Christie Wilcox writes about the ecological experiment asking what happens to the environment of a mass die-off, done by dumping 6 tons of dead pigs in a heap in a forest. It’s impressive. The scavengers swoop in and proliferate, and you literally do get heaving, writhing rivers of maggots pouring off the rotting mass.
There is video at the link. I decided not to imbed it since I didn’t know if all of my readers would have finished lunch yet.
Why are people dumping pigs? Why not eat them?
Because after digestion, the prevalence of macroscopic scavengers tends to be far lower. Outside of the 1%ers and dung beetles, macroscopic coprophages tend to be rare.
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Even bigger than the amount of faunal remains available to scavengers, think about the incredible mass of floral remains. One good sized tree masses far more than 6 tons of pigs. At PT extinction, there are repeated hints of fungal blooms — millions of ‘shrooms feeding on gigatonnes of dead trees — though the discussions regarding these spores (are they fungal spores? algae? something else?) continues apace.
Apparently they are feral pigs, a widespread invasive species. No idea how they were killed — implication is in a deliberate culling program — and I’ve no idea if these specimens were fit for, or could have been or were offered for, human consumption. In any case, there’s no shortage of the pests, nor were they deliberately raised / farmed.
This PLOS Ecology blog on the problem makes interesting reading, Invasive Wild Pigs Leave a Swath of Destruction Across US — And They Keep Spreading.
@ 2 Ogvorbis
I think you misunderstood me. I was thinking of the pigs being turned into roast pork with crackling, pork sausage, pulled pork, ….
Thankfully, ham is on the menu tonight.
@ 3 blf
Good points. And there may not be acceptable processing facilities. Still, I’d prefer the meat to go to charitable or non-profits to feed people, if possible.
Thanks for the link. CBC Radio had programme on feral pigs about 3 or 4 years ago and it seems things have gotten worse.
About 25 years or so ago, a dog died in our yard. Streets & San will only remove animals on public property, so my landlord piled the already-stinking dog carcass onto a piece of wood, and put it outside the fence in the alley.
There he apparently forgot all about it, because no one ever came to take it away.
I admit that it had a sort of morbid fascination for me, seeing the fly larva writhing and cascading down the pile of other maggots. It was totally dead and totally alive at the same time. Of course, it may not have had the same fascination for me if I didn’t already have to be in the alley walking my dog.
After a few weeks the garbage collectors put something (I assume it was lime) on it, and the writhing stopped. *Years* later someone took away the bones.
Sigh. Good times.
jrkrideau:
No, I don’t think I did. For the experiment to work, the pork had to be minimally processed.
Exactly. And do you know how much 6000 pounds of prosciutto or Jamón serrano would cost !?
jrkrideau
The carcasses went to science. They were donated for an experiment. Perhaps you’re confused by the word “dumped” in the OP, as though it were an accident or done to dispose of them. That’s not the case, no more so than the forensic research at a body farm is a form of disposal.
Resources must be spent for the sake of research. In this case, research into what happens when there’s a massive die off of large animals. That requires intact bodies, as would be present at the start of such a scenario,.
The godbots pawing Trump to get illegal money looked like rivers of maggots crawling over the corpse of the American constitution.
6000lb =/= 6t. I think you misread it as 6000kg.
Yes, it was “only” 3 tons (6,000 pounds), both as stated in the original article.
I know dead whales play a big role in the deep ocean ecosystem, but now I’m wondering what happened when a brontosaurus croaked and left tons of meat lying in a field somewhere. I assume there were all sorts of opportunistic predators and scavengers and serious streams of maggots. I’ll bet there’s a paper to be written analyzing this, that or a rather grisly book.
My sweet, dearly beloved has a fascination with funerary practices. More than once she’s regaled me with the stories about the grounds of church cemeteries during plagues writhing and roiling from the rotting mass buried in shallow graves.
Our organic waste bin looks like that.
Ogvorbis:
Huh, that sounds highly speculative. Could you tell a local fungal bloom/forest death from a more widespread one? Can you know from fossil spores if the fungus was a rot eater or a symbiont on living trees?
