Does anybody else think that rafting is bullshit? Do they really expect me to believe that iguanas and monkeys were able to survive on a couple floating logs for thousands of miles?
>>5081091thisdesuneif rafting really did happen what about now? shouldnt there have been sightings of animals on rafts then?
iguanas that's real easy to believe. Monkeys I guess, it only has to work once. frogs are pretty good about hunkering down in a tree, but I like eggs or tadpoles surviving for a couple days in a bird's guts more.anyway, they did move across the ocean, you think people did it or something?
Why wouldn’t the monkeys just cross the Bering Strait?
>>5081138>>5081140There was a documented event in 1995 where a dozen green iguanas rafted to Anguilla from another island 200 miles away. So obviously it does happen, but what I find hard to believe is an entire breeding population of monkeys rafting from Africa to South America, or iguanas rafting 6000 miles to the middle of the Pacific. Or burrowing legless lizards buried in a ball of dirt going all the way across the Atlantic.I mean they did get there somehow but it just doesn't make sense. Sure I guess given millions of years it's bound to occur but it's so improbable. How many times was it just a single individual that made it, or their raft got destroyed and they died, or there was not enough genetic diversity to sustain their population. It's fucking crazy. It's not even surival of the fittest at this point it's survival of the luckiest.
>>5081148It helps if you consider that small animals make significantly better sailors than humans from a biological needs standpoint.>Small size = Need less food and water>Small size means even the most modest piece of driftwood can be a suitable raft.>Small animals reproduce a lot and there are a lot of them in general.Last point is especially important because you have to consider survivorship bias. Yes some animals manage to make the entire trip across the sea. However there was also likely the hundreds or even thousands of others before them that failed and died at sea due to the elements/starvation/dehydration/being eaten by a whale. Small animals with huge populations will naturally have a higher probability of getting into raft situations + have a higher probability of succeeding in them due to the sheer amount of attempts happening over millions of years. Plus, as an added bonus, being able to reproduce fast and a lot makes it easier to establish a breeding population once you do make landfall successfully.Funnily enough this thread reminded me of pic related documentary, which shows what I mean pretty well. A raptor and his siblings get swept up; in a tsunami, end up rafting at sea, and only the MC raptor makes it to new land alive, while all his siblings die. Remember that every insular species only got there via a path paved by the blood of their ancestors. (Except birds, those dicks just cheat by flying.)
>>5081091How did amphibians raft anywhere? If they come into contact with seawater they die due to their permeable skin and yet there are plenty of island endemic frogs in places like the Carribean and a couple species of salamanders that somehow rafted to islands off the shores of California.
>>5081184the channel islands are pretty close miles away, most of these distances are a day's travel, maybe two, the islands in the carribean are about a week, thats plenty of time for these creatures to survive the journey. saltwater isnt a big deal, if theyre living that close the sea to be to get to those islands, they would have some tolerance to saltwater, that a few errant splashes wouldnt mean instant death
>>5081184That's because amphibians and fish didn't raft, they flew. You know how oftentimes you'll see a pond that was never stocked before suddenly have some fish appear here and there? That's because of birds which can accidentally get frog/fish eggs stuck on them on their feathers, feet, or beaks while they're feeding. As a result when that bird flies to a new pond, or in this case island, you'll suddenly have a small population of fish or frogs wandering about. Oh and picrel can happen too occasionally but it's far rarer.
>>5081148>given millions of years it's bound to occur but it's so improbable.you just explained it. It's very improbable, but over millions of years even very improbable events do happen
>>5081091Ectotherms can go a long time without eating much. Also we're talking about rare events that occurred over the course of *millions* of years, much longer than human civilization has been around.
>>5081091Also the "rafts" in question were not made of logs but often huge masses of vegetation that got dislodged by a storm or something. It's also worth that there would've been many more vertebrate species in many more places at a time when humans and their livestock weren't around.
>>5081091The only two of these that don't make any sense are lemurs (there are lemurs fossils on the Indian subcontinent from the time when Madagascar was joined to it) and African monkeys rafting to southeast Asia (why is that necessary when the most basal haplorhines like tarsiers and the closest relatives to primates like colugos are endemic to Asia?).
>>5081199>You know how oftentimes you'll see a pond that was never stocked before suddenly have some fish appear here and there?I'm not saying it's not possible for birds to spread it, but I think it's that fish are more mobile than we think. I've personally witnessed fish moving on land during heavy rains. This isn't them getting washed out, it's them exiting the water on their own volition and moving through the grass. This is most likely how they bypassed the small dam to get into the actual pond upstream.
>>5081396While it's true that many fish are incredibly mobile and can get to crazy places, we find fish in completely isolated lakes up in the mountains, with no streams connecting them that they could swim up. In these cases it's most definitely birds introducing fish to the lakes
>>5081613If they're salmon or trout then they were stocked by humans
>>5081630Fish appear in mountain lakes that aren't stocked
