Good introductions to Australia

[Deleted]

@hardcastle I'm not quite following the "gross" angle of primates. Is there a practical ecological issue with the grossness of primates, or more a personal preference? How are they gross? lol

And what happened to Australia's ecosystem 50,000 years ago to cause megafaunal extinction?

In this article www.earthmagazine.org/article/ecosystem-collapse-pleistocene-australia/ they surmise that 45,000 - 50,000 years ago Australia's ecosystem was dramatically altered via systematic burnings by humans:

"... dramatic upheaval at the base of the food chain are consistent with the hypothesis that systematic burning of the landscape by humans permanently converted the previous ecosystem from nutritious tree and shrub savanna (with frequent years of rich grasslands) to the modern desert scrub environment. Animals that could adapt survived; those that could not went extinct."

They go on to say:

"After collecting this evidence that ecosystem change played an important role in the megafauna’s extinction, Miller and his colleagues decided to see if human burning permanently altered the ecosystem via feedbacks that reduced the delivery of monsoon moisture to the continent’s interior."

and results:

"... vegetation and soil characteristics play a significant role in determining the penetration of monsoon moisture into Australia’s interior, with the model showing that a vegetation shift may cut interior monsoon rain by as much as half under conditions normally favoring strong monsoon flow. “If the vegetation is there, you’ll get that feedback of recycling, and so the argument is that the vegetation changed, and that’s what the isotopes in the emus tell us,” Miller says. “What was lost were those elements that allowed the recycling of the water” and thus allowed moisture to penetrate into the interior."

If true, the Aboriginals burnt the shit of the continent's vegetation to that degree? That's a lot of fire. If so, what were they getting out of conducting burnings?

[Hardcastle]

I just personally find primates gross and creepy. No real rationale behind it Lol.

It's funny capuchin monkeys, Mandrills and Hamadryas baboons have all spent time as favourite animals of mine, and there's a certain soft spot still there, but yeah there's a bigger feeling that monkeys and apes skeeve me out.

The burnings offered an immediate short term benefit of dead semi cooked meat and other animals fleeing the flames in a panic and running straight into them and their spears. Also the more they did it the more they had to keep doing it, as the landscape started being dominated by fire propellant flora in an imbalanced way where you had to burn it or it would choke out the ecosystem and make these "forest deserts" that look like a big forest presumably teeming with life but actually not if you really take a look inside. Huge swathes of forest in Australia are still like that. They do actually need to be burned or cleared, now, to make way for other plants and grass and then more biodiversity, but before the intense campaign of burnings there were other plants keeping the fire propelling/benefitting plants like eucalypts and banksias and brigalows spaced apart and somewhat suppressed, but the more fires the more of a leg up these plants have and ultimately they outcompete the others and form unnaturally homogenous woodlands for as far as the eye can see which actually can't support full ecosystems. Plant species die out and animal species follow and the soil deteriorates and etc etc. The fires get more and more insane as in larger and more intense because they are fucked by these crazy thick masses of JUST perfect fire propelling trees (eucalypts are essentially petrol bombs if the fire gets hot enough) and things just get worse and worse.

By then fires do actually "help" in a twisted way to open things back up a little and also make the fires less severe if you do like controlled burns when it's not peak fire season to minimise the "bonfire" when it is. So there's some truth to aborigines developing a way to minimise and manage it, but it's a problem they kind of created, which is taboo and controversial to say, and I admire and respect aborigines but it's clearly true and was actually kind of weirdly racist in the first place to act like they aren't humans and therefore ofcourse bad for the environment and responsible for mass megagauna extinctions as humans were in every location around the world when they first moved into a place.

Now we're in a strange place where pulling out the bulldozers and chainsaws and clearing huge patches of native forest would be good for the environment, and using introduced hooved animals like cattle and goats to keep big patches cleared and improve the soil (in accordance with Savory institute teachings), but Greenies could never wrap their head around that and don't understand.

[Deleted]

Dec 28, 2022 4:12:10 GMT Hardcastle said:

I just personally find primates gross and creepy. No real rationale behind it Lol.

It's funny capuchin monkeys, Mandrills and Hamadryas baboons have all spent time as favourite animals of mine, and there's a certain soft spot still there, but yeah there's a bigger feeling that monkeys and apes skeeve me out.

The burnings offered an immediate short term benefit of dead semi cooked meat and other animals fleeing the flames in a panic and running straight into them and their spears. Also the more they did it the more they had to keep doing it, as the landscape started being dominated by fire propellant flora in an imbalanced way where you had to burn it or it would choke out the ecosystem and make these "forest deserts" that look like a big forest presumably teeming with life but actually not if you really take a look inside. Huge swathes of forest in Australia are still like that. They do actually need to be burned or cleared, now, to make way for other plants and grass and then more biodiversity, but before the intense campaign of burnings there were other plants keeping the fire propelling/benefitting plants like eucalypts and banksias and brigalows spaced apart and somewhat suppressed, but the more fires the more of a leg up these plants have and ultimately they outcompete the others and form unnaturally homogenous woodlands for as far as the eye can see which actually can't support full ecosystems. Plant species die out and animal species follow and the soil deteriorates and etc etc. The fires get more and more insane as in larger and more intense because they are fucked by these crazy thick masses of JUST perfect fire propelling trees (eucalypts are essentially petrol bombs if the fire gets hot enough) and things just get worse and worse.

By then fires do actually "help" in a twisted way to open things back up a little and also make the fires less severe if you do like controlled burns when it's not peak fire season to minimise the "bonfire" when it is. So there's some truth to aborigines developing a way to minimise and manage it, but it's a problem they kind of created, which is taboo and controversial to say, and I admire and respect aborigines but it's clearly true and was actually kind of weirdly racist in the first place to act like they aren't humans and therefore ofcourse bad for the environment and responsible for mass megagauna extinctions as humans were in every location around the world when they first moved into a place.

Now we're in a strange place where pulling out the bulldozers and chainsaws and clearing huge patches of native forest would be good for the environment, and using introduced hooved animals like cattle and goats to keep big patches cleared and improve the soil (in accordance with Savory institute teachings), but Greenies could never wrap their head around that and don't understand.

My sensibilities are kind of different, I love primates, partly probably because I like the kind of ecosystems they thrive in and would like to live in those ecosystems.

I'd love to see primates in the Wet Tropics of Northern Queensland. Not sure anywhere else in Australia is that suited for primates, but the Wet Tropics might be.

And if primitive primates were able to thrive in the Wet Tropics region it would be a great sign that the tropical ecosystem up there is thriving. And perhaps primitive primates up there would actually make the tropical jungle better.

Not sure Australia is suited for great apes though, even in the Wet Tropics. I'm thinkiing you sort of need proper rich tropics for that, which I'm not sure Australia has the climate for. Although it is interesting how that article talked about changes in vegetation changing climate.

But little monkeys and shit in some of the richer tropical rainforests of the Wet Tropics, I'd dig that a lot.

Central Africa is the least rich tropical rainforest of the 3 major tropical rainforest regions ie South-East Asia, South America, and Central Africa. Gorillas and chimps thrive in Central Africa, I'm still assuming it's still a level up from the Wet Tropics in richness, even if the driest of the 3 major tropical jungle regions.

South-East Asia has the richest tropical jungle in the world, richest being Borneo and South Malaysian pennisula, with Northern Borneo being the absolute richest in Borneo. Some tall trees in the jungles of Northern Borneo.

Then you go to the north-western parts of the Amazon around east Columbia and Ecuador for the next richest, with the northern Amazon in general being richer than southern Amazonian jungle.