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Let’s play a game. I’m going to show you three news headlines, and you have to find the string that connects them all. Here they are: “One in six Mediterranean mammals face extinction”; “Studies find that male bass in many U.S. rivers are feminized”; “Florida is on the alert for man-eating pythons.”
What do these three things have in common? Let’s break it down and find out.
First, let’s look at the mammals. According to a study on mammals living around the Mediterranean Sea, we may soon be saying goodbye to creatures such as the Iberian lynx and the Mediterranean monk seal. Why are they dying off? The biggest culprit is destruction of habitat. Other contributing factors include climate change and agriculture. Say, have you seen the snazzy new condos they’re putting up on the outskirts of town? Way nicer than the wilderness that was there before.
Next, there’s the fish. Scientists have analyzed largemouth and smallmouth black bass in nine river basins covering about two thirds of the United States and discovered that 6 percent of them had female eggs growing in their testes. Six percent might not sound like much, but for those of you who like to fish, think about the last 20 bass you caught. One of them was a hermaphroditic mutant fish and you ate it. Anyone else getting hungry?
Finally, in Florida, people no longer have to worry about being eaten by alligators because the snakes will beat them to it. Idiots who think it is cool to buy exotic pets while they are small and cute have been purchasing Burmese pythons for years and dumping them into the Everglades when they become too large for their dim-witted owners to handle. Pythons are not native to Florida, but the climate is much like home, so they’ve been thriving and killing off native animals in the process.
Now a new factor has been added to the equation: the African rock python. They’re much more aggressive than the Burmese python. They are known man-eaters, in fact. When these two species interbreed, if they haven’t already, scientists happily predict the snake equivalent of Africanized bees. Ever see that horrible movie “Anaconda”? Something like that, only instead of taking place in a distant jungle, it’s in the swimming pool of the retirement home your grandpa just moved to. Fun for the whole family!
What do all three of these things have in common? Think hard. You’re right. It’s us, the happy-go-lucky humans. We are destroying the homes of some animals, bringing others into places they’re not supposed to be and mutating even more of them with chemicals and pharmaceuticals we dump into the water.
Why should we care? The lynx isn’t a beloved house pet, Florida is miles away and surely the high mercury content we’ve already put into the fish will kill off any rascally mutations before they can affect us. It’s not like we have any responsibility. I certainly haven’t killed any lynxes or let a pet snake loose in the backyard, have you? No?
Well, let’s just put the blinders back on and pretend nothing is happening. Fat, dumb and happy isn’t just the American way; it’s the only way.
-Karen Ingram is a sophomore in English. Please send comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu.
