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The desert tortoise has lots of problems, but a big one is ravens. As more people move into the Southern Californian deserts, more ravens come to eat their trash. Ravens also love to eat baby tortoises. One article I found called ravens in this context "subsidized predators" which I thought was a
neat term. Result: less tortoises.
In my search, I found a few ideas on how to fix this. 1.Kill ravens by shooting them. This seems laborious and probably not too effective. 2.Clean up trash - haw haw. 3. Raise turtles and turn them loose when grown up with hard shells. 4. Hide baby turtles in holes. etc etc.
Ravens are really smart. They have culture, and teach things to each other and to their chicks. That could be used against them. I propose that fake baby turtles that can fool a raven be created. They might have a hard baked glazed or waxed pastry shell with an interior of some sort of dogfood-like preserved meat. The hard pastry shell would prevent lesser predators (eg ants) from getting the meat. They would be colored like a baby tortoise. The meat within would be poisoned - but the critical thing is that it would not be lethal. It would be something like ipecac - the raven would get very sick. It would remember that baby tortoises are bad. Tortoises would gradually be off the diet of ravens.
The trick is making a realistic tortoise mimic. This would be all about trial and error, and watching the ravens. I doubt that the fake needs to move to fool the raven - it is a tortoise after all. The other good thing is that ravens cluster around trash, and so one would not need to spread fakes over the whole desert - they could be concentrated at trash dumps.
Desert tortoises and ravens
http://www.nwf.org/...ID=23&articleID=201
[bungston, Jul 15 2006]
[link]
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But the ravens may begin to learn to just not eat the baby tortoises in the trash dump, and go a little further afield.
I'm also not so sure that the shell would be able to stop ants getting in. |
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I like the thought for tortoises, they could do with some help. |
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Could you atleast be consistant with which reptile this idea applies to? |
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as much as I love this, aren't we supposed not to mess with nature? |
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Alternatively, we could go the entire pig
and really mess with nature. Genetically
modify the specific species of tortoise
(you keep inexplicably hopping between
tortoise and turtle - two entirely
different animals: one is aquatic, the
other isn't - I'm adhering to the animal
in the title) so that the shell is
poisonous and brightly coloured
(advertising the fact). |
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Then once the
word is out on that, remove the poison
from the next generation, so that we're
back to ordinary tortoises, only with
bright colours that mimic the lethal
ones (in the same manner that many
insects mimic other actually poisonous
species, without having to go to all the
effort of being poisonous themselves). |
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The ravens, from the first generation of
poisoning experience onwards, will
spread the general ethos throughout
subsequent generations like a kind of
virally poisonous mindset, in much the
same way that generations brought up
during the war years, or the depression
years, structured their family values to
embody scarcity as a behavioural norm,
leading to generations growing up in
the sixties innocently inheriting a
crippling poverty mindset when
there's no real reason for such any
more. Blame the parents. |
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/inexplicably hopping/ explication: I screwed up. But since this seems to have attracted as much attention as the idea, I will leave it so the annos make sense. |
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Poison shell - no need for GMO. Just put poisonous stuff on the shell of baby tortoises. It is not like the tortoise will groom it off. But this works only for real tortoises, which are scarce - you could easily get thousands of fakes. |
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The last thing you want is the fakes to reproduce at a greater rate, displacing the real ones and becoming regarded as a pest. Look what happened in Australia. |
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What happened in Australia? The faux Royal subjects reproduced at a greater rate than expected and displaced the real subjects and indigenous population? |
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//aren't we supposed not to mess with nature// |
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Now why has it took around 15000 years before you bothered to tell us all that, eh? |
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"Right, I'll have one line of hunters here, and one line of gatherers there. Get into line as quickly as you can and no pushing." |
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//They have culture, and teach things to each other and to their chicks. That could be used against them.// |
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Yes, but could the effect of this kick in quick enough to save the tortoises? |
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And does raven culture allow for the teaching of things to avoid doing as opposed to more simply the teaching of things that are believed to be a good thing to do? |
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Once you put the non-posionous/ colorful ones back into the system, wouldn't it take just as long for the ravens to unlearn what they learned when they were learning? One or two of them are going to try out the new shelled reptile (I am avoiding the whole tortoise/ turtle debacle), find them not to be deadly or illinateous and then you're right back to where you started. |
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That's the power of their culture. |
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I thought this was going to be an idea to fill fake shelled creatures with artificial sperm and have 'em going around having their way with the lady shelled creatures. |
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Don't mess with the raven's culture, it's too strong. Exploit the shelled creature's lack thereof. |
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This'll work until the fake raven start appearing to lessen the amount of fake tortoises. Then the whole thing just escalates. |
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