EVEN MOA MYSTERIES FROM KARL SHUKER

http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2011/03/feathered-mystery-from-new-zealandmoa.html

MAX ON MOAS

http://maxzoo.blogspot.com/2011/02/review-moa-sightings-by-bruce-spittle.html

Max eceives the major new three-volume work on contemporary moa sightings, and is very favourably impressed.

MOA GENDER CONUNDRUM

Tony Lucas sent this:

Where are all the males? - ancient DNA raises questions about extinct moa populations.

A little more than 700 years ago multiple species of the gigantic flightless birds called moas were still running around New Zealand. They ranged over almost the entirety of the North and South Islands, from the coast to the mountain forests, but when the Maori people arrived in the late 13th century the birds were quickly driven to extinction. Within a few hundred years they were entirely wiped out (along with the immense Haast's eagle, which fed on the moas), but fortunately for scientists these birds left behind vast accumulations of bones.
Two such moa graveyards are the Pyramid Valley and Bell Hill Vineyard sites on South Island. Together they record the presence of four moa species (Dinornis robustus, Emeus crassus, Euryapteryx curtus, Pachyornis elephantopus) over the course of the 3,000 years prior to the arrival of the Maori, and these sites presented scientists with the opportunity to recover ancient DNA from a large sample of bones to investigate the population genetics of the birds, including the sex of each individual. As they collected and analysed the genetic data, however, they found something they were not expecting. In each species and across both deposits, females, which are considerably larger and heavier than males, were significantly more common, with an average of five females for every one male out of a sample of 227. What could could account for this disparity?



PICTURE CAPTION: The skeletons of female (larger, background) and male (smaller, foreground) Dinornis robustus, with a pigeon skeleton for comparison. From Allentoft et al 2010

Read On..

TONY LUCAS WRITES WITH SOME POTENTIALLY EXCITING NEWS

Received a report the other day of the sighting of a suspected moa chick - no, not historical: it only happened three years ago.

Now don't get all excited - I know I was too.


I'm looking into the possibility of it being an escaped emu as there are a lot in this country now. I wish I had the funding to shoot down there and take a look but that's impossible. If it does turn out to be a chick this will be the first one seen in decades and may well prove a healthy breeding population of these birds DOES still exist.

Kindest of regards
Tony Lucas

Bruce Spittle writes

Dear Jon

Could I mention that an account of claims of moa sightings in New Zealand has been published? Details and the introductory chapter are available at http://www.moasightings.com/ The 1993 claim is covered in some detail including an account written by one of the claimants, a transcript of a meeting of the claimants with the Skeptics Society, and the previously unpublished transcripts of the interviews by the Department of Conservation with the claimants. Some field investigations are also reported on.

Best wishes
Bruce

GARY TAYLOR: Brief Moa Story..

I was touring New Zealand in late 2005 when the tour guide told me the following story.

A local farmer had caught and trapped a Moa, and had it contained in his garage. This news created a frenzy and all the locals wanted witness to the extinct bird. The media soon became caught up in all the frenzy (as they usually do). The farmer announced the time and date when he would unleash the Moa for all to witness.

The time approached and the farmer entered his garage. The media and locals were all gathered, cameras at the ready, when the garage door opened and the farmer emerged on his lawn Moa.

The prank was reputed to have created some bad press for the farmer.

I found the story quite amusing and it seemed to capture the quirkiness of the Kiwis. I'd forgotten that story until I read the article and I don't know how true it is. I have a very good friend that lives on the Kapiti Coast so I'm going to ask her if she's heard the story. New Zealand was a beautiful country; it reminds me of how this country could still have been.

AUBREY: Moas are they still with us today?

Well, according to 64-year-old cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy he believes they are.


He has found what he believes to be the footprints of the smaller Scrub Moa (Anomalopteryx didiformis) in the remote Urewera Range. He made casts of the prints and matched them to a male Scrub Moa at the Auckland Museum. Moa belonged to a group of birds called Ratites, which includes Emu's, Ostriches and the Kiwi.




