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naturalplastic
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19 May 2022, 4:49 pm

Kraichgauer wrote:
Hope there are dinosaurs! Not so much giant spiders, though.


AND...scantily clad cave women! :D



naturalplastic
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19 May 2022, 5:26 pm

Mountain Goat wrote:
Is a great idea for a book, but as with many of these "Discoveries", they talk as if no one else knows about it but the locals have known about it for years. Take a look at the nearby paths which lead right up to the edge and it looks like they go down into it.

It reminds me of these little spiders which jumped. They were often found on roofs around here as they liked the heat. They did not make webs but were so agile and quick they would jump on their pray to eat them.
They were harmless to us humans and if anything one could put ones hand down when on a roof and they would jump around it. Only small things they were.

My Dad as a carpenter was often on roofs as part of his job and we all knew of these spiders anyway as they were everywhere!

What really surprized my Dad and actually surprized me one day when I was young was that somewhere around the mid 1980's they made the announcement on our news that scientists had discovered a new species of spider and it happened to be these spiders they had discovered. Yet they had always been here and were always known about as they were here in their millions and could be found miles away from here as if we went for a drive somewhere else it was rare not to see them! (Though I do admit that our family 3 wheeler van (Yellow Reliant Regal Supervan 3 which one may have known as was almost identical to the ones used on "Only Fools And Horses") did have a small fault in that they did not have enough airflow hitting their radiators (Which was improved when the Reliant Robins came in) so on long trips in the summer we had to stop every 50 or so miles and take a break and my Dad would wait and get a cloth and very carefully (When it had cooled a little) open the radiator cap and pour in a little aater to replace the water and coolant which had bubled out. Worlds first aluminium engine in mass production in those little cars and vans. Very strong little engines too!)
But the longest trips we did in one go back then were to my Grandparents which was around 75 miles each way. So these little jumping spiders may in theory just be around Wales but I doubt it. I believe they are all around the UK, but they usually were found on rooftops in sunny weather.

Was a total surprize when they said they were a new discovery. My Dad said something like "Where have these scientists been not to have noticed them before?" :D



Well...you and your spiders live in a wild remote untamed part of the world that Western science has barely penetrated! More remote than New Guinea, the Amazon, and Tibet, put together. You all live in....Wales! In the UK!

:lol: :lol: :lol:



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19 May 2022, 5:29 pm

https://www.chinanews.com.cn/sh/2022/05-08/9749062.shtml

Quote:
China News Service, Baise, May 8 (Chen Qiuxia) On May 8, the reporter learned from the Institute of Karst Geology, China Geological Survey, Ministry of Natural Resources. The institute organized a scientific expedition team to confirm the discovery of a standard tiankeng in Leye County, Baise City, Guangxi. So far, the number of tiankengs in Leye County, the "tiankeng capital of the world", has increased to 30.

Zhang Yuanhai, senior engineer of the Institute of Karst Geology, China Geological Survey introduced. After drone photogrammetry, the mouth of the tiankeng is flat oval, 306 meters long from east to west, 150 meters wide from north to south, with a maximum depth of 192 meters, an average depth of about 139 meters, and a volume of more than 5 million cubic meters, reaching the standard of tiankeng.
...
Chen Lixin, leader of the Guangxi 702 Cave Expedition Team, said that the expedition team descended to the bottom of the tiankeng, moved slowly down the slope of the complex boulders, passed through the dense underground forest intertwined with vines, and finally reached the lowest point at the bottom of the tiankeng. The ancient trees growing concentrated towards the top of the tiankeng are nearly 40 meters high, and the dense shade plants almost cover the shoulders.

Zhang Yuanhai said that there are three large openings on the wall of the Tiankeng, which are presumed to be the remains of the cave in the early stage of Tiankeng evolution. There is a well-preserved virgin forest system at the bottom of the Tiankeng, and a large number of collapsed rocks are hidden in it. "Whether it is the evidence of the evolution of the tiankeng, or the unique ecosystem after the formation of the tiankeng, it has high scientific value and popular science value."

