A place to remind us that nature can be cruel and while I/we all like to focus on the wonder and the beauty we should not forget that the creatures we enjoy so much can have a pretty rough life. Share your photos that show this crueler side of nature. Please down size the photos you share to Save iNat money on memory storage. I shall post a few examples now and more down the road.
A young Laughing Gull with a broken wing.
Also, I had a question, which of these do you think makes life rough the most for creatures? I’m not talking about extinction and population decline, but at a creature’s level.
Without wanting to play down the devastating effect humans have on the environment and the life that surrounds us, I do think that predation and parasitism are the prime causes for suffering for the most amount of creatures on an individual level, just by how widespread these phenomena are. (This is, assuming every creature’s suffering to be as acute and vivid as that of any other, which probably isn’t the case)
I imagine, human impact tends to be more abstract and on a species- or a population-level, rather than on an individual creature’s level, although these do in part correlate.
Basically any predation event. The older surviving animals also continue to live with the injuries; You find plenty of snakes with the tip of the tail missing, huge healed scars down the side, an eye missing, for example.
I think the biggest most predation resistant animals end up the worst if they survive; I’ve seen a few cape buffalo riddled with open wounds, flies, and just looking exhausted of life.
The ones I find the most upsetting though are the ones I see via camera trapping, then it is not a one off encounter, but a case of watching the sick get balder, thinner, until one day you just don’t see them any more.
Some birds seem to cope well with a leg missing, or painful looking avian pox pustules.
This most recent one, an invasive deer species, is missing the best part of the rear leg, and yet apparently successfully rearing offspring. The lack of predators in the UK probably allows these ones to survive and reproduce.
The highest quantity of killings is going to be by other animals, just because of the numbers involved and many animals live by killing several others every day. But in predator/prey interactions, the prey usually escapes with a fright and learns from it, or is killed. Predators don’t really “make life rough”. I have voted for humans because we cause such long term suffering such as sea turtles starving because they have eaten a plastic bag, birds dying slowly because of oil pollution, collisions with vehicles that injure but don’t kill, etc etc.
I don’t know that those examples are any more long term than disease can be. Chronic wasting disease in deer, for example.
And then there is the example I have seen of a bull elk walking around with the skull of another bull elk on his antlers. It’s not hard to put together the backstory there: during the rut, the two bulls locked antlers. This normally would have condemned both of them to slow death by starvation. In this case, though, a predator killed one of them, and ate enough of it that the head came loose, allowing the other to escape, but with the antlers still locked. How long did the surviving elk have to stand there and watch his rival being eaten? At least he’ll eventually have the mercy of shedding his antlers, and his rival’s head with them.
Incidentally, I appreciate those of you who put links rather than showing the pictures here. This is a sensitive topic, and now that I know what is likely to be shown, I don’t think I shall be participating.
That’s pretty fascinating. Do you think it’s possible that the elk picked up a skull from the ground? Not familiar with elks. How common is it for them to lock antlers?
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher - with one very bad eye. It seemed to being doing okay. The other eye was fine. I have no idea what is wrong with the eye. It could be injury or disease. Since the problem is only effecting one eye I’m leaning injury.