Reports still trickle in to this day about these large flightless birds
from across New Zealand. In 1993 Paddy Freaney, a former member of the British Army's elite Special Air Service (SAS), witnessed a large Moa in the Craigieburn Valley in Canterbury. His photo attracted international attention. Following the Moa, he snapped its picture from a distance of 40 metres. Was it a Moa? I for one believe that smaller Moa will be found some day hiding deep within the New Zealand interior. Always fascinated with the Moa, I have studied them for years. In 2006 I carved a Moa skeleton, one bone at a time. It stands 2 feet tall. And here you can see the football size of an actual Moa egg.

FLEUR FULCHER: Fleur's Internship Diary Weeks Four and Five

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. She is spending the summer as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. This is her story.......

It has been a hectic two weeks both at work and at home, so I can only apologise for the missing week from my internship diary.

Last week started with me in Launceston; I had wanted to be allowed to help the curators to see how they work. Tony Eccles, the curator of Ethnography let me help him take down an exhibition about the great plant collectors of the Veitch nurseries. They had by the outbreak of World War one introduced 1281 plants to the west, including over 200 orchids and the Pocket Handkerchief tree we have one of in our garden.

The rest of the week was taken up with more shells including the prettiest ones yet and more herbarium. On the Friday I was again helping Tony, we took some rather ace objects to be photographed. My favourite was a Tongan club.

This week we have been doing a variety of things, yet more shells, even more herbarium action and condition checking the Cuvier's Beaked whale skeleton which is being remounted.

On being told that there was a Moa skeleton in the stores, I found it whilst looking for a whale rib and took a few pictures. On Friday I also saw a specimen of Passenger Pigeon, a bird whose story I'm sure you're all familiar with. It looked ordinary; not being an ornithologist I wouldn't have thought it unusual if it appeared in my garden. But nonetheless seeing it in such close proximity was quite emotional, it was on a table, between a pair of hummingbirds and the shell of a small turtle.

Friday afternoon found Catherine crawling around finding bits of bamboo under a tiger (one of 39 shot in 10 days by George V, the git), and found me checking pest traps as we had found a couple of live booklice, in one of them were two odd looking insects I couldn't identify, on asking some of my superiors they couldn't identify it either although the Assistant Natural History curator thought it was a type of winged Psocid (booklouse) however we were unsure if he was right and may send photographs of it to an expert. It was a rather long legged, bristly winged beastie of about 2 or 3 mm in length. Maybe I shall include a pic of it next week if I can.

So all in all I am still loving my work placement and hope that I can get a job in a museum like the one I'm working at now.

Fleur's bosses at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum have been kind enough to allow her to write this blog, even though it is not usually their policy to allow such things. We would like to thank them for this, and to point out that all pictures of museum specimens are copyright to the RAMM

TONY LUCAS: Moa Feather follow up

Tony Lucas is one of our New Zealand representatives. We first published his work in the 2008 Yearbook when he wrote us an overview of New Zealand cryptozoology....

As you may well remember, if you have been keeping up with the blog, a few weeks ago I wrote to Jon regarding a Moa feather that was for sale on the Internet auction site "Trademe".

I decided to conduct an investigation into whether this was a genuine Moa feather, which if it was would have proven the Moa was still around in the late 1800s, or whether it was a very similar Emu feather. After some investigation I found an anomaly at the bottom shaft of the feather which seemed to indicate a secondary feather which would definitely indicate emu as it is the only bird in the world which has this double feather configuration. My suspicions aroused I tell the seller to take it to the museum which they did and visually identified it as Moa, they also wanted to send a small portion away to be DNA tested. I advise the seller strongly to do so which he duly did.

I decided to follow this up the other day and wrote to the seller, with the merest slimmest of hope that it was indeed a Moa feather.

I received his reply last night, and regrettably for both him, he was trying to get the money together to buy a house, and I, it turned out to be a 100-year-old emu feather.

The one thing I've learned from this is not to take things at face value but to investigate everything thoroughly, there was apparently an American buyer interested as well as a large auction house.

So hopefully through a little research I have saved all parties involved a lot of embarrassment.

Who knows perhaps the next item to appear may well be the genuine thing, what a discovery that would be. Until then I'll continue to keep my eyes open but not take things at face value.

THE BIG THREE: Fleur Fulcher

A FEW WEEKS AGO WE ASKED VARIOUS BLOGGO REGULARS TO TELL US WHAT WERE THEIR TOP THREE FAVOURITE MYSTERY ANIMALS... AND WHY

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. After a gap of a few weeks during which she has been about her studies, she is back and as charming as usual....

