Kontextmaschine

16th May 2023

Post reblogged from three masks with 376 notes

discoursedrome:
it’s funny to think about how if you actually did the jurassic park thing, where you recreated genetically engineered dinosaurs and then they ran amuck and killed a bunch of people, it wouldn’t actually be a big deal in the grand scheme of things. in retrospect people would focus on the long-term transformative impact of the technology and the dinosaur gys would mainly be blamed for introducing chicken-sized invasive species that fucked up various ecosystems, like during the colonial era, and the stuff where t-rexes ran around and ate people would be considered a quirky historical fact like the boston molasses flood
This is kind of an epiphenomenon of the charismatic megafauna issue. In reality there is 1 predator for every 500 prey, which means you are going to face a lot more issues from all the tiny prey species that T-rex feeds on, than the T-rex itself. But obviously the movie wants to focus on the handful of big, scary predators.
The question is whether the park (and the entire industry that follows in its wake) uses artificial food sources enough that that ratio is seriously reduced, or it really is a park with 500 prey animals to every predator. If the former, your prediction might be off but how much just becomes a matter of the numbers involved.

In the book it was a major plot point that they were all born female and dependent on some food supplement such that they could not reproduce or survive independently (but it was a critical twist that some had then naturally become male and the epilogue suggested feral populations found alternate sources of nutrition on their own)