Feeling reminded of this…
lumipuma:
No, I cannot. I am going by the writings of people who know this shit: Wignall, Ward, Hallam, etc. The evidence for a possible fungal bloom has been found in China and Israel, co-incident with the oxygen and carbon isotopic perturbations. It is still being argued. Sorry for mentioning something that (a) interests me, (b) had some bearing on the conversation (in my estimation, at least), and (c) is not absolutely certain even in the eyes of palaeontoligists who study mass extinctions.
Eh, I probably came off as dismissive, rather than honestly curious. I might not go further into this since you had already mentioned it’s controversial…
lumipuna:
Ah, I misunderstood.
It’s not so much controversial as it is the usual problems involved when dealing with a fossil record from 251Ma. From deposits in the Karoo of South Africa, there is an interesting event right at the KT boundary: the river systems below the PT event are meandering rivers with extensive overbank deposits which suggests a great deal of plan life stabilizing the floodplain, mudstone, shale and sandstone deposits which show a low-energy deposition environment, and extensive point bar and interior bar deposits which, again, suggest a meandering stream system. Above the PT boundary the river system becomes one of extensively braided streams with no overbank deposits, minimal evidence of meandering, and much larger clasts in the sediments — conglomerates and course sandstones — suggesting that the vegetation disappeared. The same succession of deposits shows up in the terrestrial deposits on the West side of the Ural Mountains in Russia, especially near the city of Perm. Unfortunately, those are the only two terrestrial depostional sequences to cross the PT boundary.
In both Israel and China (especially China), the isotopic excursions for both oxygen and carbon at the PT boundary and the drastic reduction in the fossilized genuses as well as sea-floor bioturbation line up perfectly (this is why the official PT boundary is in China). In both places, there are extensive spore deposits which may suggest a fungal bloom at this time. Arguments have also been put forward that these spores may be algal remains. The jury is still out and, I suspect, things will bounce back and forth between the two readings based on new fossils and whether or not the researcher is a specialist in fungi or algae. The operating hypotheosis is that when the plants and trees died suddenly at the PT boundary, possibly because of very quick ozone destruction stemming from the release of highly reactive chemicals from the explosive release of gasses at the beginning of the eruptions that produced the Siberian Traps, the fungi had a field day with that much dead plant material. The deposits in the Salt River range of Pakistan show the isotopic excursions, but I have not read of any fungal spore finds across the boundary.
Ward, Wignall, Hallam, Erwin and others have written extensively on the issues surrounding the PT extinction. Mainly these have concerned ‘where did all this bloody carbon come from?’ The possible fungal bloom is but a small part of the whole. I only brought it up because, well, yeah, that much decomposing faunal matter is a rather major and disgusting concern (though all of those pig carcasses don’t even come close to even one Parasaurolophus, much less an Apatasaurus), the amount of floral matter that can die in a mass extinction is an even greater mass.
Curiously, there does not appear to have been a fungal bloom after the KT extinction. However, finds in the Hell Creek formation (the only terrestrial deposits across the KT boundary), as well as finds in some near-shore marine deposits, appears to show a massive increase in fern spores. Which would make sense as ferns are very definitely a disaster taxa, quickly colonizing areas after, say, volcanic eruptions (see Mount Saint Helens for a good example).
Disaster taxa, especially in geographically disparate areas, are a good clue that something major happened. After the PT extinction, the bivalve populations in China and the Salt River ranger become taxonomically depauperate with only two genuses dominating — Claraia is one and I don’t remember the other. These genuses were able to survive and flourish in the post disaster environment of the early Triassic and, in some places, the fossils of Claraia create pavement layers with thousands of fossils overlapping. On land, the disaster taxa was Lystrosaurus which is found in every fossiliferous terrestrial deposit of the earliest Triassic. For the right disaster, fungi would be an expected disaster taxa.
Sorry for the long comment. It really is an occupational hazard.
Thanks for the clarification, that’s all very intriguing. I did have some vague idea of what is thought to have happened at PT.