https://old.reddit.com/comments/1d5k80w

During World War II, while trying to stock a remote island in the Bering Sea with an emergency food source, the U.S. Coast Guard set in motion a classic experiment in the boom and bust of a wildlife population.

The island was St. Matthew, an unoccupied 32-mile-long, four-mile-wide sliver of tundra and cliffs in the Bering Sea, more than 200 miles from the nearest Alaska village.

In 1944, the Coast Guard installed a loran (long range aids to navigation) station on St. Matthew to help captains of U.S. ships and aircraft pilots pinpoint their locations. The Coast Guard put 19 men on the island to operate the station.

In August 1944, the Coast Guard released 29 reindeer as a backup food source for the men. Barged over from Nunivak Island, the animals landed in an ungulate paradise: lichen mats 4 inches thick carpeted areas of the island, and the men of the Coast Guard station were the reindeer's only potential predators.

The men left before they had the chance to shoot a reindeer. With the end of World War II approaching, the Coast Guard pulled the men from the island. St. Matthew's remaining residents were the seabirds that nest on its cliffs, McKay's snow buntings and other ground-nesting birds, arctic foxes, a single species of vole and 29 reindeer.

St. Matthew then had the classic ingredients for a population explosion: a group of healthy large herbivores with a limited food supply and no creature above them in the food chain. That's what Dave Klein saw when he visited the island in 1957.

Klein was then a biologist working for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He is now a professor emeritus with the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Institute of Arctic Biology. The first time he hiked the length of St. Matthew Island in 1957, he and field assistant Jim Whisenhant counted 1,350 reindeer, most of which were fat and in excellent shape. Klein noticed that reindeer had trampled and overgrazed some lichen mats, foreshadowing a disaster.

Klein did not get a chance to return to the island until summer 1963, when a Coast Guard cutter dropped him and three other scientists off on the island. As their boots hit the shore, they saw reindeer tracks, reindeer droppings, bent-over willows, and reindeer after reindeer.

“We counted 6,000 of them,” Klein said. “They were really hammering the lichens.”

The herd was then at a staggering density of 47 per square mile. Klein noted the animals' body size had decreased since his last visit, as had the ratio of yearling reindeer to adults. All signs pointed to a crash.

Other commitments and the difficulty of finding a ride to St. Matthew kept Klein away until summer 1966, but he heard a startling report from men on a Coast Guard cutter who had gone ashore to hunt reindeer in August 1965. The men had seen dozens of bleached reindeer skeletons scattered over the tundra.

When Klein returned in summer 1966, he, another biologist and a botanist found the island covered with skeletons. They counted only 42 live reindeer, no fawns, 41 females and one male with abnormal antlers that probably wasn't able to reproduce. During a few months, the reindeer population had dropped by 99 percent.

Klein figured that thousands of reindeer starved during the winter after his last visit.

With no breeding population, the reindeer of St. Matthew Island died off by the 1980s. The unintended experiment in population dynamics and range ecology ended as it began — with winds howling over a place where arctic foxes are once again the largest mammals roaming the tundra.

The debut of Concord at Sony's PlayStation State of Play hasn't been as well received as Sony and developer Firewalk would've hoped. In the hours since Concord's first trailer and gameplay were revealed, the game has been hit with an overly negative response from g*mers.

As of publishing, Concord's cinematic reveal trailer has a 76.99% negative rating while its gameplay trailer has an 82.39% dislike rate. And the comments from fans haven't been any better, with Concord being panned for numerous things ranging from appearing like another Overwatch clone to having “no soul”.

“The cutscene sold me on an adventure,” said one commenter. “The very next words out [of] the developer's mouth is 5v5 FPS.”

Said another, “It's like Guardians of the Galaxy meets Suicide Squad meets Overwatch.”

Concord is a 5v5 hero shooter set in the new Concord galaxy. The game sees players take control of one of a number of “Freegunners”, each having different abilities.

“The Freegunners roam the stars taking high-stakes jobs on worlds across Wild space, where they face other fiercely competitive Freegunner crews,” game director Ryan Ellis said. “From match-to-match, you'll form your team of Freegunners with other players and battle it out with rival crews to take home the reward across a variety of maps and modes.”

