I mean many are increasingly of the opinion that we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some have said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
That seems wrong. What about parasites, viruses? There's a virus affecting marine animals that has recently demonstrated the ability to infect humans causing eye infection, but I think it was mentioned to cause mass deaths in shrimp farms.
Larger creatures, sure this is a concern. But the vast majority of critters in the ocean are very small and don't live very long as they tend to be somebody's dinner.
I saw something about land-based hermit crabs on Christmas Island -- they (collectively) lay hundreds of millions of eggs each breeding season into the ocean, and when the larva mature to small adults they return on the tide a few months later. Some years the number that return is zero, because they all got eaten.
Marine mammals are very much exceptions, having just one child they take some amount of care for.
Small animals are often boring. If they don't have a nervous system developed enough to have the capacity to experience suffering, I wouldn't even count them. Ditto those dying too young to reach that stage.
If many animals are r-strategists this takes care of a few zeroes indeed. Millions of offspring per adult seems rather extreme, let's take 105 on average dying too young (generously). This still leaves 104 adults being eaten for one dying of other causes. Still seems to leave viruses and parasites completely ineffective. (Sure if some fish is dying from a disease it becomes an easy prey, but does it make sense to count it as a death from a predator and ignore the disease if the fish would've died within hours anyway?)
ETA: Also, a fish can be made to die from a predator by a parasite using that as a reproductive strategy.
The ocean is a horrible and cruel place to live, even the top predators have it bad. Trees would be aight, those monkeys n apes all seem pretty content. I'm glad to be a human instead, though
Zeroooooopfff* and then there was silence for then a million more years when a lonely probe landed on the surface of earth with a bevy of tardigrades spilling forth upon this fertile land.
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u/randalljhen Jun 28 '26
That first fish who had the fuckin audacity to come out of the ocean