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[freeformschooler]

tens of thousands of English crabs

I didn't know the prostitute epidemic had gotten that bad!

bahahaha
okay that was pretty awful but also funny

[nenjin]

That hasn't hit CNN yet.

This is starting to sound more like something made its way into the food chain.

[freeformschooler]

That hasn't hit CNN yet.

This is starting to sound more like something made its way into the food chain.

http://gothamist.com/2011/01/06/doomsday_update_dead_doves_birds_cr.php

Now that we have Google News, we also get to say "Google News is your friend" in addition to the standard Google version.

But yeah. I'm glad I'm a vegetarian.

[Urist is dead tome]

That would give rise to the idea that this thing is indeed waterborne. Maybe insect borne? Possibly the fish got it and then it may have spread to bugs. And then the birds eat the bugs and die.

Possibly a food shortage caused them to eat things not normally eaten and those things were carriers. But this idea is assuming this thing is waterborne or even a disease at all.

[Solifuge]

One of the things about diseases is that they rarely cross between different animal classes. The biological differences between fish, birds, arthropods, and insects are huge... and we're dealing with some major geographical differences too. I doubt the die-offs are related in that way.

I think we might be looking at a bit of synchronicity here... animal die-offs happen with some regularity, but because they're happening at the same time, we're viewing them as connected. They're probably different things entirely.

[Itnetlolor]

My theory on all the birds randomly dying and everything else is that all this will lead to Rome and other locations gathering up one hell of a static charge and then discharging all over the place, and the atmosphere incinerating people with terrible sunburns and melting bridges. The space shuttle will even drop out of the sky and have to make an emergency landing in the middle of a city or something.

I have a solution people, and it is that we send an unobtanium-coated mechanical magma snake to plunge into the depths of the Earth and restart the rotation cycle with nukes; because, you know, the Earth's rotation is slowing down. That's why all this is happening.

[Solifuge]

Oh God, that movie needed to die in a fire... or preferably in the core of the Earth.

[Max White]

Average end of the world movie was average.
It's sad that independance day set the mark, and it wasn't that spectacular in the spectrum of all movies, it was just awesome of end of the world movie standards.

[Aqizzar]

Yeah, but that had an external cause, in the form of unstoppable alien invaders.  It was about the folly of man and his hubris, ending the world by fucking around with science (which then has to be saved with science wtf) or ignoring the wisdom of the past.  I liked it honestly, because it clearly had no intention of taking itself seriously, and just went for broke on the funny.  Like the guy with the recorder, I saw every line and shot of the scene coming and it worked beautifully.

The "hacker" guy's typing-montage was unnecessary though.  Look, producers, we get that you have to give lip service to computers being everywhere, and people typing on computers is hard to jazz up.  So just stop trying, and leave him in the background where nerds belong.

[Max White]

The "hacker" guy's typing-montage was unnecessary though.  Look, producers, we get that you have to give lip service to computers being everywhere, and people typing on computers is hard to jazz up.  So just stop trying, and leave him in the background where nerds belong.

He hacked the internet. 

[eerr]

But really, on the topic of birds:

The lead bird drifts off mid-flight because of disease, starts flying downwards,

most of the other half-asleep birds don't pay much attention...


WHAM, straight into the ground. or near enough.

And yes, the trauma was the extra lethal part.


*that is, my scenario.

[chaoticag]

So, I guess the Maryland one is a little less strange, since they know it's happened before.  But still, getting spooky.  Let's make a list.

-Disease
-Pollution
-Cold snap
-Fireworks
-Airplanes
-Aliens

I still honestly think the last one is the most plausible explanation, which is my of saying I've yet to hear an explanation for any event that didn't sound like bullshit.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110106-birds-falling-from-sky-bird-deaths-arkansas-science/
Fireworks for the birds. And tall buildings. Birds have been dying like this for a while.

"Right before they began to fall, it appears that really loud booms from professional-grade fireworks—10 to 12 of them, a few seconds apart—were reported in the general vicinity of a roost of the birds, flushing them out," Rowe said.

"There were other, legal fireworks set off at the same time that might have then forced the birds to fly lower than they normally do, below treetop level, and [these] birds have very poor night vision and do not typically fly at night."

The dead birds found in Arkansas are of species that normally congregate in large groups in fall or winter. "The record I've heard is 23 million birds in one roost," Audubon's Butcher said.

"In that context, 5,000 birds dying is a fairly small amount."

[kilakan]

ok so the first one was firework based asshole ness, what about the 8 other incidents?

[chaoticag]

If it's birds, it can be anything, but it's been known to happen for a while.

Again, here

But the in-air bird deaths aren't due to some apocalyptic plague or insidious experiment—they happen all the time, scientists say. The recent buzz, it seems, was mainly hatched by media hype.

At any given time there are "at least ten billion birds in North America ... and there could be as much as 20 billion—and almost half die each year due to natural causes," said ornithologist Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C.

So out of 10 billion birds, if 5% die due to weird and unlikely causes that leaves half a billion dying of unlikely causes. And that's North America only. No matter how small you drag that percentage down, you'll still get a lot of birds, and 5thousand of them dying at once isn't a big deal when it comes to the bigger picture. Start worrying if it's billions.

And as for sweden and the rest:

Collisions with power lines seem to have killed roughly 500 blackbirds and starlings in Louisiana on Tuesday. The 50 to 100 jackdaws found on a street in Sweden that same day showed no signs of disease and also apparently died from blunt-force trauma, according to the Swedish National Veterinary Institute.

Wind, snow, hail, lightning, and other challenges posed by weather can easily kill flying birds too.

If you still think it's weird that all this is happening now, then have this:

"last year a couple of hundred pelicans washed up by the Oregon-Washington border,"

As for fish, migration patterns being disrupted can lead to that, although don't quote me on that.

[Virex]

Fish an birds, ey? Has anyone tried checking the earth's magnetic field yet? We know it's getting weaker, perhaps a local distortion threw them off? (except for the birds that got fireworked out of the sky of course)