He added: “While our core gunplay will feel familiar to shooter fans, the versatility and variety of each Freegunner and their abilities makes it so aim and thumbskill alone aren't always enough to come out on top.”

The game launches on August 23, 2024, for PlayStation 5 and PC. !g*mers

Bold emphasis mine

archive

Man pleads guilty to making 12,000 harassing calls to Congress members

Ade Salim Lilly of Queens placed the calls over 18 months in 2022 and 2023 from Maryland and Puerto Rico, where he was arrested in November, prosecutors said.

A Queens man pleaded guilty Thursday to threatening to kill a congressional aide and to making more than 12,000 harassing phone calls to members of Congress over an 18-month period in 2022 and 2023, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C. announced.

Ade Salim Lilly, 35, pleaded guilty to one count of making interstate communications with a threat to kidnap or injure, punishable by up to five years in prison, and making repeated telephone calls, which carries up to a two-year prison term. He is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 28 in Washington before U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly.

“Threatening another person's safety or life is a crime, not protected speech,” Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for D.C., said in a statement. “This case should send a clear message that while people are secure in their rights to express themselves, they are not allowed to threaten people and those who do will be held accountable.”

An attorney for Lilly could not immediately be reached for comment.

According to court documents, beginning in February 2022 and continuing until his arrest in Puerto Rico in November 2023, Lilly made thousands of telephone calls to about 54 congressional offices across the country, with about half of the calls placed to offices in D.C.

Lilly placed the calls while he was in Maryland or Puerto Rico, and most were answered by congressional staff members or interns, prosecutors said. Lilly became angry and used vulgar and harassing language in the calls, and in at least one call threatened to kill or injure his listener, according to court papers. Staffers and Capitol Police repeatedly asked him to stop calling and warned that his unwanted calls were harassing and barred by law, but Lilly masked his phone number, prosecutors said.

“I will kill you, I am going to run you over, I will kill you with a bomb or grenade,” prosecutors said Lilly told an aide in a call to an office in D.C. on Oct. 21, 2022. He was arrested in Puerto Rico in November by agents deployed by U.S. Capitol Police.

The government has no evidence that Lilly actually planned to carry out the threats, according to plea papers. A statement of his offense signed by the defendant and submitted by prosecutors did not specify exactly how Lilly made so many calls but said that in at least seven cases, staffers would stop answering the phone once they knew Lilly was targeting the office for harassment.

In those cases, Lilly would repeatedly ring the office, such as one office he called 500 times on Feb. 27 and 28 in 2023, and another office he called 200 times between Feb. 6 and 27, according to plea papers.

Fable

Good anime

What else do you need ?

Good for you Donald! As a prison abolitionist who wants to focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment I'll be cheering you all the way!

There's no other way

To shape the gentle core

Through the fire escape

You burn or hit the floor

And I'm changing

Someone like me but better now

Countdown from four, three, two, one

And then go

An anomalous bore

Amaranthine

Last one back will lead the next swing

Dedicated to more

And catalyzing

Capricorn shape fire make lightning

Every other day

I give myself the blame

In another hour

I'm bound to change my name

And I'm changing

Someone like me but better now

Countdown from four, three, two, one

And then go

An anomalous bore

Amaranthine

Last one back will lead the next swing

Dedicated to more

And catalyzing

Capricorn shape fire make lightning

Maybe I don't know myself

Like you think you do

Moving on to something else

Maybe you should too

An anomalous bore

Amaranthine

Last one back will lead the next swing

Dedicated to more

And catalyzing

Capricorn shape fire make lightning

How?

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) May 18, 2024

!neolibs

Spain's Ministry of Foreign affairs has asked ministers to stop accusing Israel of conducting a genocide, because under spanish law making that accusation grants every Palestinian a right to asylum in Spain.

https://t.co/jOgu1DSmWa pic.twitter.com/P6Xx9j9f2w

— Faytuks News (@Faytuks) May 31, 2024