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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 16 2006]
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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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/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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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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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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A rare occurrence of when undercooking the idea actually
produces a better result - even if you do half to overbake the
fake. Bravo! |
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// aren't we supposed not to mess with nature? // |
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Oh gods, you and your sad whiny hand-wringing Federation and
your pathetic idealistic Prime Directive ... no-one else bothers
with that shit, not the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Ferengi,
and certainly not the Klingons ...get real. |
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I propose miniaturised anti-raven missile defence
systems mounted on the back of tortoises (with glue).
These would scan the sky for incoming ravens and
launch pre-emptive missile strikes against them. |
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//I propose miniaturised anti-raven missile defence systems
mounted on the back of tortoises (with glue).// |
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All for that. My neighborhood used to be filled with
beautiful song birds, now we've got nothing but crows,
digging through garbage cans, spreading filth all over the
place and giving you stink eye and "cawing" at you when you
bring the garbage out. |
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I looked up an article addressing whether or not crows
reduce the song
bird population, saw that the idiot wrote "Technically,
crows are songbirds..." and obviously didn't read any more. |
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Crows are songbirds like farting is flute music. |
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// now we've got nothing but crows // |
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That's because cats have killed everything smaller than a crow. |
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Train the crows to predate cats. Problem solved. |
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I'm pretty sure that crows predate cats by several tens of
millions of years. |
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Not only are crows obnoxious, they can recognize different
people and call to each other to announce threats. They're
very intelligent. For a stupid bird that is. |
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Unfortunately where I live, killing a crow is probably a much
more serious crime than killing a human. |
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We give crows a pass despite this disturbing fact: If they
were big enough, they would kill you and eat you. That of
course goes for any predatory bird but we're not talking
about them now. Although come to think of it, cute baby
ducklings would probably eat you if they were big enough as
well. |
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Fishermen say " if bluegill were any bigger it wouldn't be safe to go in the water " |
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I have to be skeptical about that whole "domestic cats allowed outdoors affect the songbird population" - have you ever watched a cat hunt? |
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It's similar to me hunting for a girlfriend - yes, there is an effect on the population, but they're being produced faster than I can bed/wed them. |
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Hmmm, I wonder what the analogy police are going to say about that one ... |
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Not in the UK, then. The police there are only concerned with
covering up their own gross incompetence, and they're
depressingly bad even at doing that. |
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// have you ever watched a cat hunt? // |
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Almost daily, usually through a telescopic sight. Why ? |
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About this tortoise in the desert ... you're not helping. Why is
that, Leon ? |
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//have you ever watched a cat hunt?// |
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If you can see it hunting, it's not doing it very well. Conversely, if
tweety-pie, who is well-motivated to watch out, didn't see it, then
you probably didn't either. |
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