Leye County belongs to a typical karst area in southern China. It is the location of the world's largest tiankeng group, the Dashiwei tiankeng group. 29 tiankeng have been discovered before, and it is known as the "tiankeng capital of the world".

Image
Image


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The_Face_of_Boo
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19 May 2022, 5:36 pm

That reminds me of the anime To the abyss.



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19 May 2022, 5:46 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Well...you and your spiders live in a wild remote untamed part of the world that Western science has barely penetrated! More remote than New Guinea, the Amazon, and Tibet, put together. You all live in....Wales! In the UK!

:lol: :lol: :lol:


There are a few remote areas left in Wales such as the Welsh Assembly toilets and canteen.

https://youtu.be/VuijrVChHeQ


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funeralxempire
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19 May 2022, 6:29 pm

cyberdad wrote:
Tross wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Hope there are dinosaurs! Not so much giant spiders, though.
Thank goodness for insular dwarfism...but the explorers should be prepared for insular gigantism! Unless the vegetation in that place results in a region where the air is much more dense with oxygen than the current average on the rest of the planet though, I think the prospect of that crater harboring Carboniferous lifeforms is quite low, so giant arthropods are unlikely. In the case of spiders, I would be surprised if anything much larger than a tarantula is discovered.

As for non-avian dinosaurs, it's definitely a good thing they would very likely be much smaller than their ancestors, as humans would not last long were that not the case. However, they can be added to a very long list of creatures that would still be quite dangerous.

Oh yes! I didn't think about that. After millions of years the extinct populations may no longer resemble the original population stock. If say the hole sank 130 million years ago then any small dinosaur species left after surviving the sinkhole will undergo further evolution so might be really small or miniaturised. This is called the "island effect".

There is infact an extinct dinosaur that survived tectonic split and survived in the island of New Zealand called the Tuatara. it's amazingly 250 million years old!!

Image


Except it's not an archosaur, it's closer to snakes and lizards.


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Tross
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19 May 2022, 7:32 pm

cyberdad wrote:
Tross wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Hope there are dinosaurs! Not so much giant spiders, though.
Thank goodness for insular dwarfism...but the explorers should be prepared for insular gigantism! Unless the vegetation in that place results in a region where the air is much more dense with oxygen than the current average on the rest of the planet though, I think the prospect of that crater harboring Carboniferous lifeforms is quite low, so giant arthropods are unlikely. In the case of spiders, I would be surprised if anything much larger than a tarantula is discovered.

As for non-avian dinosaurs, it's definitely a good thing they would very likely be much smaller than their ancestors, as humans would not last long were that not the case. However, they can be added to a very long list of creatures that would still be quite dangerous.

Oh yes! I didn't think about that. After millions of years the extinct populations may no longer resemble the original population stock. If say the hole sank 130 million years ago then any small dinosaur species left after surviving the sinkhole will undergo further evolution so might be really small or miniaturised. This is called the "island effect".

There is infact an extinct dinosaur that survived tectonic split and survived in the island of New Zealand called the Tuatara. it's amazingly 250 million years old!!

Image
Interesting. Yeah, evolutionary pressure would shape a species over such a long span of time. Given the size of the environment, it's unlikely there would be enough vegetation to sustain something as large as a full-sized Jurassic or Cretaceous dinosaur, nor would there likely be any need for such a creature to be that size anyways, keeping in mind that dinosaurs only grew to such immense sizes because the other dinosaurs did as well. If a creature doesn't need to be huge, a smaller size can often be a better adaptation as that means it requires less food to sustain itself.

Of course, it would pay to be careful of undiscovered species, as one can never truly know what they will find until someone comes across it. However, the odds of there being one or more dinosaurs that we would be little more than rodents next to are pretty low. Humans are delicate creatures, mind you, so this kind of exploratory science is dangerous work.



