Tim Blair

And then to cleanse its palate, the cormorant ravages Tokyo before getting in a death match with Gamera...

I don't like the sound of this : ``After its voracious appetite has been appeased, the cormorant appears moody and glum.''

That's actually the rarest and greediest member of the comorant family, the phillipsis adamsi crapalotus AKA the Gundy Grub Gobbler

That's a whole lot of fish.

82 tons a day? Cormorant isn't such a big bird, assuming it can swallow (with some effort) a 1kg fish it means it would have to catch and swallow a whole fish about every second. Assuming a steady state digesting the poor bird would also have to digest a whole fish every second. That's some performance, not to mention the resulting 82 tons of the final product. That's a whole lot of it.

Say, has anybody ever seen Michael Moore and a cormorant in the same room?

(okay, that was cheap. I'm sorry)

(no, I'm not)

It's a bird, it's a plane....it's obviously a misprint. Maybe the whole species combined eats 30,000 tons a year. If a single bird did that, the contrast between the efficiency of its food gathering and the inefficiency of its energy expenditure would generate a broken-symmetry induced rupture in space-time and this whole sad, sad world would disappear in a puff of ironically sweet chaos. Sweeter than chocolate, or even fish. Yum.

That would mean each bird supplies 82 tons of bird crap a day! Holy flying shits, Batman! To the BatCave!

Not fair to say the U.N. are doing nothing.I'm sure there is some sub committee somewhere that is on top of this.Expect a preliminary disscussion paper to be release for discussion sometime,Mmmmm lets say after all fish are murdered,by vicious Cormorant.

See UNSCAP Paper 04/SFX345, Draft Preliminary Report of the Working Group on Multinationals and Ecological Disasters in SE Asia, 1993-2003: "Capitalist Exploitation of Fish Resources and the Cormorant Problem: Towards a New Paradigm". Comments required by 1 January 2006.

Gamera is Really neat
Gamera is good to eat
We're all eating Gamera!

MST3K lives! ;-)

Several years ago here in upstate New York, we had a great cormorant massacre mystery.

Some fishermen took it upon themselves to slaughter some vast number of the birds to protect the fisheries.

Needless to say, the enviros, animal rights types, and the state Dept. of Conservation were up in arms, trying to track down the killers.

It was the lead story on the local NPR station for weeks. Drove me crazy.

I guess they eventually caught the guys and fined 'em. Too bad.

Perhaps the cormorants poop dark matter pellets like that little guy on Futurama. You would need a lot of fish to make a dark matter pellet.

Actually, cormorants don't crap. They convert the entire fish they don't digest to pure methane. Cormorants on afterburner have been clocked on radar at nearly .9 Mach at sea level...

I've seen these birds along the Charles River near Harvard Univeristy. And then there's this book.

Book URL= http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312017537/qid=1092194819/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-6092892-9449425?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

If only Bush had picked up the cormorant presentation platter, instead.

Damned Cormorants!

One of them dropped a bombload onto my pickup...squashed it like a bug

How the hell am I going to tell THIS to my insurance company?
;-)

A Q bird

Canada's Cormorant Crnage

Canada's Cormorant Carnage

For whatever hearsay is worth: my friends and relatives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula blame the cormorants (and their protected status) for bad fishing in recent years.

Here's something less hearsayish...

Cormorant plague!!!

I think we should all probably worry about what the cormorants are going to eat after they've scoured the oceans clean.

Pretty nearly everyone I know who works or has worked in UK journalism has been functionally innumerate.

Don't forget pelicans also, they gobble fish up to4/5lbs. Never leave a good fish in the open when pelicans are around, they snatch them when you're back is turned. Pelicans are not only fish thieves, they're bloody crims to boot.

I'm all for exterminating both cormorants and pelicans, they murder trout fingerlings in the thousands each year, the bastards.

Well, could we train the cormorants to eat terrorists? Or left leaning journalists?

But don't start with Margo -- they'll turn vegetarian.

Kill two birds wit one stone- get Mark Latham to shag a cormorant.

one of the funniest threads i've read in a while.

Mark Latham is known as the blue-eyed shag for obvious reasons.

And don't forget the krill: whales are mass murderers of krill.

Krill are tiny, defenceless creatures who can't weild harpoons to defend themselves from those malevolent monsters. Take up your harpoons and save the krill, do it for the krill!