I’ll just edit instead!
Bed bugs.
Positive outcome would be no more having to burn contaminted possessions (or wash them in very hot water many times).
I was going to go with the rabies virus, but bedbugs is a solid choice as well.
Viruses are not animals.
Viruses aren’t even alive in the technical biological sense
Right? 🤣
Yeah I think any human-specialized parasite is an easy choice. Head lice? Fuck em.
Bedbugs, hands down.
Only good bug is a dead bug.
I’m doing my part!
I know you said that we shouldn’t say humans but I’m gonna say it anyway:
Humans.
Sorry.
Would be interesting to tally up the negative impacts of removing humans as well.
Culls of invasive species would no longer occur, which would be detrimental in those ecosystems.
A fairly significant number of endangered animals probably only exist today due to human intervention and breeding programs (i am well aware that we probably made them endangered in the first place)
Cross breeds would be done as well, Ligers and Mules require humans for breeding. Although in fairness they are definitely not natural to begin with.
Many animals we have domesticated would be done for as well, most smaller dogs are completely, reliant on humans for food and grooming. Many cats would be okay, but some breeds are likely dead ends as well. Jersey cows would probably have a bad time as well, without milking, sheep might have issues as well?
Interesting thought experiment.
Yeah, this is a good topic. I can add a few:
Short term, pets in houses, farm animals, etc will need to escape and start fending for themselves otherwise they’ll starve (or dehydrate).. Oops, I’d somehow missed an entire paragraph of your post 🤦♂️ Sheep need us to trim their wool, because we’ve bred them up grow fair more than they need. They’ll get too hot if they don’t have problems with defecation first (an actual thing farmers have to worry about).Medium to long term, when dams and dikes aren’t maintained they’ll eventually fail, flooding vast areas including the Netherlands.
I guess that the world will continue heating for a bit even once we’re gone, so we wouldn’t be around to theoretically use our tech to help. Obviously, we’re the reason it’s happening in the first place, but nature’s not equipped to deal with change that’s this rapid.
Yes, most of those we created through breeding, but you could argue that wolves and coyotes created modern deer the same way.
I do wonder if many would go extinct in the medium term from predation, before they can evolve fast enough to adapt; I’m thinking farm pigs and chickens would be OK in the short term - they don’t need us to survive - but wild dogs/coyotes/wolves, large cats like the NA lions, raptors, foxes… they’d all be putting a lot of pressure on those mostly defenseless breeds. Pigs are not wild hogs. Cattle and horses exist just fine in their environments without humans. Even with predation, herds are large and they aren’t defenseless.
Sheep are an exception; like you said, they need us to perform maintenance because of how we’ve bred them. Are there others?
My thoughts go to a lot of our stored and operational fuel supplies. Nuclear fuel (both civil and weapon) would eventually become exposed through lack of storage container maintinance and cooling starting meltdown reactions in their localized environments. Oil extraction, distribution, and refining systems are automated to an extent but somewhere a tank is going ng to rupture or just run out of space and then it’s all getting into the environment, likely at sea to have what effects that may cause.
Oh, yeah. If we suddenly disappeared, there’d be so many environmental catastrophes.
I’m sure it’d level off, but a driver falling asleep at the wheel on the highway tends to cause problems. If the BP spill in the Gulf had nobody trying to cap it off who knows how long it’d have kept going.
Life After people. Whole series exploring this
Ooh, thanks for the suggestion. Seems its on youtube as well. Thanks!
Link for anyone else interested: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLob1mZcVWOagLL-shJOp-d5_qJOG2MvCJ
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Was this the one with flying cats? Because that show was SO GOOD!! Except for the first few minutes with the dog…
Good point! Within a few weeks billions of animals would die. Chicken, pigs, cows, cats and dogs.
We definitely need to clarify what “good for the planet” means if we want to decide on the best answer.
Humans are the only species that would ask a question like this with ecologically damning effects. So, yeah.