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19 May 2022, 7:55 pm

A hundred years ago Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the novel that Hollywood has been exploiting ever since. Similar, but opposite, of this real place his was on top a mesa that rose from the jungle 100 million years ago. This real place is a hole that sank into the earth about 130 million years ago.


lost world



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19 May 2022, 8:26 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Hope there are dinosaurs! Not so much giant spiders, though.


AND...scantily clad cave women! :D


For that, plenty of guys would risk the giant spiders!


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19 May 2022, 9:00 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
A hundred years ago Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the novel that Hollywood has been exploiting ever since. Similar, but opposite, of this real place his was on top a mesa that rose from the jungle 100 million years ago. This real place is a hole that sank into the earth about 130 million years ago.


lost world


I'm really surprised I didn't see that when I was a kid. Or maybe I did and forgot.



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19 May 2022, 9:50 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
Tross wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
Hope there are dinosaurs! Not so much giant spiders, though.
Thank goodness for insular dwarfism...but the explorers should be prepared for insular gigantism! Unless the vegetation in that place results in a region where the air is much more dense with oxygen than the current average on the rest of the planet though, I think the prospect of that crater harboring Carboniferous lifeforms is quite low, so giant arthropods are unlikely. In the case of spiders, I would be surprised if anything much larger than a tarantula is discovered.

As for non-avian dinosaurs, it's definitely a good thing they would very likely be much smaller than their ancestors, as humans would not last long were that not the case. However, they can be added to a very long list of creatures that would still be quite dangerous.

Oh yes! I didn't think about that. After millions of years the extinct populations may no longer resemble the original population stock. If say the hole sank 130 million years ago then any small dinosaur species left after surviving the sinkhole will undergo further evolution so might be really small or miniaturised. This is called the "island effect".

There is infact an extinct dinosaur that survived tectonic split and survived in the island of New Zealand called the Tuatara. it's amazingly 250 million years old!!

Image


Except it's not an archosaur, it's closer to snakes and lizards.


Actually to be precise, the Tuatara are the only surviving members of the order Sphenodontia. This order was well represented by many species during the age of the dinosaurs, some 200 million years ago. All species except the tuatara declined and eventually became extinct about 65 million years ago (the same time as the rest of the dinosaurs). I think the survival of the Tuatara is something of a miracle like the primordial Coelacanth

Image

Which was also thought to have gone extinct around that magic number of 65 million years ago



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19 May 2022, 10:08 pm

@Tross
Yes you are correct, part of the reason for miniaturisation is based on selection pressures whereby large biomass can't be sustained by limited resources. But in the case of pygmy elephants and pygmy humans they live in thick rainforests where having a relatively small biomass helps in camouflage and protection from predators as would have been the case in the open savannah.

The island effect can, however, benefit some species where there are no predators and plentiful food. Examples include birds like the New Zealand Moa and Mauritius Dodo which grew a larger biomass than their original populations (the giant Moa is infact related to the small Kiwi but the former was eradicated by Polynesian hunters for meat as indeed did the Dodo which was also puported to have tasted like Turkey) .

Other examples of isolation include cave animals and deep sea fish where selection pressures increase the chance of survival of depigmented organisms (pigment is useless and a burden in darkness) and eyes (cave catfish survive blind but have highly attuned sensors/feelers much like catfish that live in dark/turbid rivers where visibility is non-existent).



naturalplastic
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20 May 2022, 7:34 pm

cyberdad wrote:
@Tross
Yes you are correct, part of the reason for miniaturisation is based on selection pressures whereby large biomass can't be sustained by limited resources. But in the case of pygmy elephants and pygmy humans they live in thick rainforests where having a relatively small biomass helps in camouflage and protection from predators as would have been the case in the open savannah.

The island effect can, however, benefit some species where there are no predators and plentiful food. Examples include birds like the New Zealand Moa and Mauritius Dodo which grew a larger biomass than their original populations (the giant Moa is infact related to the small Kiwi but the former was eradicated by Polynesian hunters for meat as indeed did the Dodo which was also puported to have tasted like Turkey) .

