If you could remove one animal from existence, what would it be?
My go is for the Buzzard, it would sure as hell make desert trips and heat waves seem a lot less worrying and paranoiac.
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Elephants. I feel like they just eat to many leaves and its an inefficient build. They are like an American F150
They walk around the jungle stomping on things and eating a lot. They can squirt water from their trunk and what else? I like em but dont get the point of them.
The only animal I think is truly worth eradicating is the bedbug.
Every other insect from the mosquito, to the tick is an incredibly important source of food (especially protein) for other animals, especially in places with very harsh conditions where other insects struggle to survive. I used to hate and fear insects but now I know they all have their place.
All, except the bedbug. These things are specifically designed to hunt us and pretty much only us. They have precious few predators, much less predators that rely on their existence. They deserve obliteration.
True, but from what I've read, virtually all mosquitoes don't bite people. You can wipe out the 1% or less of the ones that do without significant environmental impact since the things that eat mosquitoes aren't choosy about which ones so you really are just reducing their available food by like 1%, and even some of that will probably be backfilled by other species of mosquitoes since the ones that bite people don't only bite people.
I partly covered this in my response below. If we're talking about eradicating disease-carrying mosquitoes from populated areas (and or invasive), then sure that makes sense. But studies that say eradication (even of the harmful ones) would have no negative consequence are very much debated by researchers. It's reddit, but here's a well cited comment from a researcher who works with mosquitoes that does a better job of explaining why it's not that simple: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entomology/comments/1icgbrg/comment/m9qxizu/
I like your answer as its way more thought through than what most people tend to answer when questions like this is asked, like I wish seagulls would just die out as the niche they have is doing what other species are doing in an obnoxious way. I do recognise that this would likely have ramifications that I don't know about though, so I wouldn't want resources used to actively eradicate them.
The Tick is not a source of food, he is a source of JUSTICE
Ticks, sure, plenty of things to eat them and they're only a problem a few times of year here. But I think the ecosystem will survive the removal of mosquitos, even if some animals might suffer for a while or perish as well. Flies come close to the amount of annoyance I receive from the mosquito, but not close enough. I hate them so much, my perception of what seasons I like and hate is entirely dependant on if mosquitos (and other bugs) are around more often.
In the same way you've learned to tolerate bugs, I used to be fearful of spiders, though I never hated them. Nowadays I love to see a spider making itself at home in my room, the kitchen, the porch, the basement, etc. A bug trap installing itself at no cost to me, what could be better?
I totally get the animosity towards mosquitoes. I spend a lot of time birding in swamps and often leave with no fewer than 20 giant bites (and another 10 from fucking horseflies). I used to be in the same camp as you, until someone explained to me that mosquitoes are one of the few species that can survive in places where conditions are harsh, and they're food not just for land dwelling or airborne animals, but also aquatic species. They're also important pollinators, especially males since they feed on nectar and not blood.
Eradicating them 20 or 30 years ago would have probably been fine, since other insects could benefit from less competition and likely take up those niches. Today however, insect populations are literally collapsing all around us, and it's only getting worse. There is less and less food available for those on the bottom of the food chain, and the effects are going to trickle up all the way to us. Mosquitoes may be one of the few species able to ride out the apocalypse we're currently wreaking on nature.
I think local eradication is still important around human populations, especially for disease-carrying varieties. But leave the rest of them alone. We've levelled enough destruction on ecosystems. Save that energy for the true villain - bedbugs.
Mosquitos. Dad died from a bite, got West Nile virus as a result of it. I’d give anything to have him back.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I agree, mosquitoes are what I would choose.
I'm so sorry
Humans.
Here's the answer I was looking for! I'm surprised I had to scroll so far to reach it. We are the source of most of what's wrong with the world so I'm pretty sure the rest of the animals would vote us off the island too.
Sorry that's fucking gross. OP wants to walk through a world of rotting meat and unscavenged carcasses. Seriously. Read up on what happened to vultures in India when they gave all their cattle Diclofenac.
Cultures might not be pretty but they are fucking awesome and entirely necessary. Why peeps gotta hate on the cleaning staff I don't know.
I agree, but got different reasons.
OP went with "less paranoic" as their barrier of choice, whereas the "tick" and "mosquito" choices are actual posts that are dangerous.
Personally I fall in the mosquito camp. I don't know if anything depending on them specifically. And even if there is, I'm ok with sacrificing them too.
How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths
Also vultures are beautiful.
My sweet girl Zsa Zsa.
And there is the King Vulture.
Bearded Vulture
Egyptian Vulture
Yeah, I think culturally we just don't like things that remind us of dead things, and if a lot of scavengers are around, it means something's dead or about to be.
I'm glad people are coming around to realizing how essential (and honestly really cool) they are, as much as I'd never wanna kiss or even smell one. 😉
King Vulture looks like a kid coloured it, just pure chaos.
