Ootheca

This is not a common sight, a mantis actually laying her eggs. She mixes the eggs in a frothy foam which hardens into a protective case, called an ootheca. Usually attached to a twig or in this case, a stem of bamboo shoot. In a few weeks there will be a few hundred miniature versions of Momma running around.

As for the text, a heavy subject I know. I stuck my head out with this one and probably rattled a few cages, but this is not a popularity contest.

This subject is one of those 'head in sand' taboos that no one even wants to think about. No one wants to acknowledge the problem because all the possible solutions are just too awful to consider!

Artificial Selection – part 2, the consequences.

OK, it is now several hundred years in the future.

Despite attempts at population control, the world population has now reached a staggering twelve billion. We did manage to hold the population at nine billion for many years, but as fuel ran out, causing immense domestic problems, global thinking took very much a second place and the population once again exploded as people desperately tried to secure their futures with multiple offspring.

With medical and scientific advances, life expectancy reached 145 years, but with famine and adversity, has long since fallen dramatically. The economy has collapsed on a global scale. Social benefits, health services and pensions relegated to the history books. Nations interfering with other nations is a thing of the past. International trade is now impossible. Every nation now must survive on self-sufficiency.

With 95% of the world population surviving on the newly defined, lower breadline, civil unrest and lack of fuel have brought industry to a standstill. The collapse of the farming industry and the consequent severe food shortages has forced people to invade the countryside, stake out land claims to try and grow enough food to survive. People are working together in cooperatives in order to be able to defend the land and work it.

Birth rates have dramatically dropped with fewer than one in twenty women able to conceive. This has been largely contributed to malnutrition, stress and the lack of medical support. With the collapse of medical facilities and the massive drop in life expectancy, population numbers are dropping rapidly from natural causes; disease, plague, malnutrition, and occasionally old age, with civil disorder taking more than its fair share of casualties too.

With the collapse of the monetary system, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ all of a sudden find themselves living in the same world. Many people who only just a few years ago, enjoyed decadent lifestyles, now find that they cannot cope in this new world. With starvation and no wood left to burn, many people are deciding to end their own lives, unable to cope with the despair of mere survival. Suicide communes actually have waiting lists. Old people live in fear of their lives as euthanasia groups are on the increase.

Forty years ago, the six wealthiest and most powerful men on the planet, combined resources and took over occupation of Sri Lanka. Employing a massive military force to secure the land, they invited every scientific brain from all fields, to join them in the search for the BIG SOLUTION. Other than a few devastating raids that are occasionally made to commandeer raw materials, nothing has been heard of from this most powerful military compound, dubbed the Nadiron project.

Part 3 coming tomorrow, the final solution, you really don’t want to hear it!

Dave