Choosing three cryptids is a little like going into an antiques shop and trying to choose only three things I want.

Of course for me one would be the Moa, the giant flightless bird of New Zealand, it is due to this magnificent mega-fauna that I got into cryptozoology at all and therefore discovered the cfz. Apparently wiped out by 1500 there have nonetheless been reports of them from remote valleys and beaches, a girl, Alice Mckenzie saw what may have been one in 1880 and again in 1889. she herself did not say it was a Moa but thought perhaps it was a Takahe (itself thought extinct at the time) but she realised it wasn’t when she later saw a stuffed Takahe.

There were several types of Moa ranging from the truly gigantic Dinornis robustustus, to the smaller ‘Little scrub moa’ which is the one Rex Gilroy and his wife have great hopes of finding.

Another of my favourites would have to be the tatzelwurm, apparently found in Switzerland. It seems to be some sort of lizard with only small legs, but it makes up in temper what it lacks in legs. Whilst one of these creatures was apparently found dead in 1828 and sent to Heidelburg museum where, as is usual with such bodies, it vanished. There is, however, a photograph of the Tatzelwurm, but as it appears to show a rather cheerful looking carved model I’m not sure how much value should be placed upon it.There are a few pages on this mountain-dwelling marvel in the book ‘Dragons: More than a Myth?’ by Richard Freeman, but I first learnt of it by looking at the wikipedia ‘list of cryptids’ which is a wonderful, if sometimes fairly silly resource for the cash strapped crypto-fan.

The last of my favourites was very hard to choose, and not quite as fun as the lilliputian gin drinking elephants mentioned by Chris Clark. It is the Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), and if I could choose one ‘extinct’ animal that I would want to be rediscovered well and thriving then this would be it. The giant and rather silly looking beast was discovered in 1741 by Georg Steller, although it was already well known to the people native to the lands it lived near. By the time it was discovered by white men the sea cow was already endangered, due to a mixture of over-hunting and lack of algae due to the rising population of sea-urchins. But still, it could have held on to existence if the hunting had been stopped.

The sea cow became extinct in 1768, only 27 years after its official discovery. There have been odd reports ever since from the remote seas where they lived, in 1830 a Polish naturalist was sure he had seen some sea cows on Bering Island and in 1962 Russian Whalers (familiar with the wildlife in those waters) thought they saw a whole group of them.Could they still exist?

I think it unlikely, but I wouldn’t entirely dismiss the possibility.

THE BIG THREE: Glen Vaudrey

A FEW WEEKS AGO WE ASKED VARIOUS BLOGGO REGULARS TO TELL US WHAT WERE THEIR TOP THREE FAVOURITE MYSTERY ANIMALS... AND WHY
Glen is one of the newer additions to the bloggo family. He wrote to me out of the blue last year to ask wherther we wanted a Western Isles volume in our Mystery Animals of Britain series. We argeed that we did indeed want one, and commissioned him. What we were not expecting was such a bloody good writer and all round nice guy, who - by the way - is writing several other volumes for us...

What a challenge it is to think of your favourite three cryptids (that are likely to be found), there are just so many to consider. Nevertheless I managed to whittle down my selection to three very different animals, the land is represented by a mystery sloth, the seas are championed by a big shark and the avian world is proudly represented by an elusive flightless bird.

The Mysterious Sloth

The jungles of South America undoubtedly hide many things from the great lost cities of gold that seemingly lured Colonel Percy Fawcett to his doom to the giant snakes that he so eagerly noted in his journals.

Today’s sloths are restricted to the trees but it has not always been the case for back in the late Pleistocene period there existed a number of ground dwelling sloths with the giant ground sloth Megatherium americanum coming in at a very impressive 20 feet, while the Patagonia cave dweller Mylodon darwinii was in possession of a coat of reddish brown hair that concealed a skin dotted with dermal ossicles, these tiny nodules of bone would give the sloth a hidden layer of body armour. This possibly bullet proof sloth is widely believed to have died out around 8,600 years ago. It walked with its clawed feet turned towards the centre of its body.

