Well, for a start all the parasites that are specialised entirely to humans would go: head lice, pubic lice, a kind of microscopic louse that lives olnly in human eyelash-follicles… And the micro-organisms that cause certain diseases that affect only humans would go too. I don’t know whether you count viruses as living or as belonging to species, but there are some viral quasi-species that are entirely specialised to a human host, too.
Apart from that, I can think of two domesticated animal species for which no wild conspecifics exist, and that have never established feral populations anywhere: silkworms and ferrets.
Then, there are some plant species that were produced by selective breeding (I know what I said, and I meant it), and that are in various ways ill-suited to propagate themselves. The most conspicuous is maize. Wheat is not quite so dependent on agriculture for survival, but it would probably succumb to competition in time.
I don’t buy that. When people in my area have a cat that they don’t want anymore instead of giving it away, they instead dump them in the desert. I have personally seen these cat’s miles from civilization hunting for prey. They’re not real healthy looking, but they are living without any human intervention.
Ferrets were one of the first things that sprang to mind. I’m not entirely sure how accurate it is, but one of the ferret books I read suggested that domestic ferrets, unlike some other species of domestic animals, never existed in the wild, because they were the result of selectively cross-breeding two types of weasels from different continents, pole cats and some type of european ferret now extinct.
The biggest thing that would led to their doom as a species is some states, if not all, that make them legal to own as pets (I only have had to deal with state laws in 3 states regarding them) require that they must be sterilized in order to be sold for pets. Only breeders with permits are allowed to own unsterilized ferrets. So considering that in at least 3 of the states that they’re legal in, probably more, 99% of them can’t reproduce, they’d probably all die off within 12 years of the humans.
I’ve seen too much corn growing around grain bins from spilled harvests and too much corn growing in soybean fields (it’s called volunteer corn…stuff that grows despite the fact the soil has been tilled and sprayed for weeds). Never mind the couple of acres my father planted a few years ago to feed deer and game birds. It doesn’t grow in straight lines or as tall anymore, but it’s still there.
However. Some company (Monsanto? ADM? I forget which.) has created a strain of corn which renders the seed sterile, the idea being producers would HAVE to buy seed corn. I think (well, hope at least) the furor was big enough for the company to can the idea, but it would be an ecological horror if that stuff was ‘set free in the wild’, as it were.
I have just finished harvesting my sweetcorn (which was a modern variety); most of the cobs were perfect, but some (from the edges of the block) were imperfectly pollinated and were only sparsely populated with fertilised kernels - two-thirds were missing/infertile (it is also not uncommon to find a small cluster of viable kernels with no husk at the base of (what is supposed to be) the male flowering panicle - there were at least three examples of this in my little plot of about 50 plants - there’s a picture of it in Roger Phillips book: Vegetables, but I am unable to find an online image of the phenomenon); Certainly sweetcorn/maize forms as we now know them would not last long, but I strongly suspect it would chance to survive (although probably not in my locality as it is not native here) enough generations to revert to something similar to wild types.
I’m not sure how that could be - if it were released into the wild it would simply become extinct in a single generation and everything would carry on as normal. Or did you mean something else?
Since foxes have never been succesfully domesticated, how can these ones not be able to breed in the wild? Are they just that rare they can’t find mates? Foxes have been one of the most successful animals in all of history; they are like large rat-dogs in terms of human coexistance.
I think he’s worried about crosspollination. But I seriously doubt it could ever do much of that, since it dies off after one season and thats all, folks.
Many breeds and cultivars would die out quickly, but the species would find niches.
Near extinct species that require captive breeding programs would be obvious candidates.
Plants like cultivated grapes, being almost exclusively grafted, would struggle as would other hybrid fruits/vegetables/animals e.g. mules, but they wouldn’t be classified as species.
A number of viruses/bacteria exclusively human diseases (e.g. AIDS?) would die out or mutate back into feral populations.
That SDMB reference classic “Guns, Germs and & Steel” points out how few other species we depend on and obviously only a tiny proportion of them depend exclusively on us.
What are you talking about? All those species reproduce in the wild. Most endangered species would cease to be endangered if humans left the scene.
Not true for ferrets. Domesticated ferrets were intentionally introduced in New Zealand to control rabbits, and feral populations are now a considerable problem. Feral populations have also been established in other places.
Over here, it’s their very adaptability to the wild which has led to them being banned as pets. Of course, this is only because of the unique environment (no large predators + lots of relatively easy to catch prey) but here at least, ferrets are adapting to the wild. So even if humans got completely wiped out, they’d still survive over here (and in the process kill off all the endangered native birds)
I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to come up with whole species that would disappear as a result of humans leaving.
Pretty sure that fleetingly crossed my mind way back in that GM foodstuffs thread (the one where I mentioned it and got my arse (or rather, my argument) soundly whipped by some professionals in the field).
Because the gene causes sterility, it can only really wipe itself out.
The prime candidates are animals that humans almost wiped out by introduction of new predators and now only stay alive by active intervention keeping the animals sheltered from said predators.