I’m going to provide one very important reasons it would be disastrous to the ecosystem if humans were suddenly deleted from the Earth: what happens to the many currently active nuclear reactors? And what happens when Chernobyl’s sarcophagus finally corrodes entirely and exposes that radioactive blight to the entirety of Europe and central Asia? Probably nothing good is the answer.
I would be willing to put money on “likely nothing” being the answer for active nuclear reactors. They’re highly automated from a safety perspective these days. I’d be more worried about chemical plants
That’s a good point, too. My general idea was we have certain things we’ve created that we can’t leave unchecked or else it might be disastrous for the environment. Human infrastructure expects humans to exist.
Humans are not the problem. Ultrarich people are.
Oh come on, really? Is the problem ultrarich people? Or is the problem poor people who won’t eat those ultrarich people?
Touché. We need to do better xD.
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Natural selection
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Landlords
They’re not human, I’ll allow this.
You sound just like someone from Nazi Germany.
Yeah, even nazi germany had principled people
Ah yes, the condition of being a landlord, a completely immutable state of being.
Ticks.
They seem to just make everything worse, and I don’t think anything only eats ticks. Not to mention the diseases they carry.
Ticks and mosquitos.
Possums eat ticks. It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make, ticks are awful.
Possums don’t live exclusively on ticks, they don’t even particularly have a penchant for eating ticks. There was just one study that showed they could eat ticks and potentially have a resistance to some diseases.
Edit: sauce - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34298355/
Possums sure can eat some other bug/arachnoid don’t need those vermin.
Do they make everything worse in ways other than disease?
I don’t think they have much effect on the flora of an area, but humans are not the only fauna that are harmed by ticks.
Also they get in my dreams and I usually have at least one tick related nightmare a year, so please do understand I speak with some hyperbole.
Canadian Geese, the animal that Canada stored all its rage inside and sent to battle the United States
How dare you. I live for seasonal goose fly bys
I do honestly love hearing the honking and watching them fly by. I always point it out to my kids. I’ve seen lots of Canada geese in my life and they’ve never hissed at me, so I don’t have a problem with them other than the poops that are just everywhere.
You’ve been fortunate lol
I’ve been on walks in parks that got too close to someone’s nest and been charged. Those maniacs have serated tongues and beaks. I’m not kidding. You don’t want to be bit by these maniacs
https://a-z-animals.com/blog/goose-teeth-everything-you-need-to-know/
Oh I know they’re viscious! I’ve just been lucky and always kept enough distance between myself and them.
If you got a problem with Canadian Gooses, you got a problem with me, and I suggest you let that one marinate
The thing about Canada geese for me is the weird little poos. I don’t mind the aggression, the flocking behavior, or any of the other antisocial nonsense that they’ve adopted from their namesake country.
It’s the poos. They linger around for weeks.
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Cobra Chickens are one of nature’s wonders. Leave them alone!
And Finland…
Canadian geese, Australian Emus, sounds like there’s some interesting AI image ideas here
What have Emus ever done to you??? :(
Not op, but an emu bit me as a child. Havent trusted them ever since. Just look at their shifty eyes.
Nothing it’s like they don’t even care about me :(
Oh noo, I love them both :(
I got distracted by the wrong aspect of that comment lol
I was picturing Canadian Geese and Australian Emus working together on… providing aid or something. Maybe not waging war
Well they seem to have a reputation for winning battles after all
Fucker stole my dimmie when i was six. Snatched it right out of my hand
I hate to say it, but getting rid of mosquitos would probably have bigger consequences than that. The females are the only ones sucking blood, the males on the other hand help pollinate plants, exterminating them could potentially affect our food production lines…
… But not gonna lie I’d still genocide the fuckers, ecological damage be damned.
You don’t need to eliminate all mosquitos, just the ones that bite people.
There are dozens of different species of mosquitos, and not all of them bite people. If you get rid of the ones that bite people the others will likely still fill in as pollinators for those that are no longer competing with them.