While the Mylodon may have vanished from the jungles of South America there appears to be a cryptid that has taken its place - the Mapinguari. Standing 5-6 feet tall, with long reddish fur and feet that appear to be turned backward, it reportedly twists palm trees to the ground so as to be able to get the palm hearts that would otherwise be out of reach. It is also famed for the foul smelling stench that it releases when threatened.

In 1930 a hunter going by the name of Inocêncio became separated from his friends while on an expedition up the Rio Uatumã, Pará State, Brazil. Unable to find his way back to his friends before nightfall Inocêncio settled down for the evening. His sleep was interrupted during the night by loud cries coming from a thickset, black man-like figure that was standing upright next to a fallen tree. It appeared to Inocêncio that the creature was heading towards him and, perhaps understandably, he started to shoot at the mystery animal. Shooting several times it is quite likely that Inocêncio hit the animal on more than one occasion, despite being shot the animal headed off back in to the jungle well away from the scared hunter. Was its ability to walk away from being shot a result of poor aiming or a bullet proof skin?

The big shark

If you thought the sharks in the Jaws films were big they were tiddlers compared to the ancient Carcharodon Megalodon. Today the largest known living shark is the whale shark known to reach a length of 50 feet closely followed by the basking shark at 40 feet, both these sharks unlike the Megalodon are harmless plankton eaters. The largest confirmed measurement of a carnivorous shark, a great white caught off Malta, was a still respectable 23 feet. The length of Megalodon varies greatly depending on the source starting at 45 feet up to a whopping 120 feet, with such a variation perhaps somewhere in the middle would be a fair estimate of the true size, even if it was at the small end it would still be twice the length of the largest great white. The Megalodon was first swimming the seas some 50 million years ago in the Tertiary period and is widely believed to have swum off this mortal coil some 1.5 million years ago but like all good extinction dates this is open to question. In 1875 the oceanographic vessel Challenger dredged up a pair of Megalodon teeth from the seabed at a depth of 14,000 feet. When these two teeth were dated in the late 1950s the Russian scientist D.Tschernezky declared the oldest tooth to be some 24,000 years old and the younger of the pair to be just 11,000 years old, still not immediately recent but enough to make this marine predator a contemporary of homo sapiens, is it little wonder early man stuck to the land.

But it isn’t just a few odd teeth that suggest a longer term survival of the Megalodon for in the last 100 years there have been plenty of sightings of very large sharks. In 1918 Australian fishermen reported a sighting off Broughton Island; they watched a giant shark swallowing 3 feet wide crayfish traps, pots and mooring lines. The fishermen gave measurements ranging from the 115 feet to a staggering 300 feet, while these figures may well be open to question the men were all sure that they had not seen a whale shark but rather a shark reminiscent of a very large great white.

In 1933 Loren Grey sailing 100 mile northwest of Rangiroa, reported sighting a shark some 40-50 feet in length with a head 10-12 feet wide, again this witness does not consider his sighting to be that of a whale shark.

Pacific island tradition talks of a mysterious Lord of the Deep, while the title may be Lovecraftian this undersea lord isn’t Cthulhu, it’s a great shark up to 100 feet in length, its upper surface grey with the rest of its body pale white. Does the Megalodon still swim unreported in the depth of the world’s oceans

Flightless bird

Long before New Zealand was home to hobbits it hosted a whole flock of flightless birds. The largest of these, the Moa, came in a variety of types, the largest reaching an impressive height of over 11 feet. All was going well for these flightless birds until humans finally made it to New Zealand around the 10th century (perhaps Megalodon had grown bored of a diet of Peloponnesians at that point and had decided to let the odd boat load past). Between hunting and a change to the habitat the moa officially became extinct in 1800. While the giant moa died out there have been sightings of one of its smaller mystery relatives the Roa-Roa.

Descriptions of the Roa-Roa reveal a kiwi-like bird around the size of a turkey sporting a grey, blue or spotted plumage, a small head on a long neck, sharp spurs on its feet and a middle toe measuring up to 14 inches and a call similar to the kiwi.

Reported to be found on both the North and South Islands, the majority of the sightings however have come from the South Island. In 1880 seven year old Alice Mckenzie claimed to have touched a big navy blue bird at Martins Bay, Milford Sound, South Island. The bird was described as being around three foot tall with scaly legs and three toes on each foot. Eventually the mystery bird had had enough of Alice’s attention and began to attack her, understandably not enjoying the experience she ran off back home and by the time her father returned the bird had vanished, luckily for the bird I suspect.