😆
I will say, it does make me feel like I'm a bit on the boring side being fairly monochromatic.
Just need a glowup from a 5 year old and some paint!
Bearded vultures swallow bones, often shattered after they drop them onto rocks from great heights, but sometimes whole. They are so badass.
Very awesome! Some quick reading says the bones are actually their primary diet. They'd often rather have the bones than the meat. Talk about a biological niche.
And it can chomp down some huge looking bones!
Mosquitoes. If I'm allowed, midges too.
What are swallows etc going to eat?
Well if they ate all the muskitoes we'd let them be.
Ticks.
Oh no, vultures are great.
For me—probably ticks.
Was looking for this before commenting. They are terrible creatures full of dissease. I'd pick them to be banished to hell instantly.
Then I could finally got hammocking in shorts without a full body inspection every evening.
If you scroll down a lot of ppl agree with us. Horrible little things. I'm in the midlantic and this year, everyone I know who’s gone camping or hiking has come home with at least one tick. Every. Single. Time.
Ticks. Fuck those.
Agreed. I know that globally, mosquitos are worse, so it's a little self-serving to put ticks above them. But the mosquitos in my area do not carry malaria, yellow fever, etc. I think West Nile is about as bad as it gets?
Meanwhile, 50% of the ticks here carry lyme disease. I was going to put down the lyme disease parasite, except then I remembered my vet tech offspring rattling off the list of diseases ticks carry that can fuck you up in all sorts of inventive ways.
Honestly, they have changed my life, making me stop hiking in the woods or rolling in the grass like I did as a kid when they had yet to move into my area in force.
Mosquito
mosquito
Humans. We destroy everything.
What is worrying about a buzzard? Are you a small rodent?
Don't want to get rid of a good scavenger like the buzzard. They really help the ecosystem. Particularly with population and disease control.
Fuck ticks.
humans
We're practically descendants from the simians so I think it's time to devolve back to where we were moulded from.
Ourselves.
All I see here are a bunch of cowards, just look at all the top posts here, what do they have in common? Bedbugs, ticks, mosquitos... all parasites that target humans. That's too easy, anyone can get behind that.
But I'm actually willing to step out on a limb and say something. Manatees. What have manatees done for me lately? Laying about... Aggressively loitering in our estuaries! Get a job you lazy sea cows. You think kelp grows on trees? They're a drain on the global economy and a blubberous aquatic menace! Let's get rid of them!
Narwhals. Don't let them touch your balls.
Ticks. One of the most dangerous animals in the world.
Not as dangerous as mosquitos! Similarly dangerous to freshwater snails.
I said one of the. Anyhoo, Lyme Borreliose is untreatable and there is no vaccine because the company that made it couldn't make enough profits on it. TBE is also untreatable. As is Alpha Gal.
I didn't say you said!
Praying you have a tick-free existence.
4 bites in one day, despite Deet 😒
I love vultures so much! Nature's garbage crew.
I will have to go with palmetto bugs, sorry guys you freak me out so bad and I think there are other bugs that turn leaves into dirt without being nightmare fuel.
Humans or at the very least Epstillians
Ugh. Easy. The St Barnabus Mite (they call them Wringlers in the US, I think). Hate, hate, hate them. Nasty, relentless, ethereal, bitey little shitlords, and they're so resilient they turn up everywhere. They can fuck right off.
Edit: Holy shit, it worked!
Carrion birds are extremely important to our ecosystems.
Edit: apparently "buzzard" in the US usually refers to vultures, which is what I was thinking of.
I wonder what the world would be like without humans?
Bigfoot, of course. This reign of terror must come to an end.
Possums, in NZ.
Here they are a scourge. They're introduced and outcompete or prey on native birds.
I thought you solved that by making coats, hats, scarves, etc out of them for sale in the Japanese market?
That is what they told me when I was there a long time ago anyway. Damn shame they are so destructive because they are adorable.
Yeah there is a niche payment fur industry. It's supplied by hunters mainly.
Ours aren't adorable, they're diseased insane rabid demons.
Wait.. Buzzard as in buteo buteo? What did they do to you?
As a rotting corpse I live in constant fear of buzzards.
But ya the only buzzards I know chill on dumpsters and fly in lazy circles. I blame Disney for and negative portrayals.
I'm confused, are those vultures or buzzards? The buzzards I know hunt rodents and look like this
Ok, I googled it really quick because I was almost certain that's a photo of a hawk.
Apparently, in the US, we use "hawk" to refer to hawks and buzzards, but use "buzzard" to refer to vultures.
So not confusing at all.
It is confusing when I'm not american and not expecting a bird called by a name of another completely different bird.
This is a very good point. I was thinking of Cathartes but you are talking about Buteo. That's a a mal-Americanism on my part.
tapeworms and parasitic roundworms as a category
I'm not sure I understand that one. What's the connection between buzzards and heat waves? Why do they make you worry? We have a ton of them in Germany, pretty cool birds and not dangerous unless you're a mouse.