Yes… But then more humans will survive by avoiding certain diseases, which as a result, will produce a worse environmental outcome
Eh, kill off 3 or 4 billionaires per year and you’ll counteract whatever additional environmental damage comes from millions of people not dying from malaria.
Funny you mention that, but in a way that’s also true via the same mechanism.
Isn’t the Gates Foundation focusing on stopping diseases from mosquitos? https://www.worldmosquitoprogram.org/en/news-stories/stories/the-gates-foundation-and-the-world-mosquito-program-partners-in-change
Only the females of a tiny fraction of species, and only when they need to produce eggs, stuck blood.
Minimize their numbers as much as you want, but that won’t stop me from having to deal with them in almost every single day of my life.
Bedbugs. That’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone.
A wave of them swept through my old apartment once almost six years ago. I still freak out at the smallest itch or bump.
Those bastards cause serious trauma
I had them about a year ago. I’ve never been the same either. A tiny black speck on the floor that is from my socks, or a fruit fly, can send me into hysteria.
The best thing you can spend money on IMO is a bedbug proof mattress encasement and those interception cups for the legs of your bed. Nobody will ever regret doing that. It can happen to anyone, right now Paris is rife with bedbugs.
I also have the little heated traps for them too.
First we ban DDT, then Pizza Hut releases Stuffed Crust, then bed bugs make a resurgence. It all fits.
My room mates/tenants in my basement spotted 2 bed bugs and we have gone full nuclear on them because we are all terrified of them. Like they’ve replaced everything soft, rubbed the sprays into the carpet, and I made a salt circle with d earth around their entrance.
We also keep quoting aliens (nuke it from orbit, only way to he safe) and Starship troopers.
I fear water and bed bugs as a home owner.
You should also run every piece of clothing and bedding you own through the dryer, and inspect your mattress seams, and get bedbug mattress encasements.
Most positive effects on the planet but not humans?
Cattle, they’re a major source of greenhouse gasses, as are all the industries built around growing, processing, and transporting them.That would be such a boon for the planet. The biomass of cattle (that is, if you piled them all on a scale and got their weight) far surpasses the biomass of wild mammals. All wild mammals, land and sea, combined. (They’re only about 4% of total mammal biomass.)
Cattle, and the things you describe, are the result of human intervention…
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Pandas. I mean, they really don’t seem like they want to exist in the first place. And China get’s to finally shut up about them.
they really don’t seem like they want to exist
Alternatively, they’re at peace and content with their existence. At least that’s what it seems like to me, goals really
but they cute though
They’re too lazy to even reproduce.
I’m off the opinion that no animal would be beneficial to remove. In almost every instance where we have exterminated a species there has been negative unanticipated consequences. Even mosquitos and bed bugs, there are predators that eat them and subsequent predators that eat them and so on. It’s kind of like the butterfly effect. It’s a balance formed from eons of coexistence that is not to be tampered with. There is so many examples where scientists try to introduce an animal to exterminate another that has gone horribly wrong. Regardless of my opinion, all living things have a part in our world. I’m not a vegetarian btw, but I do use Arch.
Mosquitos are also pollinators.
Mosquitoes
Mosquitos are important pollinators and have a very important place at the bottom of the food chain.
Surely something else can be eaten. And there are many species of mosquito that do not eat human blood. I think we can nuke the species that does and still get by.
Perhaps I’m under informed here.
I think we can nuke the species that does and still get by.
I think people in China had similar ideas about sparrows… Nature is immensely complex and I can’t think of a single instance in which human Intervention improved anything at all
That’s fair. I’m entirely uninformed on the sparrows but I do understand nature is an endlessly complex system which we do not and probably can not ever truly understand. Not trying to be absolutist.
But I do wish death on every blood sucking mosquito.
Deleting all mosquitoes would have a significant impact on the environment, many birds and spiders mainly prey on them. Delete just mosquitoes that bite humans. It’s a much narrower range and wouldn’t affect the environment as much.
Similar insects would quickly fill the niche.
Mosquitoes are pollinators. Sucking blood and being annoying is only a small part of their functionality.