In the 1890s a sighting of a moa-like bird took place in Brunner range, again on the South Island, this sighting was made by a group of school boys who watched the bird as it crossed a road.

Racing forward to 1963 a scientist reported seeing a large moa-like bird in the brush in Northwest Nelson State Forest Park, South Island.

Reports go quiet again until the 1990s when a spate of sightings are reported however some of this recent wave of sightings have been acknowledge as hoaxes, which unfortunately muddy the waters as bit.

Is it possible for a bird the size of the Roa-Roa to go unnoticed in New Zealand? It could well be, after all a number of out of place moose are loose in the South Island and despite their size they are proving decidedly hard to spot, with that in mind what are the chances of finding this elusive turkey-sized mystery bird

TONY LUCAS DOES IT AGAIN

How does the bloody man do it? It is becoming ever more obvious that various members of the CFZ bloggo team have what Charlie Fort would have described as "wild talents". Richard Muirhead and Nigel Wright (for example) no sooner have to walk into a public library before they unearth a hitherto unsuspected treasure trove of data.

Max Blake is equally lucky with tropical fish shops, and it seems that our resident New Zealander Tony Lucas has a similar Lovejoyesque power over auction houses.

Cop a load of this.

He wrote to me saying that this was something in which we might be interested, and the answer is that of course we are (even though we still have some financial problems, even though the worst have now been alleviated).

The description is as follows:

This auction is for some RARE Moa Fragments and other items found Ex Wairau Boulder 28 April 1956 By Jim Eyles who was one of New Zealands best Archeologists at the time.

There are 29 pieces all up. There is a card inside the box which reads Odd Moa Hunt Fragments Etc Ex Wairau Bar (Jim Eyles) Hawkeye 28 April 1956 29 pcs. Jim Eyles was a well known Moa Hunter. Later in life he was the Director of The Nelson Provincial Museum. Please feel free to ask me any questions you have regarding this item and i will answer them as best as I can.

To describe Jim Eyles as a "well known moa hunter" is an understatement. To quote wikipedia:

James Roy (Jim) Eyles OBE (1926–2004) was a New Zealand archaeologist.
Born in 1926, Jim spent his early years living with his family at the Wairau Bar near Blenheim where, in 1939 as a schoolboy, he discovered early human skeletons and associated artefacts including necklaces, stone tools and moa egg. Jim discovered several more burials on the bar, and assisted with the exacavtions carried out by Roger Duff from the Canterbury Museum. The site is regarded as one of the oldest and most important archaeological sites in New Zealand.

So this item is actually quite an important piece of cryptozoological history. We have no money, but of course we are bidding on it. If anyone fancies donating a few quid towards the purchase price we would be very grateful..

The seventh lot of bird related clippings from the archives

Oll has been a busy little beaver and the latest set of scanned news clippings and other stuff from the Archiving Project is ready for you to download HERE should you want to..

This is the seventh trenche of bird-related clippings which are, once again, mostly about moas.


It is strange, but I haven't actually looked into our clippings archive boxes for years - some of them not since Alison (my first wife) cut them out and put them into the files in the first place about fifteen years ago, and I had no idea that we had so much Moa stuff.

A FEATHER BRAINED SCHEME

Tony Lucas, who is rapidly becoming my antipodean right-hand man wrote to us this morning. He found the following item on an auction site in New Zealand:

"I've had this guy get in touch with me and is selling a Moa feather.

The guy rang and spoke with me tonight, the feather, that was in a first edition Maori bible that had been locked in a metal trunk since 1900, has apparently been authenticated by Te Papa Museum in Wellington as the genuine article. I was wondering if the CFZ museum would be interested in purchasing this item"

Well, despite the fact that we are skinter than we have been in a long time, with enormous printer, garage and council tax bills on our plate, I am interested, yes.

But then came a second e-mail:

"Just done some research and Dont think this is a Moa feather, if you look at the bottom of the second pic of the feather you can see the split where asecond spine came off, Yes there were two feathers attached,The only bird to have such feathers after extensive research is - You guessed it an EMU.Sorry to get your hopes up Its not the genuine article by the look of it soforget it.Feel a bit of a dumb ass now. Still who knows one day perhaps the real thing."

