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Plant Slurs (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 12 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

aggressive spread and resilience to removal

Humans are a weed.

becomes a weed when it's suddenly everywhere and you are fighting constantly to get rid of it

(Humans! :))
But you are fighting constantly to get rid of it bcs of some arbitrary goals. And the fact it's spreading means that it's perfectly adapted for survival in that environment you created, so it's perfect for that pace.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    the fact it's spreading means that it's perfectly adapted for survival in that environment you created, so it's perfect for that pace.

    There is such a thing as exotic invasive species that destabilize the local ecosystem, though.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Yes, humans.
    We destabilised to fairly high extend literally all the ecosystems (unless you count battery cage farming as an (artificial) ecosystem, that one boomed, agricultural monocultures too).

    But I'm not just continuing a bit, humans are rally the source of a lot of invasive species introduced to local environments where otherwise that wouldn't happen. And it mostly happened unintentionally, but intentionally too.

    The dif I wanna point out is the scale & timeframes.
    Eg naturally (by which I mean without human involvement) invasive species mostly happen really slowly, and from adjacent ecosystems (sure, there are exceptions, but it's like spiders shooting butt-strings into the air & just by chance floating to Hawaii). Bcs ecosystems overlap, there is no strict boundary for the species.

    And that is what always happened throughout history, it's part of evolution (ever fauna actively transferring various species to new environments).

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    No weed is for plant. Fir animals its pest/vermin.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    True. Which still leads to an infestation.

    On non-logarithmic scale:

    And don't forget that shown is just the last couple of thousand of years - there are 4 more millions of years prior to this of slow growth (and some collapses) but it wouldn't even register on such a chart.

    Ugh, I guess this is far off topic.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The average growth rate from 10,000 BCE to 1700 was just 0.04% per year.

    Wow that's crazy to me. I had always envisioned humans steadily spreading and growing constantly. I had no idea that we were basically treading water for so long.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Yeah, 4 million years of various "humanoid" species cohabiting & barely making it through (one big event wiping out the whole species - that's why we have such a shallow gene pool & all look "identical" relative to difs in other species).

    But the rapid growth was always unsustainable, the gens lived on natural wealth that they just took out of (into?) the economy way quicker than the replenishing cycle. But the difference between a million and a billon is unimaginable, that's why we can now witness the collapse (mass extinction event) within a generation.

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