January 2011
Do you think that all of these dying animals is considered natural? You might be the smartest person I follow, so I thought I'd ask your opinion. You've always seemed environmentally aware as well.
I have my suspicions that it has something to do with the oil from the oil spill getting into the Gulf Stream and being spread about, and fish all over eating it, breeding in it and dying, birds eating the fish, and so on. But I'm not entirely sure how to go about researching it. It also wouldn't make sense that they all collapse from the sky at once, so perhaps they've caught a virus?
It is, it has to be said, rather troubling, isn’t it?
I genuinely don’t have any idea… When I first heard about the whole thing, I wondered about possible unusual weather, or possibly air pollution… Volcanoes, for instance, belch vast clouds of noxious gas from time to time. That would tie in with the birds which, apparently, died from a lack of oxygen(!). Apparently mass deaths of certain types of animals do tend to occur from time to time. Certain creatures (sea creatures, for instance) are also very sensitive to changes in their environments. An extended period of unusual weather (such as an unexpectedly cold winter) could cause a die off in populations. Weather conditions could also have to do with the birds. A strong enough updraft could conceivably propel birds up into the jet stream, where there would be insufficient air to breathe. The jet stream, in turn, is a strong enough current that it could quite possibly carry a dead bird halfway around the planet.
I’ve seen a couple of hypotheses thrown about (including movement of Earth’s magnetic poles — though I don’t really see what that could have to do with it), though none seem particularly plausible. I thought about the oil too, but no… accumulation in the food chain would cause a steady decline, not a sudden die off. It’s an enigma. An enigma that so far hasn’t had any rigourous scientific investigation. So far the only connection is that it’s either sea creatures or birds. Trying to correlate the cause of death globally would really help clear things up. I’ll keep an eye on the science blogs though, and if I hear anything, I’ll be sure to post about it!
(And thanks. :)
“The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.”
—The Doctor (Doctor Who, 510, Vincent and the Doctor)
“What an astonishing thing a book is. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.”
—Carl Sagan
