Like I said, it’d doubtful. They’re pretty well-adapted to their human hosts - I don’t know if other animals (especially ones convenient to migrate to) have the same anatomical niches for them and the lack of competition from already-well-suited species on those hosts.
Sorry, didn’t see the earlier posts. I suppose you are right, it would take some fortuitous circumstances for the lice to find a host and then thrive. They’re picky enough to care about what part of the human body to live on much less finding a new species of host suitable.
Guys, guys, guys!
Bed Bugs.
They’re not going to go extinct because we still have some in the wild, but I would imagine all those goldfish in aquariums would have a pretty rough time of it.
I’d guess thoroughbred horses and a variety of specialist dogs would die-out at once. They all require human intervention to give birth.
Probably most warmbloods will go as well.
Somehow the thought of all the cattle going free-range, and maybe reverting back to something like buffalo (aurochs) tickles me. I read a bookabout the beef industry and apparently some mad-scientist farmer has claimed to have bred his cows back to being aurochs. Cool.
(I just saw that this has been brought up already, but maybe y’all didn’t know about the intentional auroch-breeding, so I’ll leave it. The book I linked is a fun one, btw.)
I wonder about certain scavengers like rats and pigeons in the cities. I’m sure they would find another niche, but I bet there would be a lot fewer of them. Hmm, what about more domesticated rodents like gerbils and hamsters? Do they still exist in the wild? There was a theory going around that one of those breeds may have spread one of the great Plagues in Europe, as opposed to rats, but I’ve never seen a wild gerbil in America.
Beyond that, the Longhorn breed of cattle is primarily derived from feral descendants of Spanish cattle brought over in the 15th and 16th centuries, and left feral for 300 or so years.
So there’s ample precedent for domesticated cattle developing aurochs-like traits after a feral spell.
The common bed bug, while it prefers human blood, can survive on other hosts. The current infestation in certain places is believed to have originated from a reservoir in poultry.
The California Condor will finally go to join the Mastodon.
Most of the weird and useless breeds of dogs and cats will go.
Of the IUCN Red List of ‘extinct in the wild’ species: Père David’s deer* might well survive and maybe the scimitar oryx
- not really "‘extinct in the wild’ imho, since there are thousands who have been re-introduced and would likely be OK f humans stopped eating them.
Many “protected species” are being mostly protected from humans, so they will be fine.OTOH, many are also protected from feral cats/rats, and etc, so that could be a issue.
The rat, the Raven, the coyote, the pigeon and the falcon have all adapted well to living with humans. Altho they certainly wont go extinct (maybe the falcon) they will struggle a bit.
‘Biota’ is just some qualified grouping of all life, be it flora, fauna, or anything else. You could speak of the ‘biota of the tundra’ or ‘Cretaceous biota’ or, in this case, ‘human-dependent biota’. I take it you were meaning to describe everything that lives in or on the human body, and that does include plenty of fauna.
For the third part, are you thinking of ‘ethogram’?
I’m going to guess miniature horses, mainly because they’ll get pushed out of the lunch line by the bigger ones.
Please disprove this by pointing me to the Discovery video of the wild miniature mustang herds.
This litter of pug puppies begs to differ with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1hvSUEBAbU
Yes, of my knowledge of the many many living species in the human body (how many? <must look up>), I figured a tapeworm, my favorite, is fauna, but I couldn’t remember if bacteria and other industrious bugs in our gut get a different group noun along the same lines.
But now that I think of it people refer to “gut flora” all the time.
I wasn’t :), and don’t quite get the meaning of “ethogram”: sounds like a unit portion of something to do with ethology. Or a unit of ethical fucks I might give, to use a current Internet meme.
Also, I realized, by wondering if there was a word like “ethosystem,” my premise was wrong to begin with, given OP question: an “ecosystem” comprises fauna; “ethology” refers particularly to behavior, which of course is essential to an animal’s identity/stability relating to the environment of flora and fauna, but is covered in “ecosystem,” at least by my understanding.
The word “aurochs” has bewitched me from the first (bewitching, as you’ll see) time I saw it used, and continued for years even before I narrowed it down and found its specific meaning of a certain kind of (extinct) animal. It took its place next to “Roc,”-- by assonance as well, it now occurs to me–as symbol and metaphor.
Here’s where I first saw it, the final image of an author I think to be a close second only to Joyce in English.
It is from the book that begins with:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
…And ends with
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
This kind of thinking was actually my first reaction to the question. It’s not the domesticated animals that are particularly likely to go extinct (at the species level, even if particular breeds are doomed). It’s that humans will no longer be around to try to stop or slow the spread of feral populations of previously domesticated animals.
Feral cats in particular… if they go extinct at all, it will be a result of being so successful that they run out of food.
The horses part is nonsense!
Both thoroughbred and warmblood mares give birth just fine, the vst majority unaided. They are often watched over by someone, and vet-checked the next morning, but that’s just a sensible precaution for a foal worth thousands of dollars, not a requirement.
Possibly you’re thinking of the breeding of these horses.
Shipping them thousands of miles, or even between continents to cross the best bloodlines would end when humans end, but most would just breed naturally with nearby horses. (And it’s all natural breeding, no artificial insemination in this breed.)
Hmmm…Human microbiota. Aka, Biota, aka biota (here, in human) with microfauna–apparently a neologism–as well as/as opposed to bacteria, fungi, and archaea, aka microflora.
From that Wik, with cite, “500-1000 species of bacteria live in the human gut.” Plus a few in eyes, skin, etc.
So how many of those will go? E. coli can hang their hat anywhere.
Domestic cattle would survive anywhere water sources don’t freeze over for long or snow doesn’t cover the grass. Cattle somehow lost the ability to eat snow for moisture or move snow away to get access to the grass underneath. Horses paw and buffalo uses their heads to move snow. They would probably revert to longhorn type (there were/are other feral cattle breeds in the US) or something that showed lots of Brahma influence.
Horses go feral easily. They can be a problem on my Fathers ranch.
Sheep are incredibly stupid, almost seem to have a death wish, and dogs/coyotes/wolves would wipe them out easily.
Goats and pigs are smart and tough. Both would do fine.
Axolotls are apparently extinct in the wild and exist now only in captivity.
People joke about cockroaches being the winners in a nuclear war but the reality is the disappearance of humans would be followed by a massive cockroach die-off. They’re a tropical species and the only reason they survive around the world is because we provide them with a year-round heated environment. If humans disappeared and the heat went out, all of the cockroaches outside of their original tropical range would die in their first winter.
Really? Why would a cockroach in Singapore or Rio die in their first winter?