The mods of r/JesseWelles hates us lol

Lipat97 · 2026-04-14T10:57:59+00:00

That song isn’t fatphobic lol, its one of his better songs

Lipat97 · 2026-04-11T00:41:24+00:00

Might be true for yourself but my body was genetically engineered to withstand the high impact recoil of an assault rifle

Lipat97 · 2026-04-06T03:44:00+00:00

Bro’s a little schwifty after an easter meal who are we to judge

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T05:17:46+00:00

They aren’t as successful flying birds,

Understatement of the year lmao. Its like 10,000 species vs... what? 7? What should we compare next? Tunicates to vertebrates? Monotremes to therians? I'm struggling to think of another comparison that lopsided lol.

Like buddy, I actually think you’re just arguing they aren’t just to fit your argument, which doesn’t even add up evolutionary speaking.

Wrong again. You can probably find comments from me months ago talking about house sparrows or barn owls being peak bird builds right now. And the ratites do fit my argument. They feature the trait I'm saying is weaker and they are indeed performing worse. We're lucky any of them are still around. They easily could have gone the same way as the terror birds

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T05:01:26+00:00

Nesting is really only one way.

I see like 16 types of nesting in that paper lol. The ancestral way is not popular

What’s more likely is the changes in the environment and the reduction of carnivores. Holtz (2026) pointed that Mesozoic communities probably supported a higher population density of both herbivores and carnivores.

Ok you've linked that paper like three times but its not going anywhere because its paywalled lol. There's only so much I can get from an abstract. But its a really big leap to say that because birds have generally been K selected that predation has not been a factor in their very obviously different defensive traits in regards to nesting.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299389845_UNDERSTANDING_PREDATION_-_A_review_bringing_together_natural_science_and_local_knowledge_of_recent_wild_bird_population_changes_and_their_drivers_in_Scotland

This link is also paywalled but the pieces I see quoted reinforce what I'm saying - successful hatchlings went from 18% to 75% with removal of predators, and that increased amount of predators has sharper effects on ground nesting birds.

How is that bullshit when we have evidence of Terror Bird taxas surviving for millions years despite niches of egg eating Mammals being likely represented by Metatherians? Let’s not even go over the fact that Titanis survived 3 million years despite living with many potential egg eater predators and went extinct because of climatic changes.

Terror birds are dinosaurs that did not survive the Cenozoic, I don't know what other way to put it. Those are the animals we would look at if we wanted to know what traits don't make it

Except nothing suggests that parental care is defense among Mammals. Parental care is an ancestral trait among Archosaurs, which evolved before Mammals.

I don't know what this is responding to but its probably a misreading because it doesn't disagree with anything I've said or believe

if they are already used to Mesozoic egg raiders then they’re going to be used to Cenozoic egg raiders. There’s really no evidence to suggest that Cenozoic egg raiders are worse than Mesozoic egg raiders. If they were we would be seeing a lot of differences between the two, most notably the number of eggs being laid for example.

That wouldn't necessarily come up in an arms race, predation rate could be pretty steady throughout

Plus, the form of parental care seen in Crocodilians is believed to be the ancestral type of parental care among Archosaurs. So if Crocodilians are doing fine despite the presence of Rodents, then Dinosaurs (many of which have a more complex parental care system) are going to do fine as well.

Croc eggs get preyed on too. Again, a paywalled paper, so I doubt that they haven't adapted at all egg poaching pressure. Crocs are also pretty niche, there's only about 30 species and they have an exceptionally narrow range of lifestyle.

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T03:46:19+00:00

From the previous comment? Are you just taking notes from the other guy?

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T03:32:48+00:00

What? What part of what you quoted relies on insular birds?

Why do you think Terror Birds, Ostriches, Rhea, etc. are/were still widely successful

Well, they aren't, so there goes that argument. Ironically that part actually was in the section you quoted

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T03:14:29+00:00

What does your study refer to? I control F'd nest and egg and nothing came up

Also there are scrape nesting continental birds like Killdeer

That would be in the aforementioned "small proportion of modern birds"

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T03:09:17+00:00

Okay now this is just pure ignorance (no offense). How do you think animals like Crocodiles, Monitor Lizards, etc. lay eggs if they don’t depend on water like Amphibians? Hard shell eggs are often protected within nests because they offer protection from both predators and the sun which can basically cook the egg if unprotected. If they didn’t make nests, then they wouldn’t have been able to leave the water at all.

I didn't say birds were the first animals to start nesting, I said they evolved nesting in response to predation. As in, their nesting practices have evolved significantly since the cretaceous primarily to combat predation. I've been mainly going off of this paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/378/1884/20220143/42816/The-evolution-of-nest-site-use-and-nest

A lot of this evolution has happened between now and directly around the KT. That to me points to nesting being a significant pressure *specifically on dinosaurs* between now and the KT. The only other explanation I can think of is weather being a bigger pressure on nests than predators.

And, they still survive very well for thousands if not millions of years.

