You can't entirely trust the media, no really

[drdoug]

The respectable, reputable media present a version of what has happened in the world that can be as misleading as possible without being actionably wrong about what actually happened. (The disreputable media just make it up, but you know that.)

Have a look at these lovely photographs of the day, from teh Graun. In particular, look at the one

Comments

[uon]

My favouritest thing to do on a sunny day in the countryside is.. ..sit and watch hay baling and wrapping. I could watch it all day long: there's something incredibly soothing about watching the tractor drive steadily up and down a huge field, raking up big bales of hay, spinning a protective layer around them and then gently depositing them on the ground like little eggs from which the baby tractors will emerge at night to seek their first prey.

[drdoug]

They clearly eat their shell as soon as they emerge, perhaps because they're nutritious. A field can be full of eggs one day and completely clear the next day with not a trace left.

Life must be pretty tough for baby tractors. A single tractor can lay tens of thousands of eggs, but only a few survive to adulthood.

I'm slightly boggling at the sort of apex predator that would have a significant effect on tractors. What horrors lurk unseen in the countryside?

[purplerabbits]

I think the predation happens at egg level, before the baby tractors have developed their adult defences. My dad told me that cows and horses eat them, which would make sense as tractors are the natural enemy of horses and oxen and have indeed surplanted them in much of the country...

[drdoug]

That seems an impressive fit to the evidence we have, and an interesting predator-prey cycle to model. The population of draught ungulates has indeed declined as the population of tractors has increased. Presumably, if the population of horses and oxen falls far enough, we'll be faced with an uncontrollable explosion of tractors. Unless the process of random mutation throws up a ruminant capable of taking down fully-grown adult tractors ... and we'd be back to my rural horror scenario.

[d_floorlandmine]

That sounds entirely reasonable.

And somewhat less utterly terrifying than terrifying uber-predator. Especially given the size of the alpha tractors I've seen.

(And thank you, subconscious, for spooling up concepts from the film Hardware into this conversation ... after all, tractors are designed to connect to an assortment of vicious equipment in the first place ...)

[artremis]

In Iceland we were told the big round things in fields were giqnt marshmallows left to appease the local trolls. So possibly visiting trolls get confused and eat the tractor eggs?