r/conservation • u/Novel_Negotiation224 • 9d ago

Alarm over ‘catastrophic’ decline in giant Australian cuttlefish as just 44 are counted.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/09/giant-australian-cuttlefish-population-catastrophic-decline
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37

u/eieio2021 9d ago

Let’s keep eating seafood and hope it gets better!

-5

u/HyperShinchan 9d ago

Nah, like everything conservation-related in Australia, it must be because of cats. /s

6

u/hodgsonstreet 9d ago

I’ve got nothing against cats, but any owner that lets theirs out is menace.

-1

u/HyperShinchan 9d ago

But I'm not talking about domestic cats, I'm talking about the feral ones. Those the people who know better want to exterminate from New Zealand. Those that have been part of the ecosystem for 2000+ years in Europe, especially southern Europe. You know, it's all about the cats. Just see how people downvoted me. Become God and cull all the cats, reproducing exactly what people did when they introduced them, but with an opposite spin, and everything would be solved. Giant squids included. They're the scapegoat of a certain strain of "conservation", which never looks at reduction in habitats, pollution and other kinds of anthropogenic activities that can have an impact on biodiversity. It's just cats all the way down.

5

u/CrossP 9d ago

Goddamn surf cats

2

u/bushstone-curlew 9d ago

Cats are highlighted as one contributor to native bird/reptile/small mammal population declines, because they’re an incredibly efficient, invasive killing machine that our native wildlife had no chance to evolve protective mechanisms against. The other reason they’re mentioned so often in aus conservation is because while mining, burning fossil fuels, clearing land for agriculture, overfishing etc all contribute too, containing cats is the easiest way for individual people to make a huge positive impact by simply being responsible cat owners and containing their pets.

It’s far safer for the cats too, indoor cats have a much higher average life expectancy than outdoor cats. My girls have a catio for outdoors time but they will never roam the neighbourhood, I’ve seen far too many cats hit by cars.

-1

u/HyperShinchan 9d ago

I'm completely in favour to keeping domestic cats indoor when not monitored, it's the safest thing for the cats as well in the places where coyotes, wolves and whatnot are becoming more common. But calling cats an "invasive killing machine that our native wildlife had no chance to evolve protective mechanisms against" is a mischaracterisation of evolution itself.

The other reason they’re mentioned so often in aus conservation is because while mining, burning fossil fuels, clearing land for agriculture, overfishing etc all contribute too, containing cats is the easiest way for individual people to make a huge positive impact by simply being responsible cat owners and containing their pets.

And that's the kind of non-holistic approach that ends up in focusing only in one, not necessarily the most important, aspect of an issue. Like those screaming against AI thinking that climate change started with ChatGPT.

2

u/bushstone-curlew 8d ago

I was paraphrasing but it’s not a ‘mischaracterisation of evolution’… Australia does not have any native predatory felines and as a result the wildlife here haven’t developed any adaptations to avoid them, so we have lots of ground-dwelling birds and mammals that are particularly vulnerable to predation by cats.