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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1735 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 27, 2025

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What’s the wealthiest country with a non-marginal presence of each category of megafauna?

Temperate bears are easy- it’s the United States, if you say that doesn’t count for some reason(tinkering with the definition of marginal, I guess), then Canada. The next one seems like it’s probably Japan. Polar bears would be Norway, but let’s say those are a marine mammal.

For elephants, I’m guessing either South Africa or Malaysia, depending on exactly the range of Indian elephants. For giraffes and rhinos, I’m a bit more confident in South Africa.

For big cats I think this is Uruguay, with jaguars. Maybe there’s more leopards in Saudi Arabia than I think, though. Of course if you count pumas as big cats(they are after all both those things, but taxonomically different) then the US wins again.

For big grazers, this is the U.S., with bison. If you specifically restrict it to large antelope it might be Kazakhstan.

For apes, I’m pretty sure it’s Malaysia, with orangutans. Large monkeys would be Saudi Arabia, with baboons.

Big canines would be, probably, Norway.

Eagles are probably Switzerland.

Big snakes are, I’m guessing, either Malaysia or Singapore.

Any categories I’m missing? Any corrections?

Not sure how you are doing wealth comparisons is it per capita? Total GDP? Median or average?

Norway has a higher median Wealth than the US but loses in total and on average. So big Canines might also be US again with wolves living there. But Norway also has brown bears and polar bears. So if they win the wealth game for canines they'd win it for bears too.

Same issue with eagles.

I'm also not sure if Singapore should win anything. Depending on how much work "non-marginal" is doing for the population counts. There might be more large snakes in zoos and private collections in the US then there are in Singapore.

That also brings up the invasive species issue. Florida has a bunch of large snakes. They are not native to the area, so do they count?

Also we could add crocodiles to megafauna. Florida/US probably wins that.

Wild horses is another potential category. They are large grazers, but it feels like they are pretty different from bison. There is a wild population of them in North America in Virginia and Maryland, and maybe out west still. But they are also an invasive species in North America.

The invasive species issue is more important than you might think. Texas ranchers have a surprisingly large number of large game animals for hunting purposes. Some of those ranch animal populations actually outnumber the estimated wild populations for those animals.

Hogs might also be megafauna. They are bigger than wolves, and certainly bigger than Eagles. America wins that depending again on the invasive species question.

The original question in my head was ‘how first world can you get without driving your big cats extinct’ which then evolved into the broader question with wealth as a proxy. ‘Marginal’ and ‘wealthiest’ are turning out to be more relevant questions than I thought.

Texas ranchers have a few big antelopes, but I don’t know that it makes much difference- bison are native to Texas anyways. I guess free ranging gemsbok makes a difference if you’re specific to big antelopes.

Reticulated pythons in Florida probably matters, though.

Might be a bit of a u shape phenomenon. They exist at low wealth and high wealth. It's not just big cats, but big predators in general.

Urban areas are voting for policies of allowing predators to live among their nearby rural areas. The rural areas hate those policies for obvious reasons. Happened in Colorado where they were releasing wolves.

There are plenty of mountain lions in the US, and I think they're "big cats". I've also seen claims of jaguars' range extending across the border from Mexico, but relatively few documented encounters.

I've personally seen a bobcat, but that probably is too small to count.

If I see a mountain lion in my neighborhood, something has gone very wrong.

Whereas if I see a mountain lion in my US neighborhood, I have something mildly unusual to post about on nextdoor. Occasionally a mountain lion even makes its way into the heart of a major city, though that makes headlines when it happens.

There are fairly common news reports of them in several California and Colorado cities that I can recall offhand.

Oh, most certainly.

It’s my pseudo-suburban wasteland that ought to ward them off. We get yotes and bobcats.

Theres one gets shot in downtown Dallas every couple of years. Usually around the dump or in the trinity river floodplain. Their normal range peters out right around where the Fort Worth far suburbs turn into generic small towns.

The original question in my head was ‘how first world can you get without driving your big cats extinct’ which then evolved into the broader question with wealth as a proxy.

If so, I don't really think any answers to this question (your broader one) are really indicative of much because there is one glaring confounding factor in the metric you're using. Most megafaunal extinctions did not occur during the transition to industrial modernity; rather they occurred when all modern humans were still firmly in the hunter-gatherer stage. The giant ground sloths in South America, the mammoths and mastodon in North America, as well as Diprotodon and the marsupial lion in Australia were all driven extinct via a combination of human pressure + environmental shifts during the late Pleistocene. 65% of megafaunal species went extinct during this period, and when it came to animals above 1000 kg, 80% of them disappeared.

What really does this metric in is that this loss of megafauna wasn't exactly evenly distributed throughout the world, it was particularly severe in the Americas and Australia, whereas Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia were less affected. And the worst Pleistocene megafaunal die-offs occurred in regions which happen to correlate with first-world-ness today. Long before any human societies became recognisably first-world the distribution of megafauna globally was already very skewed, and relative megafaunal diversity in any region has a whole lot to do with whatever happened during the late Pleistocene and not quite so much to do with industrialisation.

There were jaguars on the Texas gulf coast until the 30’s. Tigers lived in thé actually populated parts of southern Russia until soviet times. Mountain lions lived through most of the east until the late nineteenth century and they’re still present in the outer suburbs of most American cities in the west- their ecological requirements aren’t that different from pantheras.

Wolves live up and down Italy. Bears are surprisingly willing to live near people.

Clearly large predators living near civilized people is a thing that has, in fact, happened.

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