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Spraqwa, it is not an endangered species in Kentucky, they make there home at every cliff in the red and on dozens of routes. I dont plan on climbing the route in question, but i bet everyone on this BB has climbed routes with woodrats near by and did not even know it. There are not just a handful of them, there hundreds if not thousands of these animals in the rrg area. I see them or their nests all the time. I would suggest climbers pack there tp out so the rats do not drag it up the cliff.

Creature Feature currently hosts a woodrat that has made a nest of used tampons and toilet paper!

Catastrophic events can result in cataclysmic changes. Nothing humans have ever done or could do even compares to the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction. Meteors move even faster than man's manipulations. After each catastrophic event adaptive radiation and speciation occurs at a rapid rate in evolutionary terms. Individuals do not evolve, the populations evolve. Puncuated equilibrium and adaptive radiation don't require eons of time to change the genetic makeup of a population.

t bone wrote:Spraqwa, it is not an endangered species in Kentucky, they make there home at every cliff in the red and on dozens of routes. I dont plan on climbing the route in question, but i bet everyone on this BB has climbed routes with woodrats near by and did not even know it. There are not just a handful of them, there hundreds if not thousands of these animals in the rrg area. I see them or their nests all the time. I would suggest climbers pack there tp out so the rats do not drag it up the cliff.

Just because it is not listed as an endangered species in Kentucky does not mean that it isn't endangered or on the threatened list. Read Mandala's post. It is threatened in Kentucky, just not on the endangered list.

It is NOT threatened. The populations are stable. Mandala is wrong. Also, her literature was dated to 1994. How accurate can that be?

A little bit of common sense would go a long way to help insure their survival and our ability to climb on these cliffs. Next time somebody spots a furry critter on a route, perhaps it would suffice to make a note of it in the online route description instead of making suggestions on a public forum that the routes be closed. The forest service is probably laughing at us if they read our posts about endangered routes (I mean rats). It's like we are a bunch of ecological John Ashcroft's here eroding our civil liberties in the name of a noble cause. (Thank goodness he resigned by the way).

J-Rock wrote:Catastrophic events can result in cataclysmic changes. Nothing humans have ever done or could do even compares to the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction. Meteors move even faster than man's manipulations. After each catastrophic event adaptive radiation and speciation occurs at a rapid rate in evolutionary terms. Individuals do not evolve, the populations evolve. Puncuated equilibrium and adaptive radiation don't require eons of time to change the genetic makeup of a population.

Human industrialization is a catastrophic event that is occurring all across the entire land surface of the planet in an instant on the evolutionary scale. The meteoric mass extinction came from a single impact point... and may have been combined with a cosmic dustcloud... Regardless, at the current rate of extinction we are outpacing anything that happened before. Some animals will survive. Most won't. That sucks. And don't forget that we are not only unlocking carbon that has been stored up over hundreds of millions of years we are also introducing chemical compounds that can not occur naturally. That sucks too.

J-Rock wrote:It's like we are a bunch of ecological John Ashcroft's here eroding our civil liberties in the name of a noble cause. (Thank goodness he resigned by the way).

Only to be replaced by the man who said the Geneva Conventions were "quaint."

This seemed approprate concidering the turn this thread has taken, from my Favorite Tool song:

"Some say a comet will fall from the sky.
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
Some say the end is near.
Some say we'll see armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this
stupid shit, silly shit, stupid shit...
One great big festering neon distraction,
I've a suggestion to keep you all occupied.
(Learn to swim. 3x)
Mom's gonna fix it all soon.
Mom's comin' round to put it back the way it ought to beeeeeeeee. "

[bangs head]

Saw Tool at UNO's Lakefront Arena back in the 90's. Kick ass.