Do You Know What a Rotifer Is? and Other Links
Elephants are a renewable resource, whereas woolly mammoths are extinct. So which animal’s ivory do you think is banned in international trade? (HT to Tyler Cowen.)
The European press is much more skeptical about climate change than the American press. But among the general populations, it’s just the reverse.
Rotifers can reproduce sexually or asexually. In the latter case, the females produce clones of themselves.
Those clever rotifers.
Without even looking, I’m almost sure that they have banned elephant ivory and left woolly mammoth ivory to the whims of laissez faire.
The other way around would be too logical.
If I’m not mistaken, mammoth ivory is not banned because it’s considered a fossil.
Fossil or not, it is certainly and non-renewable resource, as oppossed to elephants which were and continue to be a renewable resource. Elephants were never truly endangered and now — under “protection” — are overpopulating and destroying fragile habitat in places with otherwise good management plans based on private. Other species that depend upon the same habitat as elephants, including humans, are suffering from the ravages of elephant overpopulation, yet we can’t legally trade in their ivory. By contrast, wooly mammoths and mastadon’s, neither of which, in case no one has noticed are being made anymore, are open to exploitation with. I’m not for banning the trade in mammoth ivory, but certainly we are lossing valuable anthropological and historical data and sites due to the trade and all because Westerner environmentalists got the trade in renewable ivory banned. African’s suffer, the ecosystem suffers, other species suffer, but the Westerner’s conscience is clean.
I have to take my hat off to any creature that can have sex with itself.
Glad to see that Rodney the Rotifer is alive and well.
And never again will I be able to witness a hat-tip gesture without speculating on the hidden meaning.
Rusty, I’m not sure that asexual reproduction means that the creature has sex with itself.