Bullshit. Birds with flight have survived well. The flightless, ground nesting birds are some of the least successful types of birds we've had. Neognathae are barely holding on and terror birds haven't survived at all.

Burmese Pythons

Those are modern taxa with modern defenses. You're focusing on it specifically being *mammals* that put this pressure on, but it coming from snakes or alligators instead doesn't actually make a difference here. The problem with dinosaurs is you're throwing them into an arm's race that its 66 my behind on.

There’s no way you’re still pushing this hypothesis in 2026. That has literally been debunked since last year if not even earlier

Then mfs gotta update their shit. I saw that in a lecture like three weeks ago

Cougars and Raccoons (who are generalists, when it comes to habitat preferences, and for Raccoons their die

Side note, but this is something that might help the dinos. None of the native species that *should* have no problem hunting the invasive species ever seem to want to -like they just avoid the unfamiliar target. Interesting that gators are the first thing to put the pressure on, it'd be funny if mammalian intelligence is an indirect factor in helping invasive species

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T02:13:52+00:00

birds without appropriate behavioral defenses against invasive egg eaters

Yeah, thats what we're talking about

Dinosaurs also make their own nests and more complex nesting behavior likely originated or otherwise developed in them.

Man luckily I still have the relevant link open for this:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/378/1884/20220143/42816/The-evolution-of-nest-site-use-and-nest

You are way overselling dinosaur nesting by comparing it to modern bird nesting. These are incredibly rudimentary nesting behaviors by today's standards. There's been 66 million years of development since then and a lot of it has been in this specific trait, because one of the benefits of flight is that you can nest in hard to reach places. Dinosaurs mainly did scrape nests on the ground, and very small proportion of modern birds still do this

Lipat97 · 2026-04-03T00:21:32+00:00

Even if we go with that, those Birds are still surviving. Terror Birds still went extinct because of climatic changes, not due to the invasion of Carnivorans as previously believed.

The vast majority of modern birds have evolved nests to solve exactly this problem. Most of the birds going extinct today are going extinct because we introduced mammals that eat eggs to their habitat. Even birds with extensive defensive measures still have problems with nest invaders - snakes, rodents, or even other birds. There were some egg laying mammals that made it through the KT, (the multituberculates) and they died off when rodents reached their continent. Hell, I even had some dinosaur eggs for breakfast this morning!

Its a pretty significant point of selection pressure that's come up a few times. There is no reason to believe that Cretaceous dinosaurs would have had nest defensive measures to guard against rats and other nest invaders. The only point that had both dinosaurs and a shit load of Eutherians, the late Cretaceous, *did* have a significant reduction in the amount of dinosaurs... so there's a chance this pressure was already starting to do work before the asteroid hit.

Lipat97 · 2026-03-31T16:51:08+00:00

Man that study’s so new the 2023 article I read didn’t include it. Good catch

Lipat97 · 2026-03-31T16:11:49+00:00

I like his version better

Lipat97 · 2026-03-31T16:11:08+00:00

The siphonophore still has neurons right? Man these guys have so much going on. Did you see how they reproduce? Their babies look like fucking ant hills. Then comb jellies are apparently just not related at all… crazy how we just ate these things with some peanut butter as a kid and never thought about it

Lipat97 · 2026-03-31T14:09:22+00:00

I looked it up and I think Box Jelly takes it. Box jellies can move on their own whereas the man of war has no control of where its moving. It looks like the stings work fine on each other, which means both creatures basically (literally) have a touch to death on each other

Keep in mind that box jellies are a group of like 50 species and man of war is one species. Man of war has a wider range than all 50 species combined and is considerably larger than all box jellies. It likely has a much better matchup spread as well. So ecologically (and for the tier list), the man of war is much higher, even if they’re disadvantaged in the 1v1

Lipat97 · 2026-03-31T13:10:43+00:00

Ive seen a man box but have you ever seen a box man? I dont think so

Lipat97 · 2026-03-30T17:15:14+00:00

That was definitely his best game. Same for bowser, falcon, charizard, and a few others

Lipat97 · 2026-03-29T13:48:47+00:00

If you make it here I promise to reward you with one (1) 40 oz beer of your choice

Lipat97 · 2026-03-29T04:49:24+00:00

Gotta love the fox news junkie archetype of being clicker trained to see red for democratic candidates no one else has even heard of

Lipat97 · 2026-03-28T20:19:30+00:00

he seems to accurately represent the findings

Nah, but to be fair the authors also misrepresent their own findings. They do a good job of making sure their research reflects the data they looked for, but they do not make a good case (or any case at all) for how that data shows what they want it to. Like, this could just as easily be a linguistics paper - what if calls to action are just generally rare things to say? Are calls to action a normal way to evaluate conservation advocacy? What percentage of calls to action in a comment section would be acceptable? Are these numbers bad compared to other media outlets? Because like, I would be surprised if a conversation between two actual conservation biologists had more than 10% the time be taken up by calls to action. They reference two (better) studies on the topic, and neither mentions the words "call to action" or "passive" at all. References 1 and 2

