Google map: Mass Animal Deaths

The blogosphere has noticed a seemingly large increase in the number of mass animal deaths globally, and Desdemona would be remiss not to comment. As a general rule, Des doesn’t post about big animal kills, unless they’re very large scale and unusual, e.g., Cold empties Bolivian rivers of fish — ‘There’s just a huge number of dead fish’. We don’t want to be distracted by noise; what’s important are the trends, and all of those point inexorably downward. Nevertheless, here’s a nice collection of recently reported mass animal deaths, which will hopefully be kept up to date. It will be interesting to see if any kind of rigorous statistical testing can be done against these observations. Mass Animal Deaths