from it that lands in South America?

jna_sh 28 minutes ago | parent

The article clearly spells out why this wouldn’t be in our favour: functional ecosystems provide services to humanity that we need, and those ecosystems need biodiversity to effectively provide those services. The idea that destroying these systems is “more convenient to us” is very flawed

barbazoo 20 minutes ago | parent

The behavior you're describing has already brought us close to the planetary boundaries of our own existence in the last century or two. Plenty of second order effects to our actions.

meander_water 51 minutes ago | parent

For anyone curious about what can be done about this, see the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted during COP15 by 188 countries - https://www.cbd.int/gbf

Push your leaders to stay the course

tkdb 33 minutes ago | parent

I'm reminded of Ian Malcom's monologue in Jurassic Park (the book).

Paraphrased: "Nature will be fine, it's humanity we should be worried about."

Bounce back can take millions of years.

octol 25 minutes ago | parent

This is what gives me pause about “killing all the mosquitoes”.

barbazoo 23 minutes ago | parent

"killing all", can't imagine anything going wrong here at all, nope.

slibhb 17 minutes ago | parent

This doesn't seem like serious science. They just looked at correlation between biodiversity and a few dozen things.

Of course, for many reasons, we should try not to drive species to extinction. That's not really science; it's just basic moral intuition. People seem embarrassed to admit that their motivations are perfectly reasonable things like "I like living things and we shouldn't kill them off".

bcjdjsndon 12 minutes ago | parent

Isn't an ecosystem an arbitrary area somewhere on the planet? Weather is a massive effect on these so called ecosystems and it is global. You might say there is only one single global ecosystem