Tony, I will not have ANYONE badmouth members of my team. Not even the members themselves. You have done a remarkable piece of detective work, and deserve to be congratulated, so be warned that I will be really cross with you if you EVER describe yourself as a `dumb ass` again.....

GUEST BLOGGER TONY LUCAS: Where have all the cryptids gone?

Tony Lucas is one of our New Zealand representatives. We first published his work in the 2008 Yearbook when he wrote us an overview of New Zealand cryptozoology. New Zealand is a particularly fascinating place because of its zoological isolation from the rest of the world. However, Tony argues that although it was once home to many mystery animals, it is now - quite possibly - too late.

If we look back on the history of Cryptid sightings, the further back we go the more frequent the sightings seem to be. It seems once an area is colonised sightings appear, instead of as one would expect to increase, to decline sharply.

Is it because these creatures seek retreats further apart from the colonised areas or is a more menacing mechanism at work here?

The New Zealand Moehau and corresponding hominoids used to be plentiful and frequently spoken of by the Maori people. European colonizers made a push to populate the land for farming and instead of sightings and encounters becoming more numerous, as one would expect, what creatures that were encountered had gone from being barbarous, confrontational monsters of the forest to wary, timid creatures which would abscond at the first sign of humans.

Could it be these hominoids associated mankind with death? Sightings declined, and nowadays are virtually unheard-of. Why should these creatures associate us with death? Simple: in a single word.... disease.

We have witnessed it down through history where a less advanced civilization, free from the many pathogenic woes of their discoverers and conquerors, are wiped out of existence, or nearly so, by pathogenic marauders to which the new arrivals are totally immune.

The conquistadors brought smallpox and influenza to the Aztecs. In scarcely 100 years the Aztec population collapsed from 22 million down to a mere 2 million, a 90% loss in population. Easter Island and the Canary Islands also endured the same fate in the 16th century via measles, whooping cough and influenza.

However, this is not just restricted to humans; rats on Australia's Christmas Island were decimated by a hyper disease carried there by other rats that had jumped ship. Nowadays the Tasmanian Devil faces annihilation by a lethal type of introduced facial cancer, the list goes on and on.

Isolated island populations appear the most vulnerable as they are populations already under pressure from habitat loss and often hunting. This tendency clearly shows domestic introductions have had an impact on wild populations, and if they are genetically close it doesn't take much for a pathogen to jump hosts. This has been noticed and is still a concern with the recent H5N1 Bird flu epidemic.

One hypothesis advanced for the extinction of the Mega-Herbivores advocates that it was human introduced diseases that tilted the balance and lead to the mass extinctions which followed. With hunting and climate change it is easy to see how this could occur.

Taking this into account, judging by the absence of sightings here in New Zealand, I fear many of our Cryptid species may already have succumbed and for them, it is now too late. The Moehau is an excellent example. If these hominids were genetically close to humans the smallpox, measles and influenza which colonized the country alongside the colonists may have spelt their death knell.

A species already under pressure by habitat loss due to clearance for farming of the land by both Maori and European colonizers, all it would have taken would have been an outbreak of disease to drive the species to extinction.

Was a headless and partially devoured body of a miner and a woman found with her neck broken and 1882 the result of vengeance by a grief stricken Moehau? Interestingly, Bigfoot tracks in the United States have exhibited foot deformities and witnesses have also reported these creatures hobbling, being assisted and supported by another creature and acting sickly. Could these maladies be from catching some ailment to which they have no resistance?

Back in New Zealand, the Moa, the most famous of New Zealand Cryptids, was also under pressure from hunting and habitat loss.

Accounts also became spasmodic with colonization. Could the poultry and species introduced by the Acclimatization Society, such as sparrows, blackbirds, Indian mynah and countless others, have carried disease along with them to which the Moa had no immunity?

A poultry disease like infectious bronchitis which is highly contagious, could easily have wiped out or reduced Moa populations to unfrequented pockets far away from areas of contamination.

I believe the Moehau to be no more.

The last possibly dying from something as uncomplicated as the flu. Moas may yet hang on in remote and relatively unexplored areas like Fiordland in the lower South Island. But I'm forced to ask myself how many additional Cryptids worldwide have we doomed by introducing microscopic pathogens that neither known or cared for the rarity of the next victim.