Jogging through it is nothing. Playing football and getting knocked down in it is fucking disgusting. It's also extremely slippery when wet if you aren't wearing cleats.

They render sports fields virtually unusable. Have you ever played on a field covered in goose shit? It's both nasty and treacherous. They are so populous because humans scare all their other predators away.

It won't work for long. Chasing them with dogs in Watertown will just move them to newton and Cambridge. These non migratory shitbirds are still reproducing. The dog isn't going to stop that. They need to cull them or shoot them with dart guns containing bird contraceptives or something.

There are an awful lot of most boring places in america. Anywhere from lubbock texas on up to rural illinois is basically the same in my mind. Flat, boring. Maybe corn, maybe wheat, maybe just grass, but boring.

The problem is that parasites can range such a gamut that range from selfish genetic elements like transposons all the way up to like, head lice and remora. It's not clear where the line is between organisms and not, because it's really a gradient that depends on your opinion to draw a line. "Capable of living on it's own" is a good line to draw, though, when you're asking how many genes you need to live. It would be like asking how much money you need to live in NYC and including people in a survey who live with their parents. Not totally relevant to the question being asked.

I think part of the reason it seemed unusually stable was that it was operating in basically a vacuum for immune evasion pressure. Every host was a naiive one without prior covid exposure. There was therefore not as strong of a selection pressure as the other coronaviruses were under to evolve new variants that could evade prior immunity. Once you get that selection pressure, the number of apparent new variants ratchets up quickly, because anything that isn't new can't spread effectively in our high-immunity environment.

Which perfectly explains why different species frequently have different numbers of chromosomes: It's part of how you get a new species.

Imagine a family of these 44 chromosome people dropped on a desert island with another family of 46 chromosome people. Breeding within a chromosome number group is likely to be more successful than outbreeding. Therefore, over time, a couple possibilities are likely.

1. The two groups stop interbreeding much and instead carry on as two indepdendent groups which accumulate more independent mutations over time until they are completely infertile with each other.
2. One of the two groups dies out.
3. They heavily interbreed. This might result in both groups dying out if there aren't enough fertile individuals in successive generations.

Several scenarios could result, over time, with the emergence of a new population that's not interfertile with 46 chromosome humans. A new species.

The only point it really makes sense is during the stocking with blue catfish. Those got big much sooner, though. We were catching 2-3 lb blue cats while the flatheads were still a quarter pound or less. So having it happen from that single stocking event doesn't make a ton of s ense to me, but I guess it's possible if they grow much slower than blue catfish.

I know some people seem skeptical of birds as a means of dispersal, but unless mistakes are happening with fish stocking or someone is secretly sneaking onto our land to do it, it's the only explanation possible for certain fish getting into ponds on my family ranch. We have ponds stocked with bass, perch, and blue catfish. Suddenly flathead catfish started appearing in some of the ponds and eventually took them all over. We definitely didn't stock them, and the ponds aren't in locations capable of flooding from other nearby ponds. The only reasonable explanation is that either people did it somehow (it wasn't any of my family) or birds are doing it. Ducks aren't that common either, so it would have to be something more like an egret/heron.