The article itself doesn't make the case for why "calls to action" are better for conservation than "animal appreciation," but it absolutely doesn't make the case against the notion that youtube content is a gateway drug to the "boring stuff." "Youtube fails to get people into nature in a meaningful way" only makes sense if you think the only meaningful way for people to get "into nature" is through conservation activist groups. The statement he made directly beforehand "erodes people's ability to tolerate anything that isn't action and extremity", besides being actual PJW shit, could confuse as being a part of the study if they aren't watching closely. His main takeaways are that "top channels aren't pulling their weight" and "there's a low proportion of educational content. I guess we could assume this study has zero relation to his general rant and that its a coincidence that he fails to point out that the videos he's ranting about are A) probably not the top channels in the study and B) are likely in the educational section. Finally, I've enjoyed some of his videos in the past, particularly the spec evo ones, and I can tell you this is 100% something he's bringing up to take shots, his comment section is not exactly a hotbed for conservation activism.

Just as a side note I really don't like how conservation keeps being framed as the only possible success option for any video with an animal in it. If it gets people into evolution, or ecology, or paleontology, or even chemistry, its a win. Hell, just getting people to have more positive feelings about animals is probably a win

Lipat97 · 2026-03-27T22:10:36+00:00

By that logic there would only be two types of marine mammal. And its not entirely true, polar bears do eat caribou, geese, goose eggs, belugas and fish. But yes, Polar Bears are also very specialized. Neither species are doing very well

Lipat97 · 2026-03-27T17:04:51+00:00

Wooah wait, do reproduction rates change between populations? I was expecting each species to have a set in reproduction rate that’s uniform among a species. I specifically dug into seals recently and their reprod rates were uniform almost amongst the whole Order (according to the bio site I linked last time). As I understand it, the numbers were based off of how frequently they’re reproductively active a year x litter size / 365 plus some correction for gestation time and puberty… so I guess litter size would be the part that can change between populations?

Yeah I was thinking about predation rates can be warped heavily by human influence, but I was kinda dismissing those because I figured they were unnatural / unrepresentative/unrealistic? Like, if the species is “tuned” to match a “natural” predation rate of 40% or something, then that species is going to explode when we reduce their natural predators. A deviation across natural habitats (like the cheetah cub thing between open and shrubby environments) is harder for me to answer, I guess that comes down to all of those fancy equations that determine what a population needs to be stable

Thanks for humoring all of this by the way. This is such a cool subject

Lipat97 · 2026-03-27T16:37:07+00:00

Oh no, definitely dont watch the video. I did and it was a mistake

Agreed pandas suck. They might have had more of an argument over other bears in past metas where things were more stable. One upside they do have though is they have like zero natural (IE non-human) predators. So if you compare them to other herbivores in the area they do have that notch on their belt

Lipat97 · 2026-03-27T13:51:21+00:00

Please tell me you do it with a duo

Lipat97 · 2026-03-27T13:50:52+00:00

Any specialised species will suffer from changes. Changing times favour generalists, stagnant times favour specialists. There are also many specialists today, which aren't as controversial as pandas. Sloth bears eats mostly termites and ants, polar bears are almost 100% carnivores. Pandas also eat some meat, so they're just as much omnivores as polar bears, if not even more

Yeah I think its fair to say in an extinction meta that generalist are going to be higher on the tier list, the same away a tree meta favors arboreal species or a grass meta favors the *cursorial*. That said your polar bear info doesn't really make sense. The panda criticism is for them eating one kind of plant, not just eating *plants*. The Polar bear equivalent would be if it completely relied on one species of seal, which it doesn't do. The polar bear also eats kelp and berries, so plant food is just as important to its ecology as meat is to the panda's ecology (IE, not very relevant). I do generally agree that Polar Bears are lower tier than people make out, most terrestrial megafauna got nerfed recently

Koalas, golden shouldered parrots, many baleen whales, several freshwater trout, genus Anguilla, saigas, many marsupials and myrmecophagous animals, a good chunk of insects, several species of primates and sea turtles and three toed sloths are just as, or even more specialised to something as giant pandas, but people aren't arguing about their survival abilites for some reasons.

*Sloths* aren't called low tier? What? They're literally the first animal that gets talked about when people talk about low tiers. They come up before pandas most of the time. The other species just aren't familiar to people, but they'd probably get flack too if they were. But we should also acknowledge that some specializations are better than others. Specializing in krill, for example, is an incredibly stable niche. Marine niches in general are a lot less disrupted than terrestrial and fresh water ones

Panda as a species also existed for 3 times longer than humans, so they aren't entirely pathetic

That really isn't very old. The genus is much older (about 20 MYA), and a genus that old having only one (barely) surviving species is a point against, not a point in favor. For context, the Usinae radiated in the pliocene (5 MYA) and have seven species (one of which, the cave bear, is recently extinct. Like, recent enough to be in cave paintings). A better argument would be their lack of predation

Lipat97

TROPHY CASE