I guess if I had to pick one, it would be ticks. But I'd rather not remove any, because whatever animal you remove may have devastating consequences on the entire ecosystem.
Screw worm and mosquito
Grizzlies.
Mosquito
Humans and I'm not joking maybe Neanderthals would have coexisted with the planet better and we would not be going through the 6th Anthropocene mass extinction event.
Not all humans are like this, it's our shared industrial and postindustrial civilization.
def humans we suck
Why wish? It happens every day.
Emus. Stupid flightless birds.
Still bitter about losing that war?
And finally be rid of those stupid Liberty Mutual ads? You might be on to something.
these flying stinging insects ... what are they called ... that can give you bad diseases (e.g. malaria)
Fleas.
They make great music though
they make great merchants too
Do you even know what a buzzard actually is though? Go look up a photo of a buzzard and make sure you aren't mistaking buzzards with vultures.
Both are vital parts of theor ecosystems though, I'd hate to see either vanish.
My pick might very well be humans for how fucked up we are and how much we destroy and cause suffering for all the other animals
You know you're right humans might be best
You always have the choice to not exist, you can be the good human who removes themselves from the equation (not actually telling you to die, your logic is just fried) Any concept of good that you know of came from other humans, your thoughts aren't that original, not how we work. Humans are the only species preserving other species and not driving them to extinction.
Chicken!
Just to see how everyone would react.
Any of the scary parasites, like the guinea worm or those amoebas that eat your brain and kill you within a week.
Giraffes
The Orange Crybaby.
Cattle. That would cut down human land use by a lot (in the short term, probably not very effective in the long term)
"One animal" could easily mean an individual animal. This makes things tricky. Ruling out humans (because that's no fun), how can a single animal's disappearance affect anything?
Well, I don't think it can. The biggest effects would happen if you remove an individual from a critically endangered species, but I don't see anything good coming from that. For just about all other species, it would be like a drop in the ocean.
So, given that I probably can't make the world meaningfully better, I'll aim smaller. I'll remove a dog that shits in the street without its owner picking it up, causing innocent people to step in it.
Mathematically, assuming perfect knowledge about the future (if we can remove an animal, we might as well see the future):
Define S_0 = the number of piles of dog shit I will step on in the rest of my life assuming no dog has been removed.
Given dog d, define S(d) = the number of piles of dog shit I will step on in the rest of my life assuming dog d is removed right now.
Select d_1 = argmin{S(d}}. (If there's a tie, just pick one arbitrarily or use a tie-breaking metric)
If S(d_1) < S_0, then remove d_1.
If S(d_1) = S_0, then there is no improvement over baseline - maybe whichever dog I could remove just gets replaced with another dog. In this case, I could still remove d_1 if the tie-breaking metric did find an improvement, otherwise see next case.
If S(d_1) > S_0, then no matter what dog I try to remove, somehow I end up stepping on more piles of shit in my life?! Ugh. Remove the nearest ant or something.
Myself.
Can you do it in a very public way that gets a lot of attention? Would make for an interesting news cycle. Or if you happen to be a magician, it could make you legendary!
::: spoiler Joking aside if you are depressed, or have thoughts of suicide, you are not alone. Help is available. :::
The amnesia sloth-newt. That tricky fucker got me yesterday... I can't remember what it was but it was important and by the time I got out of the shower... Poof! It was gone with the memory.
Think someone asked this before and the overwhelming evidence based answer was Sloths and/or Koalas because they have gross eating habits and sexual habits
Maybe jellyfish? They are annoying and sometimes dangerous, and right offhand I can't see any downside to their disappearance.
Besides being a food source themselves, they break down organic material and transport it to other parts of the ocean. Some studies show up to 10% of the nitrogen needed by phytoplankton is supplied by jellyfish. Beside the plankton feeding cool animal pals like whales, they also generate at least 50% of our atmospheric oxygen. Jellies can also survive in oceanic dead zones and stand a chance at bringing life back into those areas.
Oh, ok then.
No more food for turtles :(
I know giant sea turtles eat some jellyfish, but I'm not sure how much of their diet it actually is.
As others have said its a no brainer with man. Other species would still be in existence without us and the earth would be in a good healthy shape and maybe some more deserving species would evolve. Its a shame we can't meet our potential and actually be helping the health of the earth rather than hindering it.
People lived in harmony with the ecosystem for thousands of years. Then they got slaughtered by the colonizers.
Manatees.
Why?
Just look at them.
What? No!
Dogs. They are loud, shit everywhere, are narcs and a big source of CO2.
You misspelled "humans".
I very much didn't.
Yeahh this is what I was gonna say. The biggest problem I have with dogs is that shitty dog owners (pun intended) leave their shit as landmines in public places. Yeah I know it's the owner's fault and not the dog's, but this problem still wouldn't exist if it weren't for dogs.