Other examples of isolation include cave animals and deep sea fish where selection pressures increase the chance of survival of depigmented organisms (pigment is useless and a burden in darkness) and eyes (cave catfish survive blind but have highly attuned sensors/feelers much like catfish that live in dark/turbid rivers where visibility is non-existent).


You seem to be misusing the term "biomass".

The biomass of a species is not the same thing as the size/mass of an individual member of that species. The "biomass" is the collective mass of all living members of the species.

Which species has a greater "biomass"? The domestic cat? Or the Bengal tiger?

Let say that the average size of an adult Bengal tiger is 400 pounds. That of an adult house cat is ten pounds. So tigers are the bigger animal.

But the total world population of Bengal Tigers is (I am guessing) ten thousand.

The total world population of kitty cats is (I am guessing) something like half of a billion.


Do the math. Bengal tigers would have a biomass of four million pounds. Kitty cats of the world have a biomass of five billion pounds. So Bengal tigers may weigh on average forty times as much as a single average kitty cat, but felis domesticus probably has more than a thousand times the "biomass" of the Bengal Tiger.

Dodos are descended from pigeon like doves in the Middle East. Dodos may have gotten bigger as individual animals when they got isolated on the island of Mauritus, but they didnt necessarily increase in "biomass". The smaller mainland species they branched off from might have a bigger and more widespread population that probably has more "biomass" (though it may have less biomass per square mile).



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20 May 2022, 7:44 pm

@natrualplastic

You are getting caught up in semantics. Smaller animals = lower biomass while larger animals = higher biomass. It aint advanced calculus.

My overall point was that selection pressures that cause some species to become "smaller" and some to increase in size are different depending on various factors.

Again it might also depend on niche adaptations to different ecosystems in the same evironment. For example the small Kiwi was directly related to the massive Moa in New Zealand. without natural predators they both became flightless - the kiwi, however, remained small, feeding on insects and lizards in thick forests and remained small whereas the Moa occupied open grasslands and had a more varied diet which allowed it to evolve into a much larger bird



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20 May 2022, 10:37 pm

cyberdad wrote:
@natrualplastic

You are getting caught up in semantics. Smaller animals = lower biomass while larger animals = higher biomass. It aint advanced calculus.


Thats factually wrong. Smaller animals have nothing to do with less biomass, and etc.

If you're going to use big grownup terms like "biomass" you better be prepared to do "calculus".



I just showed you in my cat vs tiger comparison how biomass and size have nothing to do with each other. What part of my comparison do you not grasp?

Smaller animals have nothing to do with less biomass. Larger animals have nothing to do with more biomass.
Most of the biomass of the ocean consists of plankton (microscopic, up to insect sized creatures). The biggest animal in the sea, and on the planet, is the blue whale. But the "biomass" of the whole blue whale species is negligibly small compared to the biomass of plankton. That is a fact.

Seriously...why do you use that choice of word?

If you meant "animal X got bigger" then why didnt you just say it that why? Got bigger.

Saying it 'got more biomass' just makes you sound dishonest and pretentious. And on top of that its not accurate, because it doesnt mean the same thing. And it implies that you cant keep it straight which thing (size or biomass) that you're talking about.

Let me put it another way. Twelve thousand years ago humans were all hunter gathers (cave men), and the whole world population was three million. But thanks to the fact that they invented agriculture a few thousand years later we now have seven billion humans. So the 'biomass' of the human species has grown immensly. But the physical size of average human bodies has not changed, or even gotten slightly smaller on average, since cave man days.



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21 May 2022, 1:08 am

Yes, in the ecological sense, biomass is a commonly used term with a strict definition, used to measure the dominance of a certain group of organisms in an ecosystem or to calculate trophic level relationships.

The biomass is the mass of living biological organisms in a given area or ecosystem at a given time.

At present, both ants and termites have biomass similar to that of humans.
Human biomass accounts for about 36% of mammalian biomass, and domesticated livestock (mainly cattle and pigs) account